Yikes, I guess I ought again to step in and suggest that people review the issue in accordance with the relevant LAW.
Stoidela’s quote contains the statement “Florida law mandates that all absentee ballots in a county be disqualified if any are tainted.” This is not an accurate statement of Florida law. This is a remedy available to a circuit judge when the result of an election has been contested successfully under Section 102.168. An example of a case where that happened was the 1997 Miami mayoral election, where the winning candidate was successfully shown to have procured fraudulent absentee votes. The basis for this remedy is the determination by Florida courts that absentee voting is not a right, it is a privilege, and the courts are somewhat less worried about ‘disenfranchising’ absentee voters than people who actually step in a booth on election day. When you can’t easily separate out the absentee ballots which have been fraudulently cast, then the court can simply remove all absentee ballots from consideration.
However, as was noted above, this doesn’t mean that it will ALWAYS happen whenever there is some irregularity in the absentee ballots. In the case Beckstrom v. Volusia County Canvassing Board, 707 So.2d 720 (1998), the Volusia County elections people, following the instructions of the company which sold them their ballot scanning equipment, marked with felt pens over the marks made on absentee ballots which were too faint for the equipment to read and tally. This was a violation of Florida law requiring that a copy of the ballot be made and scanned, allowing the canvassing board to retain the original for later perusal. No fraud was proven; indeed, despite some effort by the losing candidate, it was not shown that there were any ballots that were mismarked in this fashion, either in error or on purpose. The Florida Supreme Court refused to throw out the absentee ballots, noting that, in the absence of evidence creating a reasonable doubt that the substantial noncompliance with the law resulted in an election that did not reflect the will of the people, there was no valid reason to contest the result.
Here, as I have posted before, there is no direct connection between the alleged substantial noncompliance and the result of the election. Some Republican voters received absentee ballots who would not have had the law been followed. So what? We can hypothesize all we want that this might have resulted in increased numbers of Republican votes, but we can’t PROVE even that weak hypothesis. For one thing, the voters could have re-submitted their applications. For another thing, they could have voted in person. For a third thing, they wouldn’t have necessarily voted for any given candidate. Therefor, we can’t establish by use of evidence or deductive reasoning that the result of the the election didn’t reflect the will of the people because of the ballots sent out ‘illegally.’
Now, the closest anyone has come to really suggesting something that would be a possible remedy is to identify the ballots that were sent out ‘illegally’ and remove them from the count. But, again, this presupposes that the ballots should be treated as invalid votes. It is hard to understand this reasoning. The people who cast those ballots did nothing wrong. They filed applications, failing to realize they lacked essential information. They got ballots in the mail. They voted those ballots and sent them in. The only illegal actions were those of the county elections official and, arguably, the operatives of the Republican Party who filled in the information. But should the votes of people who did nothing illegal or fraudulent be rejected because someone else screwed up? I have a hard time following that logic, nor is it in any way consistent with the basic mantra of the Democratic party (which has existed for much longer than this election dispute) that we do everything we can to get people to vote and count those votes.
Which leaves the REAL troubling difficulty with what happened. Some Democratic voters did not receive ballots who would have received those ballots had they been treated in the same way that the Republican voters were. Some of those voters may have been precluded from voting by this fact, unable to go to the polls in person, and unaware that they needed to do more to ensure they received a Democratic ballot. To which the unfortunate, but legal response is, "you should have made certain you were able to vote by doing what you needed to to ensure either receipt of an absentee ballot or presence at the voting booth Nov. 7. But to remove from consideration the several thousand absentee votes of Democrat and Republican alike because some 500 Democrats didn’t do what they needed to to ensure they could vote not only flies in the face of logic, it fails to follow Florida law.
As to those who compare this to the illegal vote machinations of the political machines of the past, those comparisons fail to take into account that none of the votes suffered any irregularity OTHER than that the ballot was procured through someone else’s improper actions. It isn’t like they were ineligible to vote, or voted twice, or voted based on improper influence of their vote, or under threat of violence, etc.
The Seminole County lawsuit will be denied. The official will be charged with criminal actions if the evidence shows she did, indeed, engage in criminal activity. And we move on.
