Challenges dog overseas ballot count

By ALICIA CALDWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 19, 2000

PENSACOLA -- The Democrats arrived here five days ago, armed with laptops and the do-or-die fervor that has come to define these days since the presidential election.

Their aim? To challenge overseas absentee ballots -- widely presumed to be predominantly George W. Bush votes -- in socially conservative Escambia County, which is home to Pensacola Naval Air Station.

On Friday night, after five hours of all-out skirmishing between lawyers representing Democrats and Republicans, 112 of 272 ballots had been invalidated -- a rejection rate of 41 percent, which tracks an unofficial statewide rate of 39 percent.

The scene in Escambia County was one front in the overseas absentee ballot battle that played out in 67 Florida counties.

If the Democrats' strategy was to keep a lid on Bush votes, they succeeded: When the tallies were in, Bush had extended his lead over Vice President Al Gore to 930 votes, an uncomfortably small lead to take into the hand recounts in three largely Democratic counties.

In all, canvassers rejected 1,420 votes around the state and accepted 2,206 ballots, the Associated Press reported. Republicans feared that many of the rejected absentee ballots were from military personnel, who they believe were Bush supporters.

By Saturday, the numbers segued into spin: Each side accused the other of manipulating the process with biased legal briefs and challenge strategies designed to exclude votes favoring the opposing candidate.

Republicans used the episode to take a poke at Gore's patriotism.

"No one who aspires to be commander in chief should seek to unfairly deny the votes of the men and women he would seek to command," Karen Hughes, Bush's communications director, said Saturday.

Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, a Bush backer, complained that the ballots should be counted.

"It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis . . . yet because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States who will be their commander in chief," Schwarzkopf said in a statement released by the Bush campaign.

The Gore people were just as disturbed by what they called an all-out effort by Republicans who wanted even clearly invalid votes to be counted.

"I think that they wanted to get every military vote they could counted, regardless of the law," said Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. "They use the law when it suits their purposes, and ignore the law when it suits their purposes. There's an amazing, tremendous inconsistency on their part."

In Miami-Dade County, the canvassing board looked at 312 ballots and threw out two-thirds of them. And nearly three-quarters of the overseas absentees in Broward were tossed for missing postmarks, missing or unclear signatures, and other problems.

Democrats said the high discard rate in Broward proves the canvassing board, made up of two Democrats and one Republican, is fair and impartial.

"It's an extraordinary big number, and the majority of those votes would have been for Gore," said state Sen. Steve Geller, a Hallandale Democrat.

But Democrats clearly focused their efforts on Republican-leaning counties.

In some counties, half or nearly all the ballots were rejected, many of them military ballots that apparently didn't have postmarks.

Orange County, for example, rejected 117 of its 147 overseas ballots. Alachua County rejected half of the 56 overseas ballots received. St. Lucie rejected 13 of 14 and Lake County, all five.

In Duval, which Bush carried, results were not announced until after 4 a.m. Saturday -- capping a marathon that had begun at 9 a.m. Friday for party operatives who examined each of the county's 618 ballots.

Lawyers for each side argued an array of elections laws, including whether ballots without postmarks should be counted if they otherwise complied. At first the canvassing board said no, then they reversed course.

Republicans argued, using an affidavit from the postal officer aboard the Mayport-based USS John F. Kennedy, that sometimes military mail doesn't get a postmark. And, if the ballot was received just a day or two after the election, logic would dictate it was sent before the election, they said.

"It's shameful that our men and women in uniform are being disenfranchised for political gain," Bush attorney Jim Post said. He said a lawsuit was possible later, but they were waiting now to see how events in the election turned.

Across the state, county canvassing boards in heavily Republican counties tended to include military ballots that had no postmarks, while in mostly Democratic counties the decision went the other way.

By the time it was over in Escambia County, Bush picked up a net of 71 votes. But it was neither a painless nor pretty process.

Escambia County Judge Thomas Johnson, head of the canvassing board, had announced before the meeting started that he intended to get it over with in two hours so that he could take his wife out for their anniversary.

But the tone was set when Democrats immediately objected to the mass opening of absentees that the Escambia supervisor's staff had determined were not questionable. Elections law says challenges must be made before the ballot envelopes are opened.

"We have a number of serious questions that impact the integrity of the entire process," said John Gannon, a Boston lawyer working for the Gore camp.

And so it went. Ballot by ballot.

The Democrats, who along with Republicans had gotten a list of overseas absentees that had been mailed, had created a database of voters in Escambia. As each voter's name was called out, the Democrats ran the name through a laptop to determine whether they had an objection.

Both Democrats and Republicans had been given several hours earlier in the day to look over the ballots and plot their strategy.

Typically, the Democrats objected when the witness signature was unreadable, or the ballot was postmarked within the United States or if the ballots had no postmark at all.

The canvassing board also threw out ballots when the signature on the ballot did not appear to match the one on file at the supervisor's office, or when the voter cast two ballots.

By the end of the meeting, nearly half the ballots had been thrown out. The Republicans were none too pleased.

"There are some ballots here in this box that have been invalidated that deserve to be counted," said Stuart Bowen, a lawyer for Bush who had come to Pensacola from Austin, Texas.

At one point, a lawyer for the Republican Party was arguing against throwing out ballots that bore signatures that appeared to be different than the ones the supervisor had on file. The lawyer, Edward Fleming of Pensacola, said it was unfair to ask canvassing board members to judge the signatures.

"This is exactly what the canvassing board does," said Johnson, the canvassing board chairman. "But no one ever usually comes."

-- Staff writers Wes Allison, Matthew Waite, David Karp and Eric Stirgus contributed to this report, which also contains material from Times wires.

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