Politics

Judge won't close election-law loophole on write-ins

TAVARES - A Florida judge refused to close an election-law loophole that experts say has been abused by Republicans and Democrats alike to exclude each other from voting.

Circuit Judge Mark Hill made the ruling Monday.

The state Constitution was amended in 1998 to open primary elections to people whose own party didn't offer a candidate. Typically, only Republicans can vote in Republican primary elections and only Democrats in Democratic primaries. But if Democrats don't have a candidate, for example, the law was designed to allow them to participate in a Republican primary, since it would effectively be the deciding contest.

The loophole is write-in candidates. In Lake County, a man who was registered as a Republican declared himself to be a write-in candidate for the Democrats in a county commissioner race. That step prevented 93,000 Democrats, independents and other non-Republicans from casting a ballot in the election.

But Hill said he could not - as the loophole's challengers wanted - make a judgment on a write-in candidate's intentions.

"Nothing in the Constitution authorizes this court or any other court to predict the degree of opposition a candidate will present or to determine whether a candidate's opposition is significant or even realistic," Hill wrote in his ruling.

In 2006, a Senate Ethics and Elections Committee analysis identified 30 legislative races where the game had been played and primaries that would have been open to all voters were closed by the presence of a write-in candidate.

A write-in candidate pays no filing fee and does not appear on the ballot but is considered under law to be general election opposition.

In reality, the average margin of victory in these 30 general election legislative races was 99.8 percent. In six of the races, the write-in candidate got no votes, including their own.

[Last modified October 30, 2007, 23:24:27]