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By ALICIA CALDWELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 5, 2000
TALLAHASSEE -- Michael Leach was merely following orders.
The Republican Party staffer said he didn't ask whether it was legal to correct thousands of Republican absentee ballot requests in Seminole County. His assignment -- to go to the elections supervisor's office and add voter identification numbers -- came from state Republican political director Todd Schnick.
"I'm a military man; I follow orders," Leach said in a sworn statement last week.
Leach is a central figure in the lawsuit that may be the Democrats' last best shot at claiming the White House. The action, which has trundled along in the shadow of other legal challenges, seeks to throw out 15,215 absentee ballots. If successful, it could give Vice President Al Gore a winning margin in Florida.
With the rejection Monday of Gore's request to force a manual recount of thousands of ballots cast in South Florida, the sleeper lawsuit from Central Florida takes on new significance.
"It puts more pressure on us," said Harry Jacobs, the Longwood personal injury lawyer who filed the lawsuit, which is set to be tried Wednesday.
By Monday afternoon, the spotlight had perceptibly shifted toward the case. The Republican Party faxed a news release about a rally set for today to protest efforts to disqualify Seminole absentees. And offers of legal help already had begun, Jacobs said, though he declined to specify from whom they had come.
"There are a lot of promises," said Jacobs, a Democratic Party contributor.
Much of the activity in the Seminole County case on Monday had to do with access to evidence. Jacobs' lawyers asked for, and ultimately received, permission to re-examine Seminole's 133 precinct books and rejected absentee ballot requests.
An important issue in the case is fairness -- whether the access allowing Republican staffers the chance to correct applications gave their party an unfair advantage.
A way of proving that is by determining whether discarded Democratic absentee applications ultimately kept those voters from casting ballots in the Nov. 7 contest, facts that can be gleaned from examining voter sign-in books in each precinct.
Leach's deposition details the special treatment he received from Sandra Goard, the Republican elections supervisor in Seminole, and provides a window into his life.
After high school, Leach joined the U.S. Air Force, serving for two years. He then worked odd jobs in security and became a reserve deputy sheriff. Leach, who said he was 29 years old, was a disc jockey for a country radio station while he attended Florida State University. He graduated this year with a degree in criminology.
Within a week of graduation, he became the North Florida regional director for the state Republican Party, a full-time paid position. He coordinated Republican activities in eight counties.
On Oct. 17, Leach got a call from his boss, Schnick.
"He asked me to leave the next day and go to Seminole County supervisor of elections office and correct a mistake that the Republican Party of Florida had made on absentee ballot request forms," Leach said.
Leach was told to bring his laptop computer with him and access a Republican get-out-the-vote program called Victory Suite. The database had the name, party affiliation and voter identification numbers for every Florida voter.
He was to go through the incomplete Republican absentee requests, which had been set aside by Goard, find the voters' names in the database and write the voter identification number on the request.
For this task, the supervisor's office gave him a desk and a chair in a back room, and access for at least 15 days, including weekends.
It was treatment not afforded Democrats, though Goard has said through lawyers that she would have given them the same access -- had they asked.
Leach told lawyers that on a couple of occasions, he briefly had help from two other regional directors for the state Republican Party, but largely he worked alone, unsupervised by county employees.
After he filled in voter ID numbers, he gave the applications to workers in the supervisor's office. He said he didn't know how many cards he altered, but lawyers researching the case put the number in the thousands.
In the days after the election, Leach served alongside Jacobs as observers for their respective parties as the ballots were recounted. That's when, Jacobs has said, he heard whispers of the application alterations and filed a lawsuit.
While Jacobs and his lawyers braced themselves for the attention the Seminole case likely would draw now that other legal avenues have been narrowed, they said they are not surprised it has come to this.
"We've thought all along that our case was the stronger and better case," said Gerald Richman, the West Palm Beach lawyer representing Jacobs.