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The incident is one of many complaints statewide about absentee ballots and other irregularities.
By LEONORA LaPETER and DAVID KARP
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 10, 2000
State prosecutors are investigating whether a forged absentee ballot in Escambia County was part of a broader voter-fraud scheme, as new reports of voting irregularities, including intimidation of minority voters, continued to surface around the state.
Investigators said they are looking into whether there was a plan to redirect mailed ballots to someone who filled them out and forged the voter's signature.
Escambia County State Attorney Curtis Golden said the fraudulent ballot contained the name and address of a fictitious witness and was postmarked from Miami.
The ballot has not been opened, so it is impossible to determine whether it was designed to help Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore.
The investigation was prompted by a complaint from Todd Vinson, a law clerk in Miami who is a registered Pensacola voter.
Vinson had requested an absentee ballot from Escambia County but it didn't arrive. He requested a second ballot, but that one never arrived either. Supervisor of Elections Bonnie Jones then reviewed the absentee ballots and discovered a ballot with Todd Vinson's name on it.
When she compared the signature on the ballot with the signature on Vinson's voter registration card, they did not match.
Jones mailed a third ballot to Vinson, who voted for George W. Bush.
The Escambia incident was among a number of complaints about absentee ballots, which elections officials said were cast in record numbers in Florida because of an aggressive direct-mail drive by the political parties, especially the Republicans.
In Pinellas, Barbara Argyros, who owns a printing company, said she went to her Seminole polling place on Tuesday evening but was turned away from voting after a clerk erroneously claimed she already had cast an absentee ballot.
"No, I didn't," Mrs. Argyros, a registered Democrat, insisted to the clerk. "I haven't voted absentee. I haven't voted yet."
An election clerk tried for 45 minutes to call the central Pinellas elections office to clear up the problem but couldn't get through to anyone. Mrs. Argyros walked out in frustration.
"I felt mad, ripped off," she said.
Meanwhile, civil rights leaders called for a Justice Department investigation as NAACP offices around the state continued to gather hundreds of complaints from voters who said they were disenfranchised. Black voters with voter registration cards and proper identification were not listed on voter rolls.
There were reports of polls closing while people were still in line in Tampa and from voters who were denied ballots on grounds that their precinct had changed.
Tampa voter Willie Dickens filed two lawsuits Thursday in state court and federal court in Tallahassee, seeking to stop the state canvassing board from certifying Tuesday's election.
Federal Judge Robert Hinkle denied Dickens' request for an emergency injunction, but set a hearing for Nov. 21, according to his attorney, Sidney Matthew.
Matthew said a poll worker refused to allow Dickens to vote Tuesday because he did not have a driver's license. He wasn't allowed to sign an affidavit swearing to his identity, either.
By the time Dickens drove home and got his photo ID, the polls had closed.
"Willie feels that he was denied the right to vote because he was African-American," Matthew said.
In Miami, the NAACP charged that election officials refused to allow translators for Creole-speaking Haitian-Americans.
In Hillsborough, Brenda Wade, a Head Start teacher, said she was given a ballot that had already been punched for Bush. Wade, who is black, said the elections clerk gave her a new card, but the teacher nonetheless found the experience suspicious.
Shawnda Newkirk, a 27-year-old marketing coordinator, complained that a 30-person line of voters with problems in her poll, Precinct 330 in Largo, seemed to be made up entirely of black voters, while whites coasted through the voting.
Adora Obi Nweze, president of the NAACP in Florida, had her own bad experience.
Nweze said she was told she couldn't vote because she had already been sent an absentee ballot. She said she had to recite the law to elections officials before they allowed her to vote.
Scores of convicted felons, who had voted in past presidential elections, did not understand why they were turned away at the polls this year.
"I have been voting for a long time," said Derek Graham, 34, who was convicted of a felony 13 years ago.
He didn't know that the secretary of state removed about 12,000 convicted felons from the voting rolls this summer who had mistakenly been voting.
In Hillsborough, about 2,900 voters were purged from the rolls.
Graham said he should have learned about the purge months ago so he would have had enough time to get his civil rights restored.
Instead, he received a letter from Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio Thursday about his removal from the rolls.
"It came today and the election was two days ago," Graham said.
Besides irregularities, elections offices were dogged by complaints of bureaucratic mismanagement, from inadequately staffed polling places to untrained poll workers to paperwork glitches.
Lawrence Fenn Ellery, 69, in charge of Precinct 105 on 54th Avenue S in St. Petersburg, said 10 to 15 percent of the 1,100 voters who came to his poll had problems and couldn't vote.
He blamed a lot of the problem on the system for checking voters with a central office in Pinellas County, where 50 workers -- many of them temporary workers -- competed for 10 computers to check records.
Voters had to wait hours to find out if they were actually on the rolls, and many left in disgust.
By the end of the night, Ellery said he had gotten permission from a supervisor to allow waiting voters to cast ballots past 8 p.m. In some cases, voters who had gone to the wrong polls were allowed to vote in his precinct.
"We got kind of loose and free-wheeling," he said.
Ellery said he wrote a letter four years ago to former Supervisor of Elections Dorothy "Dot" Ruggles complaining of several problems, including the lack of communication between the central office and the polls. He said nothing was done.
-- Times staff writer Sydney P. Freedberg contributed to this report.