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John Stafford Jr: Today brings an epilogue to their election dramas
By LEONORA LaPETER © St. Petersburg Times, published January 20, 2001
The one in Duval County, where 21,942 people voted for more than one candidate for president and 4,967 voted for none. Where poll workers allowed 162 unregistered people to vote. And where, more than two months after the election, officials still can't reconcile the number of ballots cast with the number of people who signed voting registers. With so many messed-up votes, you might think America would know more about Jacksonville's John Stafford Jr. His two-page presidential ballot helped make Duval one of the counties with the highest percentage (9.07 percent) of invalid or uncounted votes in the state. About 9,000 were tossed out in Jacksonville's predominantly black voting districts where voter turnout for Al Gore was at an all-time high. "Imagine what we could have had if we'd counted those 25,000 votes," said Rodney Gregory, a lawyer for the Duval County Democratic Party. "It would have been enough. I think Duval County is one of the great unexplored terrains." Arguably, Gore could have won the presidency if all the votes had been counted in this Republican stronghold, where George W. Bush won with 57 percent of the vote. But Duval County's top election official and his caterpillar ballot eluded the spotlight just as sure as Palm Beach County's Theresa LePore and her butterfly ballot got snagged in it. Even today, more than two months after the election, Stafford, 55, won't talk. Through a spokesperson, he says he is the subject of a lawsuit and won't address Duval's election difficulties. So is Stafford a Republican operative who misled Democrats on the extent of the problem in the days following the Nov. 7 presidential election? Or a good guy with an honorable disposition who tried to do his job the best he could under the circumstances? Either way, the soft-spoken Stafford, who started out as a computer programmer for the city of Jacksonville in 1970 and worked in the supervisor's office for 10 years before he was elected in 1999, will have to regain the trust of some voters in Duval County. "I think most of us feel we were misled by John Stafford's office," said Isaiah Rumlin, president of the Jacksonville branch of the NAACP. A sample ballot published by Stafford's office in the newspaper in the days before the election told voters to cast votes every page on Election Day, while the actual ballot gave voters a list of 10 presidential candidates over two pages. Stafford's spokesperson, Susan Tucker Johnson, called it an "oversight." Thousands voted on both pages, and their ballots were tossed out. In the days immediately following Nov. 7, Stafford told a Gore campaign manager, former State Rep. Michael Langton, that "not many, perhaps 200 or 300 ballots" had been discarded, Langton recalled. That was not true. Not even close. But Stafford's spokesperson, Johnson, said Stafford thought Langton was talking about the total number of discarded absentee ballots -- not overall ballots. Stafford and the county's canvassing board certified the election results before Democrats realized the extent of the lost votes, Langton said, and although there was time to demand a manual recount, it was not enough time. Others defend Stafford, who pledged in his campaign to eliminate the county's 20-year-old voting system and reduce voter fraud. "Considering the antiquated equipment he has to work with, it's arbitrary to point the finger at John Stafford," said Deborah Katz Pueschel, a retired air traffic controller and one of four supervisor candidates defeated by Stafford in May 1999. "It's not John Stafford. It's the whole system. What I've known of John Stafford, maybe you just want to call it woman's intuition, to me he's a very honorable, decent man." Even today, Stafford can't reconcile his books and has given up trying to do so. Attempts to match the total number of signatures in the voting registers with the total ballots cast in Duval have failed, hampered by sloppy scanning and the loss of a voter roll book that turned up on someone's desk recently. The latest report shows that the county received 1,442 more ballots than they had signatures for voters acknowledging receipt of a ballot. That's down from an earlier 2,659. Stafford's assistant supervisor, Dick Carlberg, said his office thinks part of the problem is that some voters have been purged from the rolls, but he plans no further investigation of the discrepancy. "We don't worry about those," Carlberg said. "We know we'll never find them. We know there are scanning errors. We know we're never going to come up with a dead-on posting report that matches the ballots cast." Asked why the office had so many discrepancies and why poll workers gave 162 folks who weren't registered the chance to vote, Carlberg said poll workers should have known not to do that. "If you want to hang this county, go and f--ing do it," he said. - Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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He's the supervisor of elections you didn't hear about.
