Examining the pieces of a cracked election

Yes, I know School Board races are officially nonpartisan now, but let's just look at the internecine Republican politics of it anyway.

Tiffany Todd received the most votes in the five-way School Board District 4 race last week, which means she will be in a runoff election Nov. 5. Janice Starling finished third, so she's out of the race by a hair.

What if Todd and Starling -- both Republicans -- had finished one-two?

That would have torn the GOP. Todd carries the mantle of her late father Tom Todd, whom she hopes to replace, and her mother, County Commissioner Barbara Sheen Todd. But at 24, her history of public service is limited.

Starling was recently appointed to the board by Gov. Jeb Bush, and could have become the first African-American person ever elected to the board.

Instead, the runoff will pit Todd against Mary Brown, also African-American, who ran for School Board in 1998 as a Democrat.

So if you want to look at this through partisan eyes, you can.

How will Republicans vote?

"I would expect that it would be united behind Tiffany," said Pinellas GOP Chairman Paul Bedinghaus.

This does not mean Brown can't win -- just look at board member Max Gessner, elected in 1998 as a Republican and ousted by voters last week.

But it helps define the challenge.

I was all ready to say a name makes the difference in a judge's race. After all, Declan P. Mansfield is a widely respected attorney with broad experience who wanted to ascend to the bench in the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit. His opponent, John Renke, has been an attorney for just seven years. Renke had something going for him: His father, also named John Renke, was a well-known Pasco County legislator.

But if his name made the difference, you'd expect Renke to have run stronger in Pasco. Actually, he did slightly better in Pinellas.

Political consultant Mary Repper, who worked for Mansfield, blamed the loss on a last-minute mailing from Renke that criticized Mansfield because he "defends people charged with drunken driving -- or people charged with stalking -- or those accused of abusing children and the elderly." She called it ugly.

When I first saw the piece, I considered it ineffective, because it was written in the voice of Renke's dog. It was even signed with a paw print and the words: Wyatt Renke, Family Dog. Call me stodgy, but I usually rely on humans for voting advice. Maybe this shows how little I know.

Jack Hebert, whose firm -- the Mallard Group -- helped prepare the piece, believes the mailing had an impact. "I didn't see it as ugly. I saw it as comparative."

Some 336 Pinellas residents saw the words "candidate withdrew" on their ballots and chose this option instead of voting for Republican Mike Fasano in state Senate District 11. ... On the Democratic side, former Pasco Sheriff Lee Cannon won convincingly in both Pinellas and Pasco.

Report from Fort Lauderdale:

The drive to bring a new voting machine system to Pinellas County has been marked by controversies. But Election Day arrived, and mostly, the trains ran on time.

The Pinellas success was quite a contrast to Broward County. Last week I spent two days in Broward, listening to the supervisor of elections explain that it wasn't her fault that her workers failed to show up at polling places. It wasn't her fault that her people didn't know how to switch on the machines. It wasn't her fault that workers closed some polls at 7 p.m. in spite of governor's orders to keep them open later.

On Wednesday night, her spokesman brought out the official in charge of coordinating Broward poll workers, who repeated all this for the television cameras.

I couldn't restrain myself from asking: "So you're blaming it on the poll workers?"

The interview abruptly ended.

-- You can reach Curtis Krueger at 893-8232 or at krueger@sptimes.com.

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