The Broward County supervisor, who faces possible suspension, is rallying allies in a debate rife with racial overtones.
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Published November 17, 2003
FORT LAUDERDALE - Just beyond the blue-gray doors of a first-floor room in a downtown government building, a portrait of Miriam M. Oliphant, Broward County supervisor of elections, greets visitors.
Sporting a fire-engine red blazer and matching lipstick, Oliphant's smile is as sparkling as the pearl earrings and necklace she's wearing. But her likeness might not remain on the wall for long.
As early as this week, Gov. Jeb Bush could decide whether to suspend Oliphant for severe mismanagement of her office.
For more than a year, Oliphant, 49, has been the new face of Florida's election embarrassments.
A first-term supervisor, Oliphant oversaw the 2002 gubernatorial primary, which turned out to be the epicenter of yet another troubled Florida election.
Broward, with about 1-million voters, had received millions of dollars for new voting technology and voter education after the disputed 2000 presidential recount. But polls failed to open on time. Machines didn't work. Precinct workers lacked training. Voters got the wrong ballots.
The bad publicity has been unrelenting ever since. Questions have been raised about Oliphant's spending, and there have been ethical and criminal investigations into her office that yielded no charges.
Most recently, Oliphant fired a slew of key managers, and a special mail-in election this month resulted in thousands of ballots being returned as undeliverable, a sign that voter rolls have not been kept current. On Friday, three former election workers sued Oliphant in federal court, accusing her of firing them because they told investigators about mismanagement, refusing to lie about the problems.
The firings, and concern about an upcoming special election in January, prompted Secretary of State Glenda Hood to send a team to Broward to review operations in October. After the visit, Hood's report to Bush characterized Oliphant as "irresponsible," exemplifying a "gross dereliction of duty" and being "dangerously close to meeting the constitutional threshold for removal from office."
The team went back last week to see whether Oliphant had made the improvements it said were needed to ensure proper elections. The group is expected to recommend to Bush this week whether Oliphant should be suspended from her $128,769-a-year job.
But now, with the record compiled against her and the governor preparing to act, those who have been sympathetic to Oliphant's challenges in modernizing the county's election system are galvanizing for a fight that could make any resolution difficult. The only black official elected countywide is trying to rally her political base.
Even Broward County Commissioner Josephus Eggelletion, who once supported Oliphant but now questions whether she should stay, says whatever Bush does will be viewed politically.
"It puts the governor in a very precarious position," he said.
As Oliphant fights to complete her first term, opinions about what Bush should do abound. Some in Broward say that it is a simple matter of incompetence and that she needs to be removed. Supporters say many of the early problems had more to do with the county's switch from punch cards to touch screens than with Oliphant.
Race has been invoked by both sides. Opponents say she would have been fired long ago if she were white. Supporters say she has been unfairly made a scapegoat for problems she didn't create because she is black.
But the opinion likely to hold the most weight with Bush is that of the state assessment team Hood assembled, made up of five state and county officials.
Shortly after Oliphant fired her finance chief and the supervisors of absentee ballots and poll workers, the team reviewed everything in Oliphant's operation from voter registration procedures to poll worker training. The conclusion: Her office was not up to par.
Last week, when the group returned to see whether Oliphant heeded its suggestions, missing was St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker, who in apparent disagreement asked that her name be removed from the team's October report.
A couple of days after that followup visit, Oliphant emerged from a meeting smiling. She offered a copy of her written response to the team.
In the letter to Bush, Oliphant wrote that her office was the target of a "constant barrage of attacks." She justified firing her top managers right before the mail-in election, saying the "managers in question were failing to perform their jobs" in preparation for the Nov. 4 election. Local newspapers reported that 17 percent of ballots in that election were returned as undeliverable.
Now, as criticism mounts, some local ministers have come to Oliphant's defense, recently taking to radio airwaves with her. Bush's decision, they say, will have great implications.
"If they remove her from office, they can go after any elected official," said the Rev. Dozell Varner, assistant pastor at Mount Bethel Baptist Church and vice president of the African-American Ecumenical Ministerial Fellowship. "If they can take her down after the press wages a propaganda campaign, then they can take anybody down that we the people vote in. That's what we're fighting against.
"I have full confidence in her. She had to facilitate a transition which may not have been easy for anybody."
Some of the ministers have described the barrage of bad publicity about Oliphant as racist. Race finds its way into the conversation of average Broward voters, too.
"She needs to be dismissed from her position," said Susan Dionne, 40, a white banker. "If it were a white man in that position, he'd have been fired by now. She blames everyone for her faults."
Others had more sympathy for Oliphant.
"I think they're out to get her," said Wayne Barrett, a black accountant. "Race has a lot to do with it. Blacks and Hispanics - minorities, in general - need to open their eyes and see what's taking place around them. I think she did a fine job with the resources she had to work with."
Eggelletion, who also is black, said Oliphant had little time to make the transition into an office already beset with challenges. A former school board member, she was elected in 2000, just as an overhaul of the state's election system was about to begin. He said some of the blame placed on Oliphant should have been aimed at the County Commission, which approves the elections office's budget.
"Although some of this was her fault, some of it was our fault for under-budgeting her office, and some of it was the people she got to volunteer for the elections," he said.
But Eggelletion said he couldn't make sense of Oliphant's decision to fire staff who "had her best interest at heart and were doing outstanding jobs."
"You're getting ready to go into an election and what do you do?" he asked, referring to the Nov. 4 mail-in election. "You fire your best people. That's like playing in the championship game but getting rid of the MVP and all my best scorers and still think I'm going to win. It's not going to work."
State Rep. Chris Smith, a Democrat from Broward, said the first signs of trouble appeared when the county began purchasing new voting machines for 2002. Oliphant, who wanted a machine that Smith said required less manpower, battled fiercely with the commissioners, who eventually approved machines that required more people to operate them.
"The county went against her own choice of machine as supervisor of elections," Smith said. "It seemed to go downhill from there."
During the critical 2002 primary, one of the complaints was that there was a staff shortage. The general election held that November, for which the county provided extra personnel, went smoothly, Smith said.
"There's enough blame to go around to all involved, the County Commission and everyone involved in the process," said Smith, a longtime friend of Oliphant's. "I think it would set a dangerous precedent if she's removed for perceived incompetence. She hasn't broken any laws."
