Battle over absentee ballots in Seminole County heads to court

Democrats, alleging ballot tampering, are seeking to have the votes thrown out.

©Associated Press

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 27, 2000

SANFORD -- Accusing Republicans of illegally tampering with thousands of absentee ballot applications, Democrats are asking a Seminole County court to throw out the disputed ballots, a move that would shift 4,700 votes away from George W. Bush.

Bush received 10,006 absentee votes in Seminole, compared to 5,209 for Al Gore.

The lawsuit was filed Nov. 17 by Democratic attorney Harry Jacobs, who said all absentee ballots in the county should be thrown out if the disputed absentee votes can't be identified and dismissed.

The suit was headed to court today, when Republicans will ask to have the case dismissed.

Florida GOP Vice Chairman Jim Stelling, who has been following the lawsuit, said: "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous." Stelling, also the county Republican chairman, declined to reveal anything about the GOP's grounds for requesting the dismissal.

The suit follows efforts by parties to get absentee ballots into the hands of voters. The GOP mailed tens of thousands of absentee requests to registered Republicans, telling them to sign the form and return it to their local election supervisor.

Seminole County elections chief Sandra Goard, a Republican, rejected requests because voters omitted their identification numbers. According to the lawsuit, she then accepted some 4,700 applications after allowing two GOP workers to add the ID numbers.

Goard said the GOP asked whether a staff member could add the IDs and she agreed. Two Republican staffers spent days at the county elections office with a laptop computer, matching ballot requests to names and writing the identification numbers on the requests.

"The Republican Party asked if they could resolve that situation," Goard said. "They had an individual who had a data base. We provided a chair -- that's all."

"Where we have misconduct, wrongdoing sufficient to influence the outcome of an election, then the Florida courts have decided that this is even more important than the individual ballot submitted by an absentee voter," Jacobs said.

State law allows only voters, members of their immediate family or their legal guardians to request absentee ballots. It does not specifically address the handling of absentee requests.

What happened in Seminole County appears to be illegal, said Joseph Little, professor of law at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida. However, he said, dismissing 15,000 absentee ballots for a "technical violation" would be overkill.

"I don't think there is any wrongdoing on the part of the people voting," he said.

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