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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Bush wins absentee ballot lawsuits
Democrats vow to appeal
court ruling
Florida Judge Nikki Clark handled the Seminole County lawsuit, and Judge
Terry Lewis the Martin County lawsuit.
MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
TALLAHASSEE, Dec. 8 — In another big loss for Democrats and Al Gore, two
Florida judges on Friday rejected lawsuits seeking to throw out thousands of
absentee ballots cast in the presidential election. Lawyers for the
Democratic voters who filed the suits immediately appealed. At stake are
nearly 25,000 absentee ballots that Democrats want tossed out, a move that
would erase George W. Bush’s paper-thin lead over the vice president.
WHILE SOME IRREGULARITIES were found in the application procedures
for absentee ballots in Martin and Seminole counties, “neither the sanctity
of the ballots nor the integrity of the elections has been compromised,” the
judges said in a statement.
The elections there, they added, “reflect a full and fair expression
of the will of the voters.”
Soon afterward, lawyers for the plaintiffs said they had appealed to a
higher court.
In both counties, Republican workers were allowed to fix flawed
absentee ballot request forms sent in by party members.
Lawyers for Bush had denied allegations that Republican election
officials acted illegally to help Bush, saying they were only trying to
correct mistakes their party made on the forms.
Voter ID numbers were left off many applications through computer
errors in Seminole County and incorrect numbers were placed on the forms in
Martin County. Florida law says ballot applications may not be mailed out
without the correct identification numbers.
In Seminole County, a Democratic activist, Harry Jacobs, had
challenged 15,000 absentee ballots. Voters from Martin County, not identified
by party in their lawsuit, had challenged nearly 10,000 ballots.
Bush, whose certified statewide victory margin was just 537 votes, won
the absentee balloting by 4,797 votes in Seminole County and by 2,815 votes
in Martin County.
Gore was not party to the suits, which run counter to his legal
arguments in other cases that every vote should count. But he has made clear
he supported the private actions.
SEMINOLE COUNTY
As the Seminole County trial ended Thursday, Judge Nikki Clark
promised her ruling would strictly abide by the edict of the law, noting, “My
job is not to send a message.”
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The case has put Clark, the first black and the first woman
appointed to the Circuit Court bench, under tremendous political pressure.
Terry Lewis, the judge in the Martin case, is white and has received
far less scrutiny from the media and outside observers.
Earlier during closing arguments, Clark expressed reluctance to toss
out the votes in question.
“Why should I not find there was substantial compliance by the voters
and accept their vote?” Clark asked Democratic lawyer Gerald Richman.
At another moment, Clark read part of the election law aloud and said
it seemed to say that the failure of election workers to comply with portions
of the law did not necessarily nullify the votes.
“If the canvassers can tell the intent of the voter, why should the
vote not count?” she asked.
Clark wanted to know why voters who did nothing wrong should be
penalized because election officials allowed Republican operatives to correct
some of the absentee ballot applications.
Richman said the legal history of similar court cases required the
judge to nullify the votes.
“They took a public office and turned it into an agent or an arm of
one political party,” he said.
Terry Young, attorney for the Seminole County election supervisor,
disagreed, saying it would be wrong to “statistically silence” 15,000 voters.
“Whether it’s 15,000 or one, those people have a right to be heard,”
he said.
Young said it was no coincidence that Democrats were creating a way to
come up with just the right number of votes to overcome Bush’s lead.
“There is no doubt that what is at the heart of this case is
politics,” he said.
Seminole County elections supervisor Sandra Goard said in testimony
read Wednesday that she allowed Republican officials to fill in the voter ID
numbers, the first time she had done so. “I had never received a request for
that to be done,” she said Wednesday in a written deposition read to the
court. Democrats did not ask for the same accommodation, she added.
Goard also testified that Florida law did not give her the authority
to allow party officials to fill in the numbers. But she said she allowed GOP
official Michael Leach and a second man she has been unable to identify to
fill in the numbers at the party’s request. Democratic Party state chairman
Bob Poe later called to protest her actions, but Poe did not request the same
opportunity to correct applications for Democrats, she said.
MARTIN COUNTY
In the Martin County case, county GOP official Tom Hauck was asked
Wednesday whether he would acknowledge “walking out of the office” of
Republican elections supervisor Peggy Robbins “with a stack of applications
for absentee ballots.”
“On one occasion, that’s right,” Hauck replied, adding that he took
the ballot applications to county Republican headquarters to fill in the
numbers.
The complaints
• Seminole County complaint
• Bush response
• Martin County complaint
• Bush response
Charles Kane, who testified he worked for the FBI and retired from the CIA in
1975, said nothing secretive nor sinister occurred.
“We had an obligation to them,” he said of Republicans who had
received the inaccurate ballot document. “We had filled out their forms. We
did not see this as altering. All we saw this as was correcting a problem
caused by the Republican Party of Florida.”
Todd Schnick, the state Republican party’s political director,
testified that he did not remember key elements of the ballot form glitches,
which occurred in the last weeks of the presidential campaign.
Edward Stafman, attorney for the Martin County challengers, had argued
the law in similar cases commands “throwing out all of the absentee ballots.”
As an alternative, he suggested Lewis order that 673 of the 10,000
votes be tossed out, representing the number of ballot applications corrected
by the Republicans.
Bush lawyer Daryl Bristow countered that throwing out any votes would
be wrong because each voter supplied correct registration information. “There
were six ways until Sunday for the supervisor to find out this was the right
person,” he said. Bristow said no vote should be tossed out for a
“hypertechnical computer glitch fix.”
An additional 2,400 overseas absentee ballots are under attack in
federal court in Tallahassee by Democratic voters.
In arguments Thursday before U.S. District Court Judge Maurice Paul,
attorney Roger Bernstein argued that state and federal laws and the U.S.
Constitution require ballots to be received by Election Day and provide no
exception. Therefore, he said, a rule in Florida’s administrative code
requiring the 10-day extension is illegal. Lawyers for Bush said the 10-day
extension was endorsed in a 1984 consent decree between the state and federal
governments.
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