Something rotten in the state of Florida

[AnIndependentTexan]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=566688

Pregnant chads, vanishing voters... the election fiasco of 2000 made the Sunshine State a laughing stock. More importantly, it put George Bush in the White House. You'd think they'd want to get it right this time. But no, as Andrew Gumbel discovers, the democratic process is more flawed than ever

Of the many weird and unsettling developments in Florida since the presidential election meltdown four years ago, none is so startling as the fact that Theresa LePore, the calamitously incompetent elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, still has her job. It was LePore who chose the notorious "butterfly ballot" - a format so confusing that it led thousands of Democrats, many of them elderly, retired Jewish people, to punch the wrong hole, giving their vote not to Al Gore, as they had intended, but to the right-wing, explicitly anti-Jewish fringe candidate Pat Buchanan.

LePore's handling of the absentee ballots was controversial from start to finish. Her design for the ballot required voters to fill in a broken arrow linking the name of the office to the candidate - a system widely expected to cause mayhem, which it duly did. She also took the unusual step of having the voter's party affiliation printed on the return envelope, opening the door for mischief by a corrupt poll-worker or mail-carrier. No other county does this.
The 2000 election in Florida represented a huge conflict of interest, as the state Governor, Jeb Bush, was the brother of the Republican presidential nominee, and the person in charge of conducting the election, the Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was doubling as George Bush's campaign co-chair. The conflict has persisted, in one form or another, over the past four years. The Republican Party finds itself in an unusual position in Florida: although voter registration slightly favours the Democrats, the Republicans have managed to engineer the demographics - through the gerrymandering of electoral districts - so that they have a lock on both houses of the state legislature and the Governor's office. They control almost all the machinery of government, including, in large part, the management of elections.

While they may have paid lip service to electoral reform after the 2000 fiasco, clearly their party interest lay in continuing to suppress Democratic votes while maximising the access of their own supporters. The Republicans did all they could to avoid manual re-counts in 2000 because they assumed that the more votes were re-counted in south Florida, the more they would favour Al Gore.

The same principle applies now. The Republicans can only be thrilled that those southern counties have opted for electronic voting machines, without an independent paper trail, because they make meaningful re-counts essentially impossible. There have even been efforts - by the Florida legislature, and by the new Secretary of State, Glenda Hood - to make re-counts on electronic machines illegal. Only the intervention of the courts, relying on a Florida statute calling for the possibility of manual re-counts, has forestalled them - so far.

Glenda Hood has become a particular object of attack in the campaign to hold Florida accountable for its voting practices. Unlike her predecessor, Katherine Harris, who was at least nominally independent because she was elected to the post of Secretary of State, Hood is a direct gubernatorial appointment. In the words of Congressman Wexler, a particularly ardent critic: "She is the political mouthpiece of Jeb Bush, a true partisan using her office to the best possible advantage of the Republican Party. She is the mechanism Jeb and George Bush have employed to do everything in their power to make Florida a Bush state."

More egregiously - certainly in terms of protecting voting rights - Hood tried earlier in the year to revive a statewide purge list of suspected felons and ex-felons, ostensibly to clean up outdated voter rolls. The list, first dreamt up by Sandra Mortham when she was Secretary of State, disproportionately affects black voters, who vote Democrat by a nine-to-one margin. The list was discredited after 2000 because it was found to be riddled with errors, leading to unknown thousands of cases of wrongful disenfranchisement, many of which have not been corrected.

Organisers are finding that at least 20 per cent of people who register to vote through their local Department of Motor Vehicles (the agency that issues driving licences) are not receiving voter cards in the mail. People can still vote without a voter card, but only at the correct polling station. The only sure way of finding out which station to go to - and they change from election to election, as do the addresses of lower-income voters and recent immigrants - is to telephone the county elections department. That line is often busy.

Absentee ballots, meanwhile, are in a class of their own, especially as the Florida legislature - with bipartisan support - recently abolished the last meaningful impediment to absentee fraud by eliminating the requirement for a witness signature on applications. It used to be that witness signatures could be tracked to spot "brokers" - middlemen who signed up dozens or even hundreds of absentee voters. The signatures could be checked by handwriting experts. No longer. "The floodgates are open for absentee-ballot abuse to an unprecedented degree," predicted Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer who once won a case overturning an election in Miami thanks to broker signature-tracking.

The mess that is Florida nevertheless came as a profound shock to a group of international election monitors who toured the state last week. Dr Brigalia Bam, who chairs South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission, was stunned by the patchwork of jurisdictions, rules and anomalies. "Absolutely everything is a violation," she said. "All these different systems in different counties with no accountability... It's like the poorest village in Africa." November could be another agonisingly long month in American politics.