Kat Harris ripped in St. Petersburg Times editorial. What doesn't Cruella want Floridians to see?!
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Secretary of State Katherine Harris apparently is willing to violate Florida's public records laws to avoid scrutiny of the activities of two Republican operatives who came to work in Harris' offices during the 36-day presidential recount period. Attorney General Bob Butterworth has made clear what Harris already should have understood: Everything on a computer in a state office - everything - is a public record under Florida law. Yet Harris' office says it withheld records of what it termed personal e-mails from the computers used by Republican lobbyist J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich and political consultant Adam Goodman before providing data to news organizations a few weeks ago.
Now Harris' office says some of the withheld material may have been erased when the computers were "reformatted" for other uses. That's convenient. But all the selective editing and erasing raises an important question:
What doesn't Harris want Floridians to see?
Remember: During the now-historic period in which the presidential votes for George W. Bush and Al Gore were counted and recounted, Harris and her office were supposed to be representing the interests of all Floridians as the state's top election officials. They were not supposed to be using their statutory powers, their offices, their computers or any other public resources to further the interests of the Republican Party.
That's a distinction Harris, who served as co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, consistently has been blind to. But having made the error of bringing in partisan operatives to work from her office throughout the recount process, she at least should have recognized the necessity of complying with our Sunshine Laws so that Florida's residents could judge the propriety of those operatives' actions. After all, there is evidence Stipanovich and Goodman influenced a policy change on Harris' part that had the effect of certifying more overseas absentee votes for Bush.
This dispute over Florida's public records law is not simply a partisan spat between a Republican secretary of state and a Democratic attorney general. Butterworth's judgment is consistent with the letter and spirit of the law as it has been interpreted over the years. In any case, a public servant with nothing to hide should always err on the side of full disclosure. For the secretary of state, public confidence in the integrity of our election process demands no less.
Harris' argument could be plausible only in an ironic sense she surely does not intend. If Stipanovich and Goodman spent their time in the secretary of state's office doing their party's business, and not the public's, they might have assumed that their communications were not public records. After all the withholdings and erasures, we may never know. But the appearance of impropriety hardly could be more striking.
7/21/01 |
