A County’s Back-Room Goings-On Bring Suit

The supervisor of elections in Seminole County has conceded that she allowed two Republican Party operatives to correct 4,700 Republican absentee ballot applications so they would not be thrown out, court documents revealed Monday.

A 132-page deposition taken of Elections Supervisor Sandra Goard paints a picture of an informal small-town voting operation with few security checks or paper trails--though the office, near Orlando, Fla., could play a key role in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.

In the deposition, Goard, an elected Republican who has held office since 1983, acknowledged that two representatives of the state Republican Party used a back room in her office for 10 days to correct the ballot applications.

Goard conceded that no one ever was allowed to correct applications in the past, and that her staff assisted the GOP representatives by sorting Republican applications from Democratic applications--something else that never had been done before.

According to the documents, Goard said her office didn’t check the identification of one of the two men, and she told attorneys that she still has no idea who he is. The men were not supervised while they worked, she said.

“It’s like putting two people in a bank vault, unsupervised, and saying: ‘Don’t touch anything,’ ” said Harry Jacobs, an Orlando-area attorney and a Democrat who has filed a lawsuit against Goard and other Republicans. “It’s a very cozy relationship they had with the Republican Party.”

The disclosures came through a lawsuit that, if successful, would throw out all of Seminole County’s absentee ballots--at least 15,000.

About two-thirds of those ballots were cast for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the GOP nominee. If they were thrown out--still a legal longshot--it would be more than enough to overcome Bush’s minute lead in Florida and to hand the election to Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore.

Printing Error on Postcards

The lawsuit, which could be one of Gore’s best shots at winning the White House after a series of legal setbacks, was moved Monday from Seminole County to Tallahassee, Fla., the capital, after both sides agreed to the change.

Weeks before the election, realizing the Florida election would be close and pivotal to the presidential race, local leaders from both parties here sent postcards to voters. The cards offered a simple, pre-printed application for absentee ballots. All voters needed to do was sign the card and send it back, and they would receive a ballot in the mail.

But the Republican version of the postcard--sent to voters who were likely to vote for Bush if they responded--contained an error. A contractor had printed prospective voters’ birth dates in a spot reserved for voter identification numbers, said Jamie Wilson, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida.

Under Florida law, that made the ballot applications invalid--unless they were corrected.

Republicans, realizing the mistake, called Goard in late October to ask if they could take the cards from her elections office to correct them. She refused, but when they asked if they could send representatives to her office, armed with laptop computers that contained voter identification numbers, she agreed. They corrected the 4,700 incomplete ballot applications before the end of October and mailed them out.

“You told them, as long as they came in with information from their database, they could fill the information in, correct?” asked Gerald F. Richman, a West Palm Beach attorney who is the lead lawyer for the Democrats, during the deposition. “Yes,” Goard replied.

Though the ballot applications already had been rejected and placed in a warehouse, Goard’s staff members fetched the Republican postcards out of storage and placed them in a separate box for the GOP representatives. More than 4,500 ballot applications were corrected and ballots were sent to those Republican voters. It is unclear how many of those absentee ballots actually were returned as votes.

Some Democratic ballot applications also apparently arrived without some of the required information, but they were thrown out and Democrats were not provided the same opportunity to make them comply, Democratic attorneys say.

Goard did not accept phone calls placed to her office Monday seeking comment. But Wilson said in an interview that “there was nothing wrong there.”

“This was an agreement between the Republican Party of Florida and the supervisor to put the code” on the postcards, Wilson said. “There was just a printing error.”

Ken Wright, a state Republican Party attorney, said the lawsuit is the height of hypocrisy. Gore is not a party to the suit, but Wright noted that Democrats are fighting for the inclusion of votes in Democratic strongholds such as Palm Beach County, but are fighting for votes to be thrown out in Seminole County, a Republican stronghold.

“Mr. Gore’s fingerprints are all over this,” Wright said. “The only reason he’s not a party to the case is that he can’t be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

Wright said requiring voter identification numbers on absentee ballot applications is “hyper-technical.”

Technical or not, it was an important piece of a get-tough election reform package approved by the state in the wake of Miami’s infamous 1997 mayoral election. That election was tarnished by widespread fraud that eventually forced the removal of Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez from office.

The law says that only the voter, the voter’s legal guardian or a family member--not a third party--can complete application forms for absentee ballots.

Goard acknowledged that law during her deposition.

“A representative of the Republican Party was the one who was going ahead and resubmitting [ballots] after having added information to those cards, without the knowledge of the Democratic Party, and without any provision of the statute that says they could do so. Isn’t that correct?” Richman asked in the deposition.

“Yes,” Goard said, over the objections of her lawyers.

Democratic attorneys say the actions of election officials in Seminole County raise troubling questions.

For example, the two men representing the Republican Party worked for more than a week in a room that also houses 18 computers that are linked to the election office’s mainframe computer--its voting database.

GOP attorneys say that doesn’t matter, because as far as anyone knows, the two men did not have the passwords to those computers.

No System of Checks and Balances

Lawyers challenging the presidential vote also point out that the elections office has no records confirming that the two men even corrected the absentee ballot applications with the right numbers.

And the attorneys raise the possibility that some Republicans in Seminole County voted twice, once by absentee and a second time in person.

While they so far have no proof of that, Richman cited “statistically unbelievable” returns in three precincts. For example, a recount of ballots conducted last week in Seminole County resulted in a net gain of 98 votes for Bush. According to Richman, 88 of those 98 came from a single precinct, suggesting, he claimed, further impropriety.

Republicans deny that there is any evidence of double voting.

But the county’s handling of the Republican absentee ballots “is clearly an illegal action,” attorney Richman said. “It is just plain cheating.”

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Seminole County Ballot Form

A lawsuit in Seminole County involves a dispute centering on about 4,700 absentee ballot request forms to which Republican workers added voter identification numbers. Democrats are seeking to have the absentee ballots thrown out. The suit was moved on Monday to state court in Tallahassee.

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Voter ID numbers were filled in by hand before the election by two workers for the Florida GOP. The county election supervisor, a Republican, admitted that state statutes prohibit a third party from filling out the forms.

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Sources: Office of Supervisor of Elections, Seminole County; staff reports; Researched by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times