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

To: ColtonGang who wrote (93736)	11/29/2000 11:19:46 AM
From: ColtonGang	Respond to of 769670

DURING A HEARING Tuesday in Tallahassee, Circuit Court Judge Nikki Clark refused to consolidate the case with an overall election contest, and instead set up a fast-paced schedule scheduled to begin Wednesday. Gore attorneys have kept their distance from the lawsuit because they are arguing in other cases that every vote should count. The suit in this wealthy, fast-growing suburban county northeast of Orlando instead asks that thousands of ballots be thrown out. Behind the problem are the thousands of absentee ballot applications mailed out statewide by Florida’s political parties. A printing glitch in a printer used by Republicans stripped the required voter-identification number from about 80 percent of the ballot applications the party mailed out in Seminole County. UNFAIR BENDING OF THE RULES? According to the lawsuit, Goard’s staffers set aside the applications missing voter IDs so they could destroyed later. But sometime in October, a GOP official called and asked if someone could come in and add the voter IDs to the applications. Goard agreed. Leach showed up at her office shortly afterward with a laptop computer, added the numbers and turned them in. The applications were processed and absentee ballots were mailed out. Democrats are outraged, saying Goard had never before allowed anyone outside her office to add voter IDs. A state law passed after Miami’s fraudulent 1997 mayoral race says only the voter, an immediate family member or legal guardian may fill out an absentee ballot request. Democrats also say they were never notified about the arrangement and weren’t given the same opportunity. There was no indication any ballot applications sent out by Democrats were missing voter ID numbers. “The Republicans call this a hypertechnicality,” said Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. “This is not a hypertechnicality. This is about any party of Republicans or Democrats going into an election supervisor’s office, which is supposed to be a neutral zone, and tampering with the files.” PLAINTIFFS: THROW OUT THE BALLOTS The lawsuit asks that all 15,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County be thrown out because there is no way to tell which ones involved applications handled by Leach. GOP candidate George W. Bush received 4,797 more absentee ballots than Gore in the predominantly Republican county. If the lawsuit is successful, the vice president would easily surpass Bush’s 537-vote margin in the overall state tally.