Absentee Application Fight Hits 2 Courts

Trying to block one of Al Gore’s last shots at winning the White House, Republicans launched an aggressive attack Wednesday on two lawsuits claiming the GOP hatched a scheme before the election to illegally correct absentee ballot request forms in two conservative Florida counties.

“This case is being brought for one reason: to change the outcome of the election,” GOP attorney Terry Young told Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark in a tense Tallahassee courtroom. “A ballot is not just a piece of paper. It is a voice--and a voice that, at all costs, should not be silenced.”

The Republicans’ campaign came as both lawsuits got underway here in a day that began before dawn and ended early this morning. As midnight came and went, aides were still bringing in steaming cups of coffee, and puffy-eyed attorneys, some of whom had been in court for 17 straight hours, were gulping them down. A television soundman was snoring loudly in the hallway, his fuzzy boom microphone at his side.

If Clark or Terry P. Lewis, the circuit judge hearing the second case, rules in favor of the Democrats, it would turn the election on its ear at the eleventh hour. The suits seek to throw out about 15,000 absentee votes in Seminole County, north of Orlando, and about 10,000 votes in Martin County, north of West Palm Beach.

Both trials were nearing completion, with verdicts promised promptly. Though legal experts believe the cases are problematic at best, a pair of victories for the Democrats could represent a net gain of almost 8,000 votes for Gore, far more than the vice president needs to trump George W. Bush’s minuscule lead in Florida.

If Clark doesn’t want to throw out the absentee votes wholesale, Democrats argue, she should at least throw out the votes that Bush earned solely because the state Republican Party was allowed to correct flawed absentee ballot applications that would have been thrown out otherwise.

That number, according to a statistical analysis by UC Berkeley economics professor J. Bradford DeLong: at least 1,504, nearly three times Bush’s 537-vote margin in Florida. At a minimum, argued Gerald F. Richman, the lead Democratic attorney bringing the Seminole County case, those votes should be tossed out because the agreement between the Republican officials tainted “the sanctity of the ballot.”

But Wednesday morning, the dew hadn’t dried on Tallahassee’s noble oaks and magnolias before Republicans opened fire.

In the Seminole County case, they quickly painted an image of Harry Jacobs, the audacious personal injury lawyer who filed the lawsuit, as a Democratic insider who spent more than $100,000 of his money this year to try to defeat Bush.

The day Gore chose Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman as his vice presidential candidate, Republicans have learned, Jacobs called Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe and pledged to “do anything and everything to support the Gore campaign,” Young said. “And that’s what he’s doing today.”

Young represents Seminole County election supervisor Sandra Goard, an elected Republican who concedes that she allowed several Republican Party employees to correct more than 2,000 flawed absentee ballot request forms that would have been thrown out otherwise.

But Goard, the Republicans argued, is not the partisan player that Jacobs is. “She has no vested interest in the outcome of the election,” Young said. “Her only vested interest is that every legally cast vote . . . is counted.”

Both parties sent postcards to thousands of prospective voters in the months before the election, an increasingly common tactic across the nation as absentee voting has become more central to political campaigns.

Each party sent the cards to voters who were likely to back their candidate--an operation that cost the state Republican Party $500,000. The cards were, essentially, preprinted applications to receive absentee ballots. They contained a variety of information about each voter, and were supposed to require only a signature. They could then be sent back to election officials, who would, in turn, send back an absentee ballot.

But a Republican contractor mistakenly printed voters’ birth dates in a spot reserved for voter identification numbers, one of the pieces of information that Florida law requires before county election officials can issue actual absentee ballots.

While the voter-identification requirements appear technical, they were an important piece of a get-tough reform package approved by Florida in the wake of Miami’s infamous 1997 mayoral election. That election was tarnished by widespread fraud involving absentee voting, resulting ultimately in the removal of Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez from office.

“We goofed,” Republican Party political director Todd Schnick testified Wednesday night in the Martin County case.

“And you knew there was big trouble,” said attorney Edward Stafman, representing the Martin County Democratic activist who filed that lawsuit.

So the state Republican Party mobilized, crafting agreements with two election supervisors--both elected Republicans--to correct the mistake.

In Seminole County, Schnick called Goard in October and secured an agreement that allowed them to use a back room of her office to correct the ballot applications, though they had already been thrown out. Three Republican Party officials worked for as long as three weeks, correcting 2,126 absentee ballot application forms.

Absentee ballots were then sent to those Seminole County voters, resulting in 1,932 actual votes--1,833 from registered Republicans and 54 registered Democrats.

The Republican Party worked out a similar agreement in Martin County, where the party was allowed to remove the flawed absentee ballot forms from the election office for several days, then return them with the correct information.

Hundreds of absentee ballot requests filed by Democrats, who received different postcards without the printing error, were flawed in other ways. And, though it’s unclear whether they ever asked, Democrats did not have the same opportunity in either county to correct those errors.

Unapologetically, Republicans formally acknowledged all of that Wednesday.

The GOP’s team of lawyers signed an extensive stipulation document in the Seminole County case that admitted virtually everything the Democrats have alleged.

Republicans acknowledged that the Republican Party officials were allowed to correct ballot applications in a room where the public is not allowed. They acknowledged that the party officials were not supervised and that Goard’s staff assisted them by segregating flawed Republican ballot applications from the rest of the application pile.

None of that matters, the Republicans argued. Legally, they said, the judges cannot throw out any absentee votes. The lawsuits, they pointed out, do not even claim that votes themselves were faulty, either because the wrong voter identification number was used or because they were cast by the wrong person.

Finally, the Republicans argued that the state Democratic Party was at least as underhanded in its efforts to enlist absentee voters.

At least in some cases, said Bush attorney Daryl Bristow, the return address on the Democratic Party’s postcards was to the party’s headquarters, not to the election supervisor’s office. Party officials would receive the ballot applications in the mail themselves, then carry them to the election office.

Clark, the judge hearing the Seminole suit, told the attorneys that she believes the case boils down to two arguments: whether the correction of the forms “is sufficient to invalidate the vote” and whether the parties were treated differently.

Richman, the lead attorney for Jacobs in the Seminole County case, said he has proven both.

In the face of the Republicans’ criticism, Richman produced a series of witnesses in an attempt to prove his case Wednesday.

Dean Ray, a Seminole County Commission candidate, told the judge that he submitted hundreds of signatures in an attempt to qualify for the election this fall, mostly to avoid paying a $3,700 qualifying fee. Many of those signatures were disqualified, and Ray said he asked Goard if he could use voter identification numbers to verify them.

“She stated that was against the law,” said Ray, a Democrat who ultimately lost the election.

DeLong, the UC Berkeley statistician Democrats hired for $500 an hour, said during his testimony Wednesday that if Republicans were given access to a voting procedure that Democrats did not take part in, “you are treading on extremely dangerous ground.”

All told, Richman said, the Seminole County case amounts to voter fraud--and a conspiracy. “This was intentional,” he said, “and not merely carelessness or negligence.”

By Wednesday night, Democrats were trying to recapture some of the momentum in the cases, with some success. In the Martin County case, especially, witnesses appeared evasive as Stafman peppered them with questions.

Charles W. Kane, a Martin County resident and a member of the state Republican Executive Committee, testified that he was one of the Republican Party officials who corrected ballots in that county. On the witness stand, Kane refused to call his actions “alterations.”

“I call it an addition to correct the problem,” he said.

As the night wore on, the courtroom exchanges became increasingly aggressive. Stafman grilled Schnick, who was responsible for the postcard program, and when Schnick appeared to dance around some topics, Stafman yelled: “Did you hear my question?”

By the end, Stafman had essentially abandoned his role of merely asking the witness questions, telling Schnick at one point that the Republican official changed the ballot applications to “save his hide.”

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Times staff writer Michael Finnegan contributed to this story.