Judge Hearing Absentee Ballot Case Had Same Problem in Her Own Campaign
Today's the day that the Democrats' go to court to try to disqualify thousands of absentee ballots in Seminole and Martin County. The case begins in Leon county at 7:00 AM before Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis.
The way the absentee ballot situation in Martin and Seminole counties has been reported by the national media, it looks as if the problem with numbers on absentee ballots was ONLY a Republican problem. It wasn't. It appears to be a rather widespread problem in Florida which includes even the judge in Seminole county before whom the "voter fraud" case was brought by Democrats.
The Orlando Sentinel reported on November 25th that Circuit Court Judge Debra Nelson had an absentee ballot problem of her own in her campaign last summer. In fact, a campaign worker said that he filled in voter-identification numbers on about 3,000 absentee ballot requests that originated with the campaign of Circuit Judge Debra Nelson.
"That is similar to what happened in the absentee ballot lawsuit before her," the Orlando Sentinel reported. "In the lawsuit filed Nov. 17, two GOP operatives are accused of setting up shop in the Seminole County supervisor of elections` office and adding voter-ID numbers to about 4,700 absentee requests, salvaging them after Elections Supervisor Sandy Goard declared them invalid.
Longwood voter and contributor to the Gore campaign, Harry Jacobs, a Democrat, filed suit against Goard, saying what happened amounted to voter fraud. He is asking that all 15,000 of the county`s absentee ballots be junked. If Nelson agrees, that would mean a 5,000-vote swing in favor of Vice President Al Gore, enough to give him the election.
"The difference between what happened in Nelson`s campaign and what happened in Goard`s office is location. In Nelson`s case, a campaign worker, James Daly III of Longwood, added the numbers while sitting at his dining-room table in Longwood and at a weekend home in Titusville. It was only after he had finished that the forms were delivered to the supervisor of elections. In the other case, the changes were made at Goard`s office.
"Nelson, 46, disclosed within the first minute of the first hearing in the Jacobs case that she had used absentee ballots in her campaign. However, she did not say anything about a campaign worker writing in voter-ID numbers"
Judge Nelson said she didn't know anything about the numbers being put on her absentee ballots and her campaign manager, Bob Lewis, said he did not tell her about the glitch because it wasn`t important.
It only became important when Gore's operatives concluded that they could disqualify a enough absentee ballots to give Gore a victory in Florida. Interestingly, although the Orlando Sentinel noted that "news of Nelson`s absentee ballot problems caught attorneys in the Jacobs case off guard" and Harry Jacobs, the Democrat who filed the suit was a contributor to Judge Jacobs campaign, the Democrat attorneys did not ask the judge to recluse herself.
The absentee ballot situation in Martin county, which is the home county of Rep. Alcee Hastings, a liberal, black congressman who has the dubious distinction of having been removed from office through impeachment when he was a judge, is even more bizarre.
Both Democrats and Republicans altered absentee voter applications. Only, according to an article in a local newspaper, the Republicans took the ballot APPLICATIONS, before they were filled out by the voters, and added number left off in the printing process. The absentee voters, on receiving the actual absentee ballot, filled it out and mailed it to the Elections department, which is standard procedure everything.
The Martin Republican Party organization wanted to correct mistakes it had made on its OWN preprinted applications for absentee ballots, which had been distributed to party members and then sent to the elections office by individual voters.
On the other hand, Democrats, who brought the lawsuit filed against the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections for allowing Republicans to actually make the corrections in her office, "should not feel smug simply because no one is highlighting any mistakes they made. That is because Democrats had voters mail their absentee ballot applications to local party headquarters, from where they were taken to the elections office. No one knows what changes, if any, were made at the Democratic Party office.
What doesn't seem to be mentioned very often in the national media, the forms change by Republicans were Republican, not Election Department, forms. As Martin County Deputy Supervisor of Elections Emma Smith is quoted as saying: "These were forms that came from the GOP state party ... with preprinted information and signed by the voters," Smith said. "It was evident that the voter was requesting the absentee ballot. It was signed, had the last four digits of their Social Security number on it."
Smith said "the bottom line to letting Republicans take them out is because they were GOP forms it was not a form supplied by this office."
The forms changed by the Democrats were actual completed ABSENTEE VOTES which were mailed back to the Democrat party, which naturally totally nullified the secrecy that is such an important part of the American voting system, and provided the Democrats with the opportunity to actually change the VOTES on the absentee ballots.
Since the absentee ballots in both counties were nearly two-thirds Republican, and there were thousands of them, if the Democrats can disenfranchise the voters in Martin and Seminole counties, they figure they can give the election to Al Gore.
So much for Gore's claim to wanting "all the ballots counted."
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