Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Four years after the biggest voting debacle in U.S. history, many suspect that GOP officials in the crucial state are planning dirty tricks again.
Oct 15, 2004 | "I'll tell you an interesting story about lawyer recruitment," says Stephen Zack, the smooth-talking Miami attorney leading John Kerry's army of election lawyers in Florida. "When I first started to do this a few months ago, I sent out an e-mail to 50 lawyers I'd worked with around the state asking for help," he said. "I got 65 yes answers, from 50 e-mails. They'd sent it on to friends saying, 'I got this e-mail. You ought to get involved.'" With a typical pro-bono query, Zack estimates, he might get a 10 percent reply rate. But this isn't just any pro-bono job. Zack needs smart attorneys to work on the thorny legal questions that could arise on Election Day, amidst the tight election returns everyone expects in this state. Zack won't say exactly how many lawyers he's recruited to work for Kerry on Nov. 2, but local media have reported the number at around 2,000. "There isn't a day that I don't walk down the street here in downtown Miami that I don't have a lawyer come up to me and volunteer," he says.
Lawyers are lining up to help Kerry in Florida for the same reason Kerry hired Zack before Election Day rather than after. Memories of the 2000 recount disaster and of widespread voting irregularities persist, as do fears that something similar could happen, or is already happening, again. Zack himself works daily amid reminders of his last brush with Florida election law. He decorated his office at the Miami branch of Boies, Schiller and Flexner with what he calls "scars" from the 2000 legal battles. In one corner, there's a courtroom sketch artist's representation of Zack cross-examining a witness during one of the many courtroom battles that occurred in that 36-day national drama. Below that, there are framed front-page articles from the New York Times and from Florida newspapers recounting his legal deftness. In another corner sits a note from Al Gore, thanking Zack for his work.
Zack is cagey about what his team is preparing for in the case of a defeat on Nov. 2 and says he fondly hopes that "everything will go very smoothly and there will be no need for lawyers." But if Zack goes looking for problems on Nov. 2, there will certainly be no shortage of voting irregularities in the state that he might contest, and many here see a legal fight heading this way that could be just as nasty as the last one.
Legal battles have already broken out all across the state. In the past week, civil rights groups sued state officials to demand that they count thousands of registration forms on which people had forgotten to check a box certifying that they were U.S. citizens. Two suits on the status of provisional ballots -- failsafe ballots given to people whose names can't be found on registration rolls -- are pending. And on Monday, a federal judge is scheduled to hear a case over the legality of paperless touch-screen voting systems. Much has changed in Florida since the last presidential election -- punch cards have been replaced with touch-screens, some laws have been rewritten and a great deal of money has been spent to improve election procedures -- but to the chagrin of many activists here, much more has remained the same.
It wasn't supposed to happen again. This is the refrain you hear up and down the state this year, from elections officials, voting-rights advocates, civil rights experts and ordinary voters fed up with the reputation for electoral clumsiness that Florida has held since 2000. Or, more precisely, the chant goes, It wasn't supposed to happen again -- but it is. Like meteorologists nervously surveying the Gulf Coast during hurricane season, elections experts who've studied procedures in Florida now see a slow-motion disaster approaching the state. The weather here isn't pleasant: You've got partisan and/or incompetent officials, new and controversial voting technology, extremely litigious candidates, a flood of new voters, and an unbearably close race, with 27 electoral votes -- and the presidency -- hanging in the balance.
At the eye of the storm is Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and the chief official responsible for running elections. Hood, a Republican who was mayor of Orlando in the 1990s and whom Gov. Jeb Bush appointed in 2003, has been criticized not only by Democrats but also by independent observers for her exceedingly partisan approach to managing elections. Her critics note that politically, Hood is firmly in George W. Bush's camp; she was a Bush-Cheney elector in 2000. Jimmy Carter has urged Jeb Bush to replace her. The New York Times has called her Katherine Harris II. Hood's critics point to a string of decisions that favor Republicans or, at the very least, undermine voters' confidence in the fairness of Florida elections. Even though Florida law requires a manual recount of ballots in close elections, Hood has issued election rules barring such a count for electronic machines. After a judge ruled in early September that Ralph Nader's name should not appear on the Florida ballot, Hood ordered local officials to add him to absentee ballots anyway (the courts later reinstated Nader).
In matters small and large, on questions over registration procedures or voter identification or interpretations of Florida's abstruse election code, Hood has ruled according to a consistent pattern, her opponents charge -- she's attempted at every turn to keeps voters off the rolls and away from the polls, a gambit that clearly benefits Republicans. Nowhere was this more clear than in her design, this spring, of a list of ex-felons to be "purged" from Florida's voting rolls. Hood, whose office did not respond to numerous inquiries from Salon, initially tried to keep the felon list secret; only after media organizations sued for access to the list and discovered that it was riddled with errors and included a large number of African-Americans and only a handful of Hispanic (read: Republican) felons was she forced to scrap the list.
"I believe that what is occurring in Florida is purposeful," says Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat whose district includes Palm Beach and Broward counties, areas hardest hit by the 2000 fiasco. Hood's maneuvers in the state are not a matter of mere ineptitude, Wexler says. "This isn't one incompetent error -- it's five or six. It's impossible to believe that Jeb Bush is that incompetent. This is a purposeful strategy."
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