Get a clue. The WSJ opinion page is about as right wing as you can get silly. The Justice Dept works for Bush silly. Get a bloody clue and stop repeating nonsense.
''''''''''''''' Florida, banana republic
Lawsuit alleges massive fraud in Florida slots petition drive
- JACKIE HALLIFAX, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
(09-28) 19:45 PDT TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) --
A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that thousands of signatures submitted to get a gambling measure on the November ballot in Florida were forged, some with the names of dead people.
The accusation by the Humane Society of the United States, an anti-gambling group and a greyhound group targets Secretary of State Glenda Hood, several local elections supervisors and Floridians for a Level Playing Field.
The latter organization is the parimutuel-supported organization that pushed the gambling measure. If approved by voters in November, the proposed amendment to the state constitution would let voters in south Florida decide whether to allow slot machines at seven horse and dog tracks and jai alai frontons.
The amendment would allow all tax revenue earned on the south Florida slots to be shared by schools across the state. Supporters say at least $438 million would be generated for education in the first year.
"It's just a bunch of trumped up charges," said Earl Bender, campaign manager for Floridians for a Level Playing Field.
In the lawsuit, the gambling opponents ask that the measure be thrown off the November ballot or, if a decision comes after Election Day, the results be found null and void.
Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash said she couldn't comment on any investigations.
In the lawsuit, the gambling opponents say they talked to nearly 5,300 of the 104,000 people whose names were on petitions submitted by the campaign in Broward County.
More than two-thirds "stated unequivocally that they did not sign any petition in support of the slots initiative," the lawsuit says. In addition, as many as 33 people purported to sign the petition in Broward County were dead, according to the suit.
The Broward elections supervisor didn't return a phone call seeking comment.
The president of the California company that collected the petitions for the slots campaign, Michael Arno, called the allegations baseless and an "election-year stunt."
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Quietly Florida Admits 2000 Election Fraud
By The Associated Press
April 26, 2002 | Filed at 10:17 p.m. ET
MIAMI (AP) -- A federal judge has approved a settlement between Leon County and civil rights groups that sued over widespread voting problems in the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
The state and six other counties remain in the case brought by the NAACP and four other groups who sued in a dispute that grew out of the long-uncertain results of Florida's vote for president.
"There was nothing they were seeking that was impossible to achieve," Ion Sancho, Leon County supervisor of elections, said Friday. "I've been a proponent of settlement from the moment the lawsuit was filed."
Thomasina Williams, one of the attorneys for voters, said settlement talks are under way with other counties, and she was optimistic that some will follow Leon's move. Trial is set for Aug. 26.
State lawmakers changed election laws in response to complaints after the 2000 election, but critics said the changes didn't go far enough.
In the biggest departure from current procedures, Leon agreed to give a written explanation to voters whose ballots are rejected. The idea to make that a state standard was discarded by the Legislature.
The groups that sued agreed that the settlement "achieves some if not all of the relief" they could have obtained at trial, according to the court order dropping Leon from the lawsuit last week.
The county agreed to address disputes over voting, voter registration and voting lists and will meet with community groups to boost registration, with special efforts targeting minorities and college students. Sancho said he was doing all of that before.
Many voters said their votes didn't count or they were turned away from polls due to mistakes on voter lists, busy telephone lines at election headquarters, punch-card voting machine foul-ups and other problems.
Statewide, the largest numbers of voting problems were found in precincts with high proportions of black and elderly voters.
Under the settlement, both sides will work to restore voters who were wrongly removed from voters lists in the 2000 election. Many law-abiding voters across the state said their names were dropped because they were mistakenly pegged as ex-cons, who generally aren't allowed to vote in Florida.
The county also agreed to improve communication and training for staffers who work on election day.
Leon County includes the state capital of Tallahassee.
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APPENDIX 3 – Dana Milbank's Report At Election Time
Tragicomedy of Errors Fuels Volusia Recount
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22
SOURCE: groups.yahoo.com
DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000.
But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters.
The aberration was relayed to County Judge Michael McDermott, the election overseer. "We have a problem here," he said.
It was the beginning of a week-long tragicomedy of errors in this central Florida county, where an initial count showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. Volusia's mess is in some ways more damning than the mix-up in Palm Beach County, where controversy has centered on a confusing ballot design. Although there is no evidence that the first round of results was wildly inaccurate, the problems in counting votes here are systemic. The underlying causes are not fraud or corruption, but lax state oversight, inadequate funding, technological glitches, poor training--and general ineptitude.
Consider these events:
On election night, six precincts couldn't transmit their results because of computer problems, and the county's returns were delayed until 3 a.m. About that time, sheriff's deputies were dispatched to find an election worker who had left the ballot collection area with two uninspected bags.
Wednesday, when county officials were attempting a recount in front of TV cameras, an elderly poll worker walked in with a bag full of ballots that had been left in his car the previous night.
By Thursday, the elections office was surrounded by police tape, and a local Bush official was thrown out of a meeting for getting too rowdy.
Friday, county workers found a ballot bag in their vault without a seal, another with a broken seal and a third on a shelf with ballots spilling out. Meanwhile, dozens of black students from a local college complained they were turned away from polling stations even though they were registered to vote.
This morning, 300 county workers and hundreds more party observers converged on county offices for a manual recount of nearly 200,000 ballots that was later postponed until Sunday. The confusion in Volusia, one of four counties where Democrats have requested manual recounts, suggests why such an arduous process may be necessary. But it also suggests that a central argument of the Republicans who tried today to stop the recounts--that they won't resolve anything--may have some validity.
"No wonder people in the North think we're a bunch of bumbling idiots--because we are," says James Clayton, a DeLand lawyer--and he represents Bush. "From a practical standpoint, nobody has any faith in the system."
Douglas Daniels, a lawyer for Gore here, predicts there will be "television movies about how the election was stolen in Volusia County." He frets that Volusia will become conspiracy theorists' new "Grassy Knoll gunman."
Doug Lewis, an election expert who runs the non-profit Election Center in Washington, says many of the troubles in Florida would be found anywhere if a close election were scrutinized. "If anything, the elections officials in Florida live to a higher standard," he said. But told of the happenings in Volusia, Lewis revised his opinion. "If these things are true, this is an exception," he says. "This is one that would embarrass all of us."
In some ways that is not surprising. The county, which encompasses Orlando bedroom communities on bustling Interstate 4, Daytona Beach and a growing population of Hispanics and northern retirees, was known decades ago for shootouts, ambushes and stolen ballot boxes at election time. "We have a sordid history of election fraud in this county," Circuit Judge John Doyle wrote in a 1997 ruling.
In that case, a challenge to Volusia's 1996 sheriff election, Doyle focused on incompetence, attributing "gross negligence" to election supervisor Deanie Lowe and her canvassing board but allowing the election to stand. They missed about 1,000 votes and illegally re-marked absentee ballots with black markers, among other things. In 1998, Lowe had to re-issue about 1,200 misprinted absentee ballots. And another ballot was found to have violated state law requiring that candidates for nonpartisan office be listed alphabetically.
Lowe, in a hurried interview last week, defended the office's performance. "There's no trouble," she said. "Everything humanly possible was done to make sure it was a fair election."
Nobody alleges fraud in Volusia, and it's possible the mishaps haven't substantially altered the election's results. As Lowe points out, each of the problems can be explained. For example, it turned out that the election worker who left with two bags was merely taking home dirty laundry. Had the presidential election not come down to a couple of hundred votes in Florida, the troubles here might have gone unnoticed.
County spokesman David Byron boasts that a recount found "exactly the same" tally and suggests that this vindicates the county. But the recount he refers to was a comparison between the data in the computer and the computer printout. The actual ballots were not scrutinized. That's a little like saying a word-processing document contains no spelling errors because a printout matches the version on the screen.
Although Volusia County is a microcosm of the tremendous changes from growth and suburbanization that Florida has undergone in the past decades, the way it runs its elections seems something of a throwback to its rural past. In the past five years, the number of registered voters in the county has increased 28 percent, from 203,000 to 260,000, but the money to hold elections hasn't grown proportionately. Lowe said she hasn't asked for big budget increases, using a $1 million computer system introduced in 1994 to do more with less. Still, there are problems. "I'd like a new building," Lowe said.
As the recounting progressed last week, the elections department was mobbed by sheriff's deputies checking everything--even office supplies--that entered a secured area for signs of stray ballots. When 20 boxes of Hungry Howie's pizza arrived for lunch Friday, Phil Giorno, the Democratic county chairman, teased the cops: "Did somebody check those?"
Finally on Friday, election officials had to relocate the recounting operation to other county offices across the street. While the nation waited for Volusia's results, men piled the 300 ballot bags on a truck under the supervision of guards, witnesses and McDermott, who joked that after all the years he spent on the bench, "now I'm telling people how to load a truck."
Though Lowe insists funding isn't an issue in Volusia, the Election Center's Lewis says money is a particular problem in poorer areas and those experiencing large growth, where infrastructure and police get priority over elections. Training also seems to be an issue for Volusia's 2,000 poll workers.
That was underscored when poll worker Gene Tracy, 79, walked into the election office Wednesday explaining how a bag of ballots was left in his car. "I about had a cotton-pickin' stroke," he told a local reporter. "I hollered for my wife and I said, 'The dadburn ballots are still in the car.' "
Technology is also a problem. Though Volusia's new system (in which ballots are marked with a felt pen and put in a scanner) is superior to Palm Beach's baffling ballot, faulty "memory cards" in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed. Also, Volusia secures ballots in blue canvas tote bags, sealed with tape that keeps popping off. Its fancy system also has a problem accepting damaged absentee ballots.
But both sides here blame human error, and particularly Lowe. "She's a nice lady, [but] she's a bumbling idiot," said Republican Clayton. "How do you lose a bag of ballots? She doesn't dot her i's and cross her t's."
Democrat Giorno's solution to the mess: "Elect a new supervisor of elections." In fact, the people of Volusia rendered their verdict on Lowe last week--they reelected her.
Even McDermott, admired by Republicans and Democrats, seems overwhelmed as chairman of the elections canvassing board. "I'm going to go home and take a nap," he said at lunchtime Friday. "You'll have to be patient with me. I haven't had very much sleep lately."
And he's not about to get much soon. Even if the recount ends by Tuesday, he's likely to face more doubts about the process. It turns out Volusia's Bethune-Cookman College, a traditionally black school, held a voter registration drive that produced 2,000 new voters. But a large number--the school says 50; the Democrats say more than 100--claim they were turned away at the polls. "It'll be thrown in the hopper," vows Democratic lawyer Daniels. |
