Dems Call Fla. Voters About Ballots By John Solomon Associated Press Writer Friday, Nov. 10, 2000; 9:39 p.m. EST WASHINGTON –– Faced with a cliffhanger election, the Democratic Party directed a telemarketing firm on Election Night to begin calling thousands of voters in Palm Beach, Fla., to raise questions about a disputed ballot and urge them to contact local election officials. The Democratic National Committee paid Texas-based TeleQuest to make the calls Tuesday night – while polls were still open – alerting voters in the heavily Democratic enclave in Florida of possible confusion with the ballots they cast. "Some voters have encountered a problem today with punch card ballots in Palm Beach County," the script for the call said. "These voters have said that they believe that they accidentally punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate." "If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate, you should return to the polls and request that the election officials write down your name so that this problem can be fixed," the script said. The firm took the names and numbers of voters who said they may have cast an errant ballot, providing the Democratic Party a list of about 2,400 voters in the county who thought they may have misvoted. If voters were about to go to the polls, the script called for the caller to instruct them to "be sure to punch Number 5 for Gore-Lieberman" and "do NOT punch any other number as you might end up voting for someone else by mistake." Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus said the party had been making traditional get-out-the-vote calls all over the country Tuesday, but shifted gears in Palm Beach after hearing local news reports about possible voter confusion. "Once we were informed by local news accounts of the magnitude of the problem with confusion about the ballot, we shifted our scripts to make sure that people who were voting were aware of the questions and confusion around the ballot," she said. The maneuver indicates that long before Americans awoke to the reality of the Florida ballot dispute, Democrats were already mobilizing voters there. The concern has focused on Palm Beach, where 19,000 ballots were disqualified and hundreds of voters have said they mistakenly voted for Patrick Buchanan while trying to vote for Gore. Within hours of the phone campaign, hundreds of Democratic voters had called election officials in Palm Beach to complain they may have been confused by the ballot and voted for the wrong candidate. Some Palm Beach County voters have filed lawsuits seeking a new vote. The outcome of the dispute is key because George W. Bush is leading Gore by a mere 327 votes after a statewide recount. The winner of Florida will lay claim to the electoral votes needed to become the nation's 43rd president. The calls indicate that Democrats were concerned about Palm Beach problems even before they knew Florida's vote would end in a razor-thin margin, said American University political science professor Candice Nelson. "To the extent there have been accusations that Democrats didn't cry foul until they realized Wednesday that Bush may have won, this cuts the other way," she said. Nelson and other political and legal experts said the calls were perfectly legal but could have contributed to what appeared to most Americans to be a spontaneous explosion of concern in Florida the morning after the election. "I think those kinds of calls make perfect sense," Nelson said. "In terms of people getting riled up, it would be a tactic that might energize voters who might otherwise not have realized they may have mistakenly voted for the wrong candidate." One Florida Democrat said Republicans would take similar action had the tables been turned. "They'd be fighting this thing tooth and nail for months and months," said Wayne Brewer, 45, of Juneau, Fla. "They knew they ... lost, and now they want to win on an assumption," he said, speaking outside the government center in West Palm Beach. Wade Scott, an account manager with TeleQuest, said Democratic Party officials contacted his company shortly before 6 p.m. EST Tuesday to make the calls. With only an hour to go before Florida polls closed, his company mobilized all of its telemarketers to make some 5,000 calls in less than 45 minutes, Scott said. "It was a very short burst of calling for our industry," Scott said. He said only about 100 of the voters in Palm Beach it contacted hadn't voted, and about 2,400 felt they may have made a mistake on the ballot. © Copyright 2000 The Associated Press
