JLA, your legal instincts are wrong again. There is actually an 11th circuit case, relied on by the GOP in their challenges to hand recounts, where under similar circumstances votes were disallowed.
This really looks bad for Bush.
Update on Seminole County developments
On November 27, the venue for the Seminole County trial was moved to Leon County circuit court in Tallahassee, the same court in which the contested recount cases are being heard.1 (The case concerns 4,700 incomplete GOP absentee ballot requests that were selectively fixed by GOP workers invited into election offices by the GOP elections supervisor while similar Democratic absentee ballot requests were rejected.)
Major stories in The Washington Post (11/28) and The Wall Street Journal (11/27) covered, respectively, the issue of alleged fraud in the case and a 1994 legal precedent, Roe v. Alabama, supporting a ruling against the GOP for what transpired in Seminole.
In a story today in The Washington Post, George Lardner, Jr. honed in on the pivotal issue in the Seminole case.2 Terry C. Young, Goard's lawyer, said that Goard "did no more than give the Republicans, who came equipped with their own database of voter ID numbers, a chair to sit in. He said she would have done the same if the Democrats had requested assistance."3 When asked, however, about affidavits contradicting that claim, Young replied that he had "not seen them."4
In fact, Goard admitted she let similar incomplete absentee ballot requests, not among the 4,700 GOP requests she arranged to be fixed, pile up in her office unprocessed through election day, claiming there weren't "48 hours in a day" to attend to them.5 The flawed applications that piled up in Ms. Goard's office, The New York Times reported, were either Democratic forms or applications filed entirely at the initiative of individual voters.6 The Times also reported: "When asked if the Democrats were extended the same opportunity to review their voters applications for completeness, Bob Poe, the Democratic Party chairman, snapped: 'Hell no.' Mr. Poe said he had complained about the practice to Ms. Goard last month, but she told him to 'go fly a kite.'"7
This is the crux of the case: selective correction of GOP but not Democratic ballot requests in the Seminole election office constitutes improper intervention exceeding that of the Roe v. Alabama precedent (see below) for court action to overturn an election. This may be why attorney Young felt he needed to fragrantly misstate the facts of the case as quoted above.
The Wall Street Journal covered the Seminole case in depth in an November 27th story: "A Lawsuit in Florida Could Be a Sleeper: Changes to Absentee Ballots Form Basis of Challenge With Possible Precedent."8 The article reviewed the case of Roe v. Alabama, involving 2,000 absentee ballots in a 1994 election for state chief supreme court justice that were accepted in one Alabama County without being properly completed according to state law.9 The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Florida, ordered the disputed ballots thrown out, resulting in the removal of the candidate who won based upon those ballots; his opponent became chief justice.10
The Wall Street Journal also noted that in the 23 years that Goard had been election supervisor, she knew of no other occasion in which such activity by GOP workers to complete absentee ballot requests had been allowed.11
The upcoming Seminole County trial for alleged fraud in connection with absentee ballot requests was covered this weekend by the New York Times,12 Los Angeles Times,13 AP,14 and several other news sources. When questioned about the upcoming Seminole trial by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne during NPR's election coverage Sunday evening November 26, Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus concurred as to the case's importance in unfolding election developments. The Seminole case even got first mention in Garrison Keillor's satirical review of election events on the November 25 Prairie Home Companion program.
The New York Times reported significant new details concerning the selective GOP alterations of GOP absentee ballot requests performed in Seminole County election offices: “Ms. Goard, in interviews, had described the area the party worker used as a warehouse. But in depositions Wednesday she said that the room was full of active computer terminals linked to her elections database, and that the Republican Party worker was joined by a second man she could not identify. Both men were allowed to use the room unsupervised, she said.”15
Goard identified the Republican worker who filled in the voter identification numbers in her office as Michael Leech; the second man who assisted Leech was GOP volunteer Ryan Mitchell.16 She said the room they had used, without supervision, housed 18 password-protected terminals linked to a mainframe computer that stored all of her voter elections records.17 “She made no effort to check what they brought into or out of her offices.”18
In a Time commentary, “Good clean cheating and dirty pool,” Richard Stengel addresses issues related to the Seminole case: “We're comfortable with buying or wrestling votes, or busing in mobs of protesters, but trying to use the courts to get people to abide by statutes, or to clear up murky ones, well, that's dirty pool.”19
campaignwatch.org |
