Democrats meet to decry election system

Not enough has been done since the presidential election, some say.

By BILL ADAIR

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 19, 2001

JACKSONVILLE -- More than six months after the presidential election, Democrats are still seething.

At a meeting that seemed to be a cross between a congressional hearing and a partisan rally, Democrats complained about inadequate election reforms by the Florida Legislature and called on the federal government to do more.

U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fort Lauderdale, said that in one Jacksonville precinct, 30 percent of the ballots were thrown out as invalid.

"That is damned unacceptable!" Hastings said, to the applause of the 300 Democrats in the audience.

As speakers described a litany of election problems ranging from punch card problems to rejected absentee ballots, people in the audience responded with spirited comments such as "You've got that right!" and "There you go!"

Some speakers were blunt in pointing blame at elections officials.

"I have one question," said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the NAACP Florida State Conference Branches. "Why isn't somebody in jail somewhere?"

The meeting was the fourth held around the nation by a panel of Democrats from the U.S. House of Representatives. The meeting had the appearance of a congressional hearing, with audience members given slips marked "WITNESS TESTIMONY" so they could describe their voting problems.

But the panel members and the witnesses gave a one-sided account of the election problems. They appeared to all be Democrats and several of them made derogatory references to Republican Gov. Jeb Bush.

The group chose Duval because the county had so many voting problems and the problems were concentrated in Democratic precincts.

Duval had more than 22,000 "spoiled ballots," more than any other Florida county, according to a local task force that investigated the Duval problems. A draft report from the bipartisan panel released this month called that number "devastatingly high."

The task force said the problems "resulted from pervasive error, mismanagement, obsolete systems and flawed practices. They were not, however, the result of conspiracy or intentional wrongdoing."

The task force blamed many of the problems on a lack of money and inadequate staffing in the county elections office.

"For too long, we have conducted our electoral processes on the cheap," the report said. "We tolerated outmoded equipment, inadequate personnel, insufficient voter education, and low funding across the board. We tolerated these things because margins of victory tended to exceed the known margin of error in our election system."

John Stafford, the Duval elections supervisor, was out of town Monday and unable to attend. But he previously has announced a 10-point plan to modernize the county's voting. His plan calls for more modern equipment, better election-day communication with poll workers, a more open procedure for ballot design, better training for poll workers and a new division within his office to investigate citizen complaints.

The Legislature and Gov. Bush have outlawed punch-card ballots and approved a plan for optical-scan ballots for next year's statewide election.

Speakers at Monday night's meeting said that effort was insufficient because it did not do enough to address the injustices of the 2000 presidential election.

"This is a farce on the people," said state Sen. Betty Holzendorf, D-Jacksonville. "We've got reform that everyone should know is not reform."

Recent coverage

Black voters believe they were denied (February 18, 2001)

Today brings an epilogue to their election dramas (January 20, 2001)

Democrats may have wrongly counted on Duval (December 10, 2000)

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