The US election
Absentee vote cases provide evidence of Republican vote-rigging in Florida
By Patrick Martin
9 December 2000
Two Leon County Circuit judges in Tallahassee issued decisions Friday
refusing to throw out thousands of absentee ballots cast in two Florida
counties. The ballots were challenged by local Democratic Party activists in
Seminole County and Martin County who used legal arguments resembling those
employed by the Bush campaign in its effort to suppress hand recounts in
south Florida.
There was no evidence that the absentee ballots themselves had been tampered
with or fixed. A decision to disqualify the ballots would have violated the
democratic rights of over 25,000 people, the majority of whom voted for
Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. The transparent aim of the
plaintiffs, who included a wealthy lawyer who made large campaign
contributions to the Gore campaign, was to counter the Republican attacks on
the right to vote in south Florida by using similar methods.
While the remedy sought by the Democrats was reactionary, the court suit
placed on the public record considerable and detailed evidence of the
Republican efforts to manipulate and fix the voting results in Florida. As
Gerald Richman, attorney for one of the Democratic plaintiffs, argued, “What
we are basically saying is that there was a conspiracy between
representatives of the Republican Party and an elected Republican official,
an elections supervisor, in terms of how the rules were bent and the rules
were changed to help one party, and one group of people, as opposed to all of
the others.”
The facts of the Seminole County case were not in dispute—on the contrary,
both sides stipulated to a detailed exposition of the facts which included
sworn deposition testimony from the county Supervisor of Elections, Sandra
Goard. The Republican loyalist admitted that she had told Democrats that
applications for absentee ballots sent in without voter ID numbers would be
disqualified, while allowing two Republican Party operatives to come into her
offices and work for several weeks filling in missing ID numbers on
applications from Republican voters.
Martin County involved a similar politically motivated deal, but in this case
the defective applications were handed over to Republican Party officials who
took them to a party office, corrected them by filling in the ID numbers, and
then returned them to the county. A separate lawsuit over similar practices
in Bay County was dismissed on Thursday.
All three cases involve gross violations of a law passed by the
Republican-controlled state legislature in 1998 in the wake of a
ballot-rigging scandal in the Miami mayoral election, when campaign workers
for former mayor Xavier Suarez, a Republican, were found to have manufactured
enough absentee votes to give him victory in the vote. A judge later threw
out all the absentee votes and declared Suarez's opponent, current mayor Joe
Carollo, the winner.
Richman cited the Miami precedent in urging that all of Seminole County's
absentee ballots be discarded. “We believe, under the law, the only remedy in
this case is the entire absentee ballot pool must be thrown out,” he said.
“We didn't create the problem; the Republican Party of Florida did, and the
supervisor of elections did.”
Under Florida law, only voters, their legal guardians or immediate family
members may request ballot applications or provide information for them. The
two trials confirmed that the election officials in both counties gave
illegal access to ballot applications and election facilities to local and
state Republican Party officials, to insure the largest possible vote for
Bush. At the same time, election officials all over the state put countless
obstacles in the path of voters thought likely to support Gore and the
Democrats, especially black and other minority voters.
The judges who heard the Seminole County and Martin County cases gave only a
slap on the wrist to the local officials, finding that “irregularities” had
taken place in the handling of the absentee ballot applications, but declined
to impose the remedy sought by the plaintiffs on the grounds that it was
anti-democratic.
From a political standpoint, the absentee ballot cases showed the revolting
cynicism of the Bush campaign and the Republican Party, who invoked precisely
the same democratic provisions of the Florida state constitution which they
had denounced when the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of hand recounts in
selected counties last month.
Bush lawyer Matt Staver, arguing the Martin County case, used the identical
language of the Florida Supreme Court, declaring, “The State of Florida, in
the very first declaration of rights, puts down the issue of voting as the
preeminent right.... We should not let this hypertechnicality disenfranchise
these voters.”
The Bush campaign cannot be consistent on either side of the issue. If all
votes in Florida are to be counted, then Bush loses. If all Florida election
laws are enforced literally—disqualifying tens of thousands of Bush votes
generated by an illegal process—then Bush loses again. The only way that Bush
can win is to demand the fullest democracy in counting Republican votes,
while demanding exclusion of as many Democratic votes as possible on
technical grounds.
Staver even cited a 1973 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that explicitly
declares that casting an absentee ballot is a right, not a privilege. He
declared, “It outrages me, your honor, to think that voting for president is
considered a privilege, as opposed to a right.”
Meanwhile other Bush attorneys were arguing precisely that—that there is no
right to vote for president, when it comes to inhabitants of Miami-Dade, Palm
Beach and other urban counties. And Republican state legislators were calling
a special session of the Florida state legislature to deprive the citizens of
Florida of any right to vote in the presidential election, by appointing a
Bush slate of electors regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in this
state.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/dec2000/semi-d09_prn.shtml
