Looking through the statute I posted a link to earlier, I didn’t see anything indicating that absentee ballots are limited to those unable to kake it.
This was alleged in the OP, citing a New York Times article:
I stick by my statements. The article says the Democrats were not “extended the same opportunity to review their voters applications for completeness,” thge implication being that Goard offered the Republicans the chance. But she didn’t…she merely informed them of a very large problem which the Democrats did not face. If the Democrats had misprinted the forms, would she have informed them? Who knows? But the point is she merely informed the Republicans of the problem and they asked for the opportunity to correct, which she then granted. The Democrats did not ask. If they had, I would hope she would have allowed them the same opportunity, and if she didn’t, there would be grounds for complaint.
So, I said “It is not alleged that Democrats requested access to rejected Democrat requests to correct problems of incorrect forms.” which is true…the Democrats never asked if they could. They didn’t find out until too late that the Republicans had done it, but they weren’t denied the opportunity, it just wasn’t offered to them. Very different things.
And as far as “It is not alleged that the supervisor offered Republicans access and denied it to Democrats.” This is also true. Even the most partisan accounts do not claim that Goard offered the Republicans the chance to review the applications, but that the Republicans asked and she agreed.
Now, did she have an obligation to tell the Democrats what the Republicans were doing? I don’t see why. It was an unusual situation which had not occurred before. No one claims she habitually allowed the Republicans to review absentee ballot applications, but in this case, due to non-voter error, she let them know.
Wait, I stand a little corrected…the article from the OP does say
That is footnoted with links to Washington Post and NY Times articles. But neither of the articles support that statement. Neither claims Poe ASKED to fill them out, just that the Democrats were not extended the opportunity and that Goard brushed off Poe’s complaints. It is true that non-Republican applications were not reviewed, but then there was no known reason to re-review them while there was a known problem with the Republican applications (which were not the fault of the applicants) and it was Republican workers working on behalf of their party members.
Now, if it can be Proved that Goard would have refused the Democrats the opportunity to do the same if they asked, then that’s a kettle of fish of a different color.
Bottom line is: CampaignWatch distorted the articles. Goard did not offer but accepted a request from the Republicans, most likely taking into account the unusual circumstances, ie the requestors didn’t add their registration number because there was no place to add it. We can assume that the rejected Democrat and Independent applications were in error due to voter error and not a misprint. There may be no technical difference, but would you really argue that voters should lose their properly cast vote due to someone else’s error in printing the application they used to obtain the ballot??
pinqy
Well, I guess they’ve made it perfectly clear NOW, haven’t they?
They make me sick…but hey, it makes Dubya & Co. look JUST as bad as they are, and that’s okey dokey with me.
When did a whole second page get added to this thread?!?!?!
Man! this is getting exhausting!
Be back later…after I slog through all this.
stoid
Actually, since this is a court case, the proof MUST be proof in the sense I am demanding. Duh.
The situation could change…
but as of right now the Florida legislature has only scheduled a session to DICUSS the certification. I would agree that if the Seminole ballots get thrown out then that would quickly change to ENFORCE. Unless Seminole goes Gore’s way, I don’t expect them to take action.
I love legalese:)
Oh, I get it! He just pointed the pistol at my head and pulled back that little hammer thingy, and is just resting his fatigued index finger on the trigger. Doesn’t mean he’s going to shoot me. Unless I force the issue by not handing over my wallet… Got it. Thanks for the clarification.
Who said I supported the democrats? I never said it. I voted for Harry Browne.
Gotcha
I’ll spare you my diatribe on this point. But, just to give you the summary, the idea that the Republicans are the party of “responsibility” is the biggest unadultrated crock of shit on the planet.
I haven’t seen mention of today’s great courtroom revelation.
we know the Republicans mailed out ballot request forms. due to a printing error, those forms left off the ID #. of course the Dems mailed out request forms too. Their forms included the ID #. The Rep “operatives” went in and added the missing number to the forms they mailed out ( not to all republican requests, just the ones they mailed out ). this was a slightly questionable tactic.
BUT, it turns out that the request forms the dems mailed out had a return address that sent them back to the local Dem party office. they were then hand carried over to the elections office. of course, they had plenty of oppertunity to insure that all of those requests were completed properly. republicans correcting applications after the fact doesn’t strike me as any less legit than having requests mailed back to the local DNC office. As it turns out, not one of the requests generated by the DNC mailing were rejected.
End of case. the Dems will lose this one.
-Luckie.
watched most of this case on the tube. hope i haven’t substantially misrepresented anything.
Luckie - I watched most of the trial today, and that’s the impression I got of it as well.
The Repubs didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. They felt bad that they had screwed up the application form, and they wanted to fix it. They did call a lot of the people they sent out forms to, to inform them of the problem. But a lot of the people weren’t home when they called. Then they went ahead and fixed the forms. There was no big secret, no “conspiracy”, nothing like that.
They were just ignorant of the fact that this was a “no no”. Had they known, they would have found a different way to get these applications fixed. They were pretty motivated to fix it, and would have some other way, had they know this would be such a problem.
That’s what I got out of what I saw today.
Since it took nine or ten days to fix all the forms, and they still made it in in time, I don’t see how it would be at all unlikely that the Republicans could have gotten everyone involved to phone in a correct request. Or to show up in person at the polls.
By the way, everyone knows the Libertarians are the party of responsibility. 
I even gave you the word for it. A presumption is something that is considered true unless it is proven otherwise. The presumption in the case of an application for an absentee ballot has to be that the applicant was unable to vote in person, since that is the very REASON for the existence of absentee ballots.
Thanks for the closely detailed and carefully reasoned response, Counselor. Quite convincing.
“no-no” in this case actually means “in violation of Florida state campaign laws that were enacted in order to curb rampant cases of fraud in absentee voting”. And, please also remember the case in Martin County where the Republicans were allowed to remove the ballot application forms from the county offices and bring them back later
For every one of the ‘sure you want every vote counted except the ones not for you’, there’s the correlation of ‘rule of law except when we were caught breaking it’.
This will wend it’s way through the court system. FTR, I believe that these cases will not result in tossing votes.
And, regardless of the outcome of any of the court cases, the FSL has announced their intention of seating a special session validating only Mr. Bush’s slate of electors (which of course, was already submitted to the Electoral College on the day the SoS certified the election).
I’m disappointed to see that the arguments seem to be mostly about who had custody of the forms when, rather than establishing if there was selective disenfranchisement or not. I can’t get worked up over simple honest ignorance, if that’s all it is, but it’s still not clear.
I would have liked to have watched the trial, of course.
While that may once have been true in Florida, it is no longer true there. There is no law in Florida that restricts absentee voting to any particular reason. This is true in California, too, as I recall from living there, and voting absentee mostly to avoid the difficulty of making it to a polling place on election day. Thus, in Florida, an absentee ballot is merely a convenience, rather than an indication of necessity.
One might note that this is self-evident from the fact that the Republican and Democratic parties saw some value in mass mailings of absentee ballot applications to their party faithful. If only those who were unable to vote on election day were able to request an absentee ballot, there would hardly be much value in such an effort. Instead, the reason for such mailings is to attempt to increase voter participation by making it as easy as possible to vote. This approach has been taken to its ultimate extreme in the state of Washington, where ALL ballots were cast by mail for this election.
One can also assume that those mailing in ballots could be subjected to voting pressures not present when voting in person behind a curtain. For instance, I witnessed a family where the mother was voting her absentee ballot here in Ohio with her husband, children, and friends all around her. She was, of course, subjected to much opinion as to the merits of each candidate. Fortunately, she seemed pretty strong willed, although one or two of her votes were obviously influenced by the strong opinions of her husband (who, by the way, can’t vote since he is a resident alien, irony of ironies! 
). Much more sinister pressures can be thought of, such as party operatives offering to ‘help’ with voting questions, etc. But we’ll leave that for another thread.
Thus, as to your claim that there should be a ‘presumption’ that a request for absentee ballot means the person can’t vote on election day, my response would be that such a presumption is not raised by anything in Florida law, nor by common sense in the case of Florida. Which leaves us STILL without a valid indication that would be accepted in the court as to why the actions of the Republican Party operative(s) in Seminole County should result in application of the remedies suggested in Florida election cases.
From the case Beckstrom v. Volusia County Canvassing Board, 707 So.2d 720 (1998):
I think this paragraph explains why it was important to try and show actual intent to violate the law. Doing so potentially would result in application of different rules as to whether the actions engaged in would result in a successful contest of the election. Most of the commentators I listened to last night agreed that the plaintiffs had failed to show actual vote fraud, that is, intent to violate the law for the purpose of altering the result of the upcoming election. Thus, the court will be limited to the much harder determination of whether the actions resulted in frustrating the will of the voters. Frankly, the cases in Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County had more traction in that regard and Judge Sauls couldn’t get the Democrats over that hurdle, so we shall see.
The paper today referenced a THIRD county with similar troubles, where a third case has been filed. Does anyone know what the facts are in THAT case??
** Wasn’t it Oregon? (and after you were so nice to me in the other thread, too)
One question, for the legally minded. Seems to me that the FSL enacted this tough legislation about absentee ballots and requests because of the huge problems they’d had with fraud regarding same.
Now, if the premise is that voter ‘fraud’ is only an issue if it’s done in a wholesale manner -ie, if I fake my dad’s vote, while that might be horrible etc, it’s really not going to effect much of anything, but if I fake my neighborhood’s votes in favor of a candidate, then there’s been real harm done, and to the rest of the voting public.
So, the laws, I would suspect would have been enacted with the aim of avoiding and discouraging this sort of wholesale improper influence of an election. If one allowed the results to stand and sacrificed the operatives who were caught, how is this a deterrant in the future?
Didn’t they completely re-do an election for Miami mayor because of absentee ballot fraud?
I’m not suggesting that the remedy is a ‘do over’ for the state of Florida. But I find it difficult to believe that the FSL when enacting these laws did not intend that some effect to the ‘subverted’ election occur (not assuming that it was subverted in this case, yadayada etc.).
Yikes, might have been Oregon. I’m from California, originally, and we tend to use those two states interchangeably.
Let’s dissect this concept of the ‘tough’ legislation that followed the Miami mayoral election of 1997. This is another of those lovely myths that starts to fall apart when viewed in the light of day.
Miami had a mayoral election in 1997. Two members of the Cuban-American community, one a former mayor, the other the incumbent mayor, were entered in the race. The incumbent, Joe Carollo, obtained about 51.5% of the votes cast on election day, but the former mayor, Xavier Suarez, received over 60% of the absentee ballots. After combination, the result was a plurality but no majority for Mr. Carollo. This resulted in a run-off election nine days later, which was won by Mr. Suarez. Mr. Carollo protested and contested the results of the two elections.
At trial, Mr. Carollo successfully proved that there had been ‘massive’ voter fraud in the election, particularly in one commission district. The trial court used the words, “a massive, well-conceived and well orchestrated absentee ballot voter fraud scheme.” The scheme included false adresses, stolen ballots, ballot ‘brokers’, and falsely witnessed ballots. The trial court, based on uncontradicted testimony that the results in the district in question could only be the result of the proven fraud (after application of sophisticated statistical analysis), ordered that the election result be thrown out and the election re-held.
On appeal to the Third District Court of Appeal, the result was changed to declaring Mr. Carollo the winner. This was done by applying the remedy of removing from consideration the absentee ballots. This had been done before by the Florida Supreme Court in other cases of fraudulent absentee balloting. It was noted by the court that there was no ‘right’ to vote by absentee ballot, so the remedy of ‘disenfranchising’ the voters who so voted was not as unacceptable a result as disenfranchising the whole electorate by ordering a new election. You can read the opinion of the court in this Miami Herald article.
As an aside, there never was an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. Public opinion wasn’t exactly on the side of Mr. Suarez, and he vacated the mayoral office after this decision, as far as I can tell. Also, the decision of the Third District Court preceded the decision of the Florida Supreme Court in Beckstrom, which I have referenced elsewhere.
In response to this election, Florida’s legislature enacted and/or modified several statutes regarding absentee ballots. One of the statutes it enacted was Section 101.62, which governs the requesting of an absentee ballot. It inserted in this provision a requirement that anyone requesting an absentee ballot provide certain items of identification, including such things as address, last four digits of social security number, etc. Included in this list of required information was the voter’s registration number, presumably as proof the voter really was registered to vote.
Let’s look at the statute to see what it says about this information.
Now we see from this that the obvious purpose of this legislation is to prevent absentee ballots from issuing to people who aren’t registered and without being able to identify the person in the future, should a contest of the election occur. But, curiously, if you read the rest of the statute, (go here), we note that it doesn’t set any further requirement about how to handle these ballot requests, should they be deficient in information. In short, you aren’t supposed to hand or send a ballot out without this information, but there isn’t anything to stop you from getting the information from the voter some other way.
Which gets back to the issue of remedy for what happened. What we have here is NOT an attempt at vote fraud. That is, no one was attempting to get ballots out to people who shouldn’t get ballots. Nor were the ballots themselves being tampered with. What happened is that the elected official simply made a bad choice in how to remedy the lack of identification numbers, and the person from the Republican party may have violated the law by adding the information (so far, despite assertions that this was some sort of criminal act, I’ve yet to see a citation of relevant Florida law for such assertions).
In short, did the type of action the statute was enacted to prevent occur anyway? No. There is no allegation that those who got ballots weren’t entitled to them for any reason OTHER than their failure to fill in an item the form didn’t contain.
So what gets done about it? Let’s go back to what the Supreme Court of Florida said in Beckstrom.
Pretty simple, I think.