While poorly attended, Election Protection's first of three fraud hearings in Florida with regard to the 2004 presidential selection was nonetheless historic. It began a few minutes late due in part to the a false fire alarm. Fortunately, Orlando City Hall security allowed the session to proceed.
Kudos to the City Beautiful for allowing the centrally located City Hall to be utilized for the event and for the comfortable, albeit poorly lit, Council Chambers to be the room of choice.
As mentioned, the event was sponsored, organized and chaired by Election Protection. Indeed, seated in the middle chair was Reggie Mitchell, an election attorney and senior executive with the Florida branch of People For The American Way, www.pfaw.org
The other panelists were:
Joseph Egan – AFSCME
Marcia Johnson-Blanco – Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights
Myrna Caban – League Of Independent Voters
Mary Peeler – NAACP
Andy Rivera – Advancement Project
and
Nora Pachnik – Florida Consumer Action Network
While the start of the session was delayed by the first of two fire alarms, a full two hours of testimony was given by a total of one dozen witnesses, all of whom were sworn in and recorded by a court stenographer. All witnesses were given great latitude in the time allotted for them to speak but on the average, each witness' statement lasted a maximum of 5 minutes.
I have posted photos from the event on my personal website. You can go there directly by visiting
http://home.earthlink.net/~cmckconsultingI had the best seat in the house for photographing the witnesses but as comfortable as the City Council Chambers were for listening to disenfranchised voters and poll watchers, my camera's flash simply could not compensate fully for the low lighting levels. Despite this failing, I believe that you'll find the photos an enjoyable bunch.
Providing a blow-by-blow accounting of the entire hearing would involve more time than I have available but here are the high points from the testimony of the twelve witnesses and the questions posed to them by the distinguished panel.
1) In Orange County, many voters in precinct 212 received telephone calls in the days leading up to the election from people who purported to be election employees. Those calls told voters that precinct 212 would be closed on election day and that they should report to precinct 214. In fact, precinct 212 was open and the people who believed the calls had to wait in line at 214 only to learn that 212 was open.
It also was noted that many election employees didn't understand how the new provisional balloting system would work. Various voters also left before voting because queues were excessively long.
2) The second witness was Ms. Marie Palmer, a volunteer with the Florida NAACP for more than forty years. She was an observer at Orange County's Mitchell Center, an early voting site, for twelve of the fourteen days when early voting took place. She noted excessively long queues and too few election employees. After the second day of observing long wait times, she asked the election staff on site why additional voting tables and staff were not allotted. The answer she received was that the office of the Orange County Supervisor of Elections did not anticipate a strong turn-out for the election and nothing could be done.
3) The third witness was a volunteer poll watcher in the Buenaventura Lakes area of Osceola County. In addition to noting frustration among voters due to long lines, he perceived a degree of hostility toward him for being there even though the election staff knew about his presence in advance. He noted that he had heard through his volunteer network that other precincts in Osceola County were worse than his and he observed the 50-foot electioneering boundary being moved at least twice while he was there.
4) The first three witnesses provided very moving testimony. However, the fourth might be described as providing the first major high point of the evening. Ms. Marcy Randolph (apologies on any spelling errors – witness name tags were not visible to me) is the member of the staff at Senator Bill Nelson's Orlando office in charge of election issues. She provided a plethora of details. Chief among them was the fact that starting approximately 3 weeks before the election, her office received a string of calls, which ultimately were logged in excess of 180, from voters experiencing difficulties in obtaining their absentee ballots, especially voters from Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties who resided in Germany and the United Kingdom.
A number of overseas voters became so desperate immediately before the election that they tried to arrange to have Senator Nelson's staff send their ballots to them by Federal Express in order to be certain that they would be counted. Ms. Randolph related that some voters even provided her with their credit card number to expedite shipment by Federal Express.
When the volume of phone calls requesting absentee ballots reached a peak, Senator Nelson's office was unable to reach election staff by email or telephone in order to retrieve the ballots and had to visit the county offices in person in order to obtain them.
Lastly, Ms. Randolph mentioned that on election day itself, her office fielded several complaint calls from voters in counties with touch screen voting machines that their votes for Kerry were switched to Bush without their approval. When asked to enumerate the calls, Ms. Randolph indicated that the logs showed 15 calls about touch screen anomalies and 180 problems with absentee ballots.
5) Like the third witness, the fifth was from Osceola County but this time from the community of Celebration, near Disney World. The voter attempted to vote before work. She arrived at 7:30AM, half an hour after the precinct opened and the queue was 30 people deep. She waited a while and noticed many infractions and irregularities. At the top of the list was fact that the Osceola County Sheriff, who was up for reelection, was standing at the entrance to the precinct in full uniform, telling voters to vote for him as they entered. The voter called the Osceola County Supervisor Of Elections office to question why he was inside the 50-foot electioneering boundary and was told that Osceola County had no such law.
(NB, in Florida, the 50-foot electioneering boundary is mandatory for all counties).
Next in the list of infractions was the fact that there was a volunteer with the Republican party distributing a voting guide to people waiting in queue. It advocated a straight-line Republican ticket vote.
After that, the voter reported on the fact that the signage inside the polling station was poorly displayed which lead to confusion and further delays. She ended her testimony with the note that later in the day, she phoned the Osceola County Supervisor Of Elections office again to question the 50-foot limit and was told by a different employee that the county has no such law. In her opinion, being at the precinct that day felt like being in the Stepford Wives.
6) The mainstream media did a fair job of reporting on the lawsuits and problems associated with Florida's felon list so I won't belabor the point here. I'll just add that the next witness was a senior volunteer with Acorn in the Central Florida region who reported on widespread problems, some of them apparently stemming from confusion with regard to the felon lists. She saw with her own eyes and her office received complaints of precincts opening late/closing early, harassment by officers of the Orlando Police Department of her volunteers at early voting sites, rejection of many voters who didn't appear on the rolls, cars of voters towed for exceeding local parking limits of two hours because of excessive queues and voters being turned away because they didn't have their registration card even though they had a state-issued identification card or driver license.
= = = = = = = = = =
In conclusion, while it seemed that Election Protection held the hearing for the most part in order to take sworn testimony from people who had phoned their hotline, the ten or so other people in the audience who were there to listen and learn were gripped by what we heard. Despite having followed the disenfranchisement and fraud stories since early voting began in mid-October, I found that seeing the face and hearing the voice of people who experienced the problems first hand made them all the more real.
For my part, although I did not testify, I was a poll observer on the morning of November 2 at the Smith Center, an Orange County precinct in a low-income minority section of Orlando at the 408 and Westmoreland. While I did not observe any illegal activities, I witnessed several occurrences which fit the description of “irregularity.” I spoke with at least ten voters who had come to this precinct in error, even though its number was displayed in the street. I spoke with one voter who had changed addresses within the same precinct who was told that she had to vote on a provisional ballot because she had not changed the address on her driver license. Most disturbingly, though, I spoke with a voter who was told that she was not registered even though she had voted in the primaries and had not moved or changed her name. What's worse, her adult children, who live with her, were registered.
Election Protection's position on the session was that the testimony would become part of their national report on the problems in 2004 and would aid in their lobbying of state and federal officials to enact another round of election reform, this time making it strong enough to prevent yet another recurrence. My opinion is that their goals are too timid but they still should be commended for conducting these hearings.
Apparently, the BBV.org group will hold similar sessions in Florida in February and March. I will do my best to attend at least one and if I do, I will provide a similar report.
The address once again for the photos is
http://home.earthlink.net/~cmckconsulting
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