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Both sides agree on what happened. Now it's a matter of what should be done about it.
By ALICIA CALDWELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 6, 2000
TALLAHASSEE -- The battleground will not be whether illegal, or at least improper, action took place in the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Office.
As attorneys in the county's absentee ballot dispute prepared to go to trial today, it became clear that the fight will center on remedy, how to make up for the mistakes.
Lawyers have stipulated to a slate of facts that eliminates the need for a full-blown trial with lots of witnesses and exhibits. What is left are exhaustive arguments of elections law, a universe of court opinions that lawyers traversed Tuesday as they argued six hours of motions before Leon Circuit Judge Nikki Clark.
Clark denied several motions for dismissal late Tuesday, and the Seminole case, in which Republican staffers were allowed unusual access to modify Republican absentee ballot applications, is one of three legal challenges moving forward in Leon Circuit Court.
A similar case filed by Democrats in Martin County also begins today. Plaintiffs allege that Martin County Supervisor of Elections Peggy Robbins allowed Republicans to correct thousands of misprinted absentee ballot applications, even allowing them to remove them from her office.
The lawsuit alleges fraud and asks Leon Circuit Judge Terry Lewis to throw out nearly 9,800 absentee ballots. But lawyers for Gov. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney dismiss Robbins' actions as a "hypertechnical" error that does "not even begin to rise to a level sufficient to justify" throwing out ballots.
Martin County's absentee voters, they argue, should not be made to suffer because of a third party's mistakes.
In a case out of Bay County, Panama City school teacher Cynthia McCauley, who voted for Vice President Al Gore, sued the county canvassing board and others alleging irregularities in the processing of absentee ballot requests and receipt of ballots themselves. That case still is pending.
As the cases progressed, Gore said the votes he needed to win the presidency were thrown away in Seminole County because Democratic absentee ballot applications lacked the same information Republicans were allowed to add.
"There were more than enough votes to make the difference that were apparently thrown into . . . the trash can by the supervisor of elections there," Gore said Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
Legal maneuvers in the Seminole case previewed arguments likely to be advanced today. Those include whether it is fair to throw out all of the county's absentee ballots -- they total more than 15,000 -- because 2,000 absentee applications were improperly altered. Lawyers also are likely to focus on how egregious the transgressions must be to justify the dramatic step of throwing out all those votes.
Gerald Richman, the lead lawyer representing plaintiff Harry Jacobs, is poised to argue that Sandra Goard, the Republican supervisor of elections in Seminole County, allowed her office to become a partisan salvage operation instead of a neutral elections office.
Issues of disparate treatment almost certainly will be discussed -- whether Republicans got unfair access and whether Jacobs, a contributor to Democratic causes, knew about the Republican application corrections before the election.
In his sworn statement, Jacobs, a Longwood personal injury lawyer, says he spent $50,000 to $60,000 to produce a television ad criticizing Dick Cheney for his job with an oil services firm Cheney ran until he became the Republican vice presidential candidate.
"Mr. Jacobs' connection to the Democratic Party has a very real relevance to our case that has to do with disenfranchisement," said B. Daryl Bristow, a lawyer for the Bush campaign. "If he, as a Democrat, knew and did nothing, then the Democrats weren't disenfranchised."
Other lawyers representing Goard argued that the transgressions, while perhaps not following the letter of the law, did not affect the outcome of the election. No fraud was alleged, they said, which is a key standard in several legal rulings cited by both sides.
And the judge, while denying defendants' motions to dismiss the case, made it clear that considerable legal standards would have to be met before she would consider the remedy requested.
"That is the bottom line in this case -- whether the integrity of the process has been violated," Clark said.
- Staff writer Thomas C. Tobin contributed to this report, which also contains information from the Associated Press.