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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shoot1st who wrote (85030)	11/22/2000 2:15:52 PM
From: Krowbar	Respond to of 769667

Hearing ordered in suit over 15,000 Florida absentee ballots By Phil Long and Mark Silva The Miami Herald MIAMI -- A potentially explosive legal battle over the presidential election is developing in Seminole County, where a judge has ordered a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to throw out more than 15,000 absentee ballots in one of the GOP's biggest strongholds. Circuit Judge Debra Nelson has scheduled a hearing for Monday in the suit, filed last week by central Florida attorney Harry Jacobs. Earlier this week, she rejected a Republican motion to dismiss the suit. If the court were to rule for Jacobs, the math would certainly break for Al Gore. In Seminole County, Bush got 10,006 absentee ballots to Gore's 5,209. At issue is whether Seminole County Elections Supervisor Sandra Goard violated state law by giving two GOP workers what the suit calls "unrestricted" and "unsupervised" access to the ballot applications. Jacobs' lawsuit alleges that for two weeks before the election, the two Republican volunteers sat in an office in Goard's department "correcting" several thousand absentee-ballot requests that lacked essential information and had already been rejected. Similar provisions were not made for absentee-ballot requests from Democratic and independent voters, Jacobs says. "Ms. Goard's misconduct ... resulted in the counting of thousands of illegal votes by absentee ballots," the suit says. The suit is the outcome of a push by both parties to press for the absentee vote. Both parties printed thousands of applications for absentee ballots and sent them to voters. Those who wanted to vote absentee filled in the requests and sent them to the elections office. But the Republicans' pre-printed form left off crucial information required by law: the applicant's voter registration number. When the ballot applications came in without voter identification numbers, they were rejected and placed in storage, the suit says. When Republicans learned of the problem, they persuaded Goard to let them use their own records to add the ID numbers to the requests, the suit says. Democrats and others were not made aware of potential problems with any of their ballots. Goard, a Republican, has declined to comment. star-telegram.com Del