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To: JungleInvestor who wrote (80492)	12/1/2000 9:02:03 AM
From: JungleInvestor	Respond to of 95453

OT: Isopatch, the Seminole case is characterized as a "frivolous lawsuit" by election law expert: opinionjournal.com ELECTION 2000 Nonsense in Seminole A frivolous lawsuit over absentee ballots. BY DANIEL H. LOWENSTEIN Thursday, November 30, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST Most of the Florida election lawsuits involve difficult issues with legitimate arguments on both sides. A glaring exception is the suit brought by Harry Jacobs, a personal-injury lawyer, seeking to invalidate 15,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County. The press has taken the case seriously, and perhaps it should, since a victory for Mr. Jacobs would hand the election to Al Gore. But unless Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts is presiding, no court should take the case seriously. The controversy centers on Florida's requirement that applications for absentee ballots contain voter identification numbers. Both parties sent out many applications with these numbers already filled in by computer. But software error caused the omission of numbers from some sent out by the Republicans. In some counties, the election officials themselves filled in the numbers. In Seminole, they declined to do so. However, they permitted Republican workers to fill in the numbers, sitting in the county election offices--without supervision. Was it wrong for Sandra Goard, Seminole's supervisor of elections, to let Republicans fill in the numbers? Perhaps. Failing to provide supervision was probably a bad idea, though one should allow for informalities typical in rural counties. She has been criticized for not inviting Democratic workers on the same terms as the Republicans. This may be a valid criticism, though there was no similar problem on applications mailed out by Democrats. Let's assume that Ms. Goard was wrong. Perhaps she should be admonished, or disciplined. But that is not what Mr. Jacobs has in mind. Instead, he proposes to disqualify all the absentee ballots. There were fewer than 5,000 on which the Republicans entered numbers. Consider the situation of these voters. They sent in an application with no reason to believe that there was anything wrong. In due course, they received their absentee ballots, which they filled out and returned. Now Mr. Jacobs asks a court to throw out these votes. But what could justify disqualifying--"disenfranchising," to use the word fashionable in election disputes--voters because of an arguably wrong decision by the election supervisor? But that is not the extent of the suit. There is no way to separate the 5,000 ballots whose applications were handled by Republican workers from the other 10,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole. So Mr. Jacobs proposes disregarding votes cast by people who were not only innocent but who had no connection whatever with the problematic applications. Mr. Jacobs relies on a 1995 case in which a federal court ordered Alabama officials not to count absentee ballots that lacked either notarizations or witness signatures, both required by Alabama law. But the case has no bearing on Seminole. Getting notarization is burdensome, and the federal court pointed out that many more Alabamans might have voted if they had known the rules would not be enforced. In Seminole, a phone call to the elections office would have given voters the information they needed. In most cases, even that wasn't necessary because the parties filled in the information. The Alabama case involved failure to comply with the requirements for a lawful ballot. In Seminole, no ballot irregularity is alleged. The problem relates only to the application. Ordinarily, irregularities with applications that are far more serious than Seminole should have no effect, so long as the voter is eligible to vote and the ballot itself complies with legal requirements. There is one close question in the Seminole case. Should Mr. Jacobs, an attorney and officer of the court, be disciplined for bringing a frivolous lawsuit? Mr. Lowenstein, a law professor at UCLA, is author of "Election Law" (Carolina Academic Press, 1995).