BlogWood: Norwood's Fair and Balanced Nattering

State finally isssues guidelines on poll watcher rules

The Tribune sez that voter intimidation and suppressing the vote are longtime traditions in Florida. So, relax - it’s just some boys having fun, is all.

Poll watchers' plans to challenge voter credentials Tuesday may read like some ugly new threat to the democratic process, but at least some historians say it's just business as usual - particularly in Florida.

``Voter intimidation is a tradition in Florida so long- standing that it must date back at least to the 1830s,'' said Cantor Brown Jr., a Florida A&M University history professor.

``Our elections typically have been tumultuous. It's more the rule than the exception.''

The SP Times has a little more helpful take on the whole situation.

Hoping to ease rising concern over voter challenges, state elections officials on Friday released new guidelines for handling such challenges without delaying other voters.

The four-page memo from state Elections Director Dawn Roberts was an attempt to clarify a 109-year-old election law that in recent days has generated widespread anxiety about whether it would be used to deter voters.

The memo emphasizes that voter challenges must be resolved without delaying other voters.

It says that even if a challenge is successful, the voter must be given the option to file a provisional ballot. And it reaffirms that inclusion on a controversial state felon list is not sufficient evidence to sustain a challenge.
......

State law allows each political party and candidate to post a single preapproved poll watcher at each precinct. They must be registered to vote in that county, and they cannot be a candidate or law enforcement officer.

While historically there to gauge voter turnout, this year some are expected to challenge voters.

Under state law, they must do so in a sworn affidavit. Election workers on site are then charged with deciding if the challenge if valid.

Public records show officials in Hillsborough County have approved 806 watchers; Pinellas, 616; Pasco, 120; and Citrus, 77. Hernando numbers were not available. Miami-Dade expects more than 2,325. Jacksonville's Duval has 959 signed up.

Roberts' memo recommended supervisors designate areas in each precinct where a challenge might be resolved, away from the table where other voters are checking in. It also spelled out that the poll watchers' challenge must be substantiated by evidence.

The memo also said that inclusion in the state's flawed felon voter database is not sufficient evidence. Hood discarded the list in July after critics found multiple flaws in the data.

If a challenge is successful, the would-be voter must be offered the chance to cast a provisional ballot, the memo said. That would allow a voter to appeal the precinct workers' decision before the county canvassing board, which reviews all provisional ballots before they can be counted.

Browning said it's naive to believe such guidelines, even if strictly followed, will maintain decorum.

"That sounds good, but you're in a polling place and your right to vote has just been challenged, what are you going to do?" Browning said. "Are you going to sit back while others decide your fate.

"I don't think so," he said. "You're going to get ticked. You may yell and stammer around the place and have your hands in the air and maybe use profanity. That alone is going to be disruptive."

Such concerns prompted Pinellas County Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark, even before Roberts' memo, to add a note at the top of a form that poll watchers will use to file challenges. It notes that it is a third-degree felony to falsely affirm an oath in election matters.

"I just want people to know that if they make this allegation, it's serious," Clark said. "If they willingly make it falsely, it's a felony of the third-degree."

Angry mob of voters turns on Ohio GOP thugs

UPDATE - the party party has a related piece. (RIGHT click and “save link as” or follow the first link to stream.)

BlogWood readers are aware of the GOP challenges to registered voters in Ohio and Florida.

Early details indicated that Repugs were mailing literature to voters in minority precincts and compiling lists of returned mail in order to challenge those voters who were unable to get mail at their registered address. According to the GOP, a returned letter is proof that fraud is taking place.

Now, we learn that in Ohio, and quite possibly elsewhere, the letters the GOP sent were registered mail - the kind you have to accept and sign for. So, if anyone willfully refused a registered letter from the GOP, or if anyone was not home and didn’t bother to trek down to the post office to retrieve said letter, they were put on a challenge list.

In Ohio, the state party had local representatives swear out affidavits to the effect that the voters on the challenge list were not eligible to vote. Thankfully, challenged voters showed up at a recent hearing and raised hell, and this particular strategy may just land some Rethugs in jail where they belong.

When Catherine Herold received mail from the Ohio Republican Party earlier this year, she refused it.

The longtime Barberton Democrat wanted no part of the mailing and figured that by refusing it, the GOP would have to pay the return postage.

What she didn't count on was the returned mail being used to challenge the validity of her voter registration.

Herold,who is assistant to the senior vice president and provost at the University of Akron,was one of 976 Summit County voters whose registrations were challenged last week by local Republicans on behalf of the state party.

She went to the Board of Elections on Thursday morning to defend her right to vote and found herself among an angry mob -- people who had to take time off work to defend their right to vote.

After hearing some of the protests, the board voted unanimously to dismiss all 976 challenges.

The move, ironically, came from Republican board member Joseph Hutchinson and was seconded by Republican Alex Arshinkoff after they determined that the four local Republicans who made the challenges had no evidence to back up their claims.

The group whose right to vote was at stake Thursday was diverse -- old and young, black and white, professional, blue collar, veterans, immigrants, and students -- and many were assisted by volunteer attorneys for the Ohio Voter Protection Coalition.

No further challenge

In addition to dismissing the challenges, the elections board ordered that none of those voters whose registrations were called into question could be challenged again at the polls.

The board was giving each a letter to present at the polls should their registrations be challenged there.

``I'm 62 years old, I've been voting for 40 years.... I think it's appalling. It's scare tactics,'' Herold said after her hearing.

Herold said she moved in January, but changed her address with the board of elections and has voted twice since then -- in the March primary and in the August special election.

But returning the Republican literature landed her on the ``challenged'' list.

Many of the challenged voters -- initially 35,000 statewide -- were targeted because cards sent to them were returned to local boards of election as undeliverable.

Herold was angry when she was notified that her right to vote was being challenged.

``I felt that my voracity was being challenged, that my honor was being challenged. They basically were saying that I lied about where I lived. I resented that.''

The challengers, all older longtime Republicans -- Barbara Miller, Howard Calhoun, Madge Doerler and Louis Wray -- were subpoenaed by the elections board and were present at the hearings. Akron attorney Jack Morrison, a Republican, volunteered to represent the four.

Democratic board member Russ Pry suggested that the four could be subject to criminal prosecution for essentially making false claims on the challenge forms. The form states that making a false claim is subject to prosecution as a fifth-degree felony.

On Morrison's advice, Miller then refused to take part in any hearings after Herold's, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Wray filed a challenge against 25-year-old Barbara Jean DeWilde of Stow, but testified that he had no personal knowledge that DeWilde didn't live at her Stow address, other than information he received from Summit County Republican Party headquarters.

DeWilde called the challenge ``a mockery of America's free election process.''

Immigrant responds

Twinsburg resident Errol Horam's registration was challenged twice.

An immigrant from Jamaica, Horam, 55, said he came to the United States because ``it is the greatest democracy on the face of the earth.''

``I am disappointed in the Republican Party,'' Horam said as he left the hearing room.

``I'm really disappointed that they are trampling on people's rights and democracy and depriving them of their right to vote.''

The angry voters had the Republicans on the defensive.

``Why'd you do it?'' one challenged voter shouted out at Calhoun. ``Who the hell are you?'' the man asked.

``What the hell do you care?'' replied Calhoun, an attorney.
......

Bennett on Thursday defended the GOP's challenge of voter registrations, saying that efforts by Democrats that registered the likes of Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy to vote warranted it. However, he said GOP attorneys -- other than just Morrison -- should have been at the hearing to represent the four party members who signed the challenges.

``I don't know what happened. I'm still looking into that,'' he said.
......

Pry and elections board member Wayne Jones said after the hearing that they intend to contact the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the challenges.

``You don't mess with somebody's right to vote,'' Jones said. He believes the effort to challenge legitimate voters is proof that Republicans are running scared in Ohio.
......

``There was no evidence,'' Hutchinson said of the challenges.

Yeah, like someone’s gonna show up on election day and claim to be Dick Tracy?

Rethugs are panicking, and for good reason. If minority votes are counted, Kerry will easily win. Florida’s looking good, too, with Kerry holding a commanding lead in the Miami area that may be too much for Bush to overcome in the rest of the state.

The Herald poll shows Sen. John Kerry winning Miami-Dade County with 54.3 percent of the vote to 41.5 for Bush. Four percent are undecided.

Splitting those undecided voters down the middle, Kerry goes to 56 percent, Bush to 43 and Ralph Nader will end up with less than 1 percent.

If Kerry wins Miami-Dade County 56 to 43, then the likelihood of him winning Florida is very high. Here's why:

In 2000, Al Gore beat Bush by almost 40,000 votes in Miami-Dade County.

BIG NUMBERS

According to the Herald poll, done by Zogby International, Kerry is positioned to win Miami-Dade by anywhere from 90,000 to 100,000 votes.

A margin that large in Florida's most populous county would be hard for Bush to make up across the rest of the state.

Now I realize if the poll's margin of error were to fall in the president's favor, Kerry would beat Bush, 53 to 46 percent (instead of 56-43). But even then, because of new voters, Kerry would still walk away with 50,000 more votes than Bush.

Before the polls open on Tuesday, Florida turnout is already 20 percent

(via Florida Politics)

OrlandoSentinel

More than 2 million Floridians will have cast their ballots before a single precinct opens at 7 a.m. Tuesday if the early and absentee voting blitz holds its current pace.

That is more than a third of all people who voted in the 2000 presidential election and almost 20 percent of the state's 11.4 million registered voters.

"I've never seen anything like it in the 15 years that I've been here," said Sharon L. Harrington, Lee County supervisor of elections. "Just think what it's going to be like on Election Day if it's like this for early voting."

With five days left to vote before Tuesday, about 1.4 million people already have made their choice.

At least 718,000 had taken advantage of Florida's new early-voting system by Wednesday, according to a survey by the Orlando Sentinel of 64 of the state's 67 counties, including the most populated areas. At that pace, almost 1.1 million people will have cast ballots at early-voting sites by the end of Monday.

In addition, about 1.5 million absentee ballots have been mailed to voters in 63 counties, with more than 707,000 already completed and returned. That number could swell to 1.1 million if roughly three-quarters of the absentee ballots mailed out are returned, as election supervisors expect.

About 700,000 people voted absentee in the 2000 election.

GOP resurrects racist voter purge list

Remember the racist and highly discredited Florida voter purge list? Once it was found to have been stripped of GOP trending Hispanic voters, it was finally dropped by the state. Well, the state backed down and stopped insisting that individual counties use the list to purge their rolls, but the use of the list was not banned - just made voluntary.

Now, state GOP officials are making a big stink over what they say are ineligible ex-felons who have already voted or who have registered and plan to vote. They are threatening to bring in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate what they claim is an emerging case of fraud.

The fraud in this case is being perpetrated by the GOP, however, as they are using the discredited purge list, a list that even Jeb! was forced to acknowledge should not be used, to selectively disenfranchise and intimidate voters who, as a group, tend to vote Democratic.

Even if the list is not used to openly challenge potential voters, the notion that the FDLE might be involved in investigating voting is chilling to many. However, the plan seems to be to use this list to challenge voters at the polls, thus gumming up the works, since in Florida, a single challenge, even a spurious one, can bring precinct operations to a screeching halt, thus increasing lines and frustration, and causing many voters to give up and leave.

Here’s the SP Times.

The Florida Republican Party said Thursday that more than 900 felons already have voted illegally or requested absentee ballots, triggering another controversy over the party's aggressive efforts to identify Floridians who might be unqualified to vote.

Using two controversial and flawed state databases, Republicans also said they identified an additional 13,568 felons expected to vote by Election Day, based on their participation in the 2000 or 2002 elections or their recent registration as a new voter.

The list of 921 felons who have already voted includes 65 names from Hillsborough County; 36 from Pinellas County; 11 from Hernando; three from Citrus; and one from Pasco. The party plans to give all its information to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation.

"We believe this is simply the tip of the iceberg and there could be potentially additional felons who have registered," said Mindy Tucker Fletcher, spokesman for the Florida Republican Party.

But within hours of the Republicans' announcement came indications that the GOP list may suffer some of the same problems that caused Secretary of State Glenda Hood to scrap her controversial list of 47,763 suspected felon voters in July.

Reporters for the St. Petersburg Times quickly found two Tampa Bay area individuals on the GOP list who say they have had their voting rights restored.

Records show Neal D. Bolinger, 57, of St. Petersburg had his rights restored in 1974, two years after his conviction for grand larceny, and has been voting ever since.

He used an absentee ballot last week to vote straight Republican.

It's the second time in four years his name has been flagged. He had to convince Pinellas County election officials in 2000 that he was qualified.

"If every four years I come up on the list and have to have myself reinstated, that will become a problem, and I'll have to start shaking some trees," he said.

Tampa resident Jeffrey Arnold, 44, said he received his clemency more than a dozen years ago and has been voting ever since. The exact status of Arnold and others could not be confirmed Thursday by the Times.

Fletcher acknowledges the GOP's list started with flawed data.

Besides the state's controversial felon voting list, it relied on a Florida Parole Commission clemency list, updated through Oct.14, that has proven inaccurate in the past because it does not include many felons whose rights were restored under Gov. Reubin Askew in the 1970s.

"We felt it was important to see if supervisors (of elections) had done their jobs and cleaned their list when some admitted they hadn't," Fletcher said. "We wanted to see if the law was being broken across the state systematically."

But some supervisors countered that the list came from the same database Hood had ordered them not to use.

"Why would they use a list that is determined to have errors?" asked Pinellas supervisor Deborah Clark. "If their real objective is to keep ineligible voters from casting ballots, why didn't they give the list to supervisor of elections right away? No one from the Republican Party has contacted me."

Hillsborough Supervisor Buddy Johnson sounded a similar theme.

"I don't have the same information," he said. "I'm not removing anyone off any voter list until I have ascertained that they are in fact a felon."

(ed. note - this is Jeb!’s “Buddy,” having been appointed by the Gov., and if Buddy sees flaws in these methods, then they are seriously wrong.)

Democrats and civil rights advocates charged that Thursday's announcement was a Republican maneuver aimed at suppressing Tuesday's vote and Sen. John Kerry's odds at winning Florida's 27 electoral votes.

The mere threat of an FDLE investigation into questionable cases could chill turnout among qualified voters, they contend.

"This is just one more attempt to intimidate, harass and disenfranchise voters," Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox said.

The potential impact of the Republican effort is unclear, since there is no mechanism before Election Day to challenge votes that have been cast.

"You can't take a vote back out of the box," said Florida Deputy Secretary of State Alia Faraj.

But the state GOP has not ruled out using the information on the remaining 13,568 suspected felons to challenge voters at the polls on Election Day, Fletcher said.

Working undercover for the man

A writer for Rolling Stone decided it might be fun to volunteer for the Bush campaign in Orlando. He was a dedicated worker, and probably helped Dubya gain a few votes, but I doubt the Bush campaign is very happy about this article.

In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.

Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

He went on.

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.

In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn't vote. He didn't make any promises.

In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I'd had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our "black volunteers."

"Penny" got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.

As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with "Penny," he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. "Wherever they need me," he said, "that's where I be rolling to." Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.

We scheduled it, but "Penny" never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.

Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: "My dad was a drinker," he said. "He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked -- she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school.... "

"Gee," mumbled Ben. "I can't imagine the strength.... I'd like to meet her."

"I know what it's like to have a parent who'll put a belt on my butt," Lorin continued.

Nervous silence. Nods.

A few minutes later, "Penny" called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don's school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, "You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us."

Lorin laughed uncomfortably. "We were OK," he said. "We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball."

Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn't, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.

"Oh, come on," he said jokingly. "I know how you people don't like to work." Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. "We don't like to work?" he said. "That's all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good."

The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.

"Good old Lorin," he said, going back to his office.

Poll says: If blacks vote, Bush loses

The GOP is blatantly attempting to suppress the minority vote in Florida and other battleground states. Their strategy seems to boil down to gumming up the works on election day in minority precincts - slowing the process to a crawl so that less people are willing or able to vote.

Blatant cheating implies desperation, which is confirmed by a new Republican poll.

.Hmmm. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio has just finished a survey of 12 battleground states and finds Bush and Kerry tied with 47% of the vote apiece. But when he weights for minority turnout based on the 2000 exit polls, Kerry is ahead 49.2%-45.7%. And when he further updates the weighting to take into account the most recent census results, Kerry is ahead 49.9%-44.7%.

As Fabrizio blandly puts it, "It is clear that minority turnout is a wildcard in this race and represents a huge upside for Sen. Kerry and a considerable challenge for the President's campaign." More accurately, if Fabrizio is right “ that Kerry is ahead by 5% overall in the battleground states” Kerry is a sure winner on November 2.

Original press release (pdf) is here.

What this poll is saying is that if minorities turn out in the same percentages (or greater) than they did in 2000, there is no way that Bush can win. It wont even be close - unless the GOP can cheat their way past a 5 point margin of victory.

Protect the rights of voters: volunteer NOW.

The 9 most important reasons to vote for Kerry

Bob Harris

UPDATE: Salon reports that, despite most media accounts, Rehnquist may be gravely ill:

Numerous medical studies only mention tracheotomy -- in which surgeons cut a hole into a patient's windpipe to aid breathing -- as a treatment for a rare form of thyroid cancer called anaplastic carcinoma. According to the University of Virginia Health Center, "anaplastic carcinoma is an extremely serious and aggressive thyroid cancer which often results in the death of the patient … within several months of diagnosis."

And from the Los Angeles Times:
The most dangerous form is anaplastic... "one of the most malignant types of cancer known to humans," said Dr. Yuri Nikiforov, a pathologist and thyroid expert at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine... Fatality rates top 95 percent in the first year after diagnosis...

A tracheotomy indicates that the tumor threatened to obstruct Rehnquist's windpipe, and that the tumor is fast-growing, according to several outside thyroid specialists. "At his age, having had a tracheotomy, the first thing that comes to mind is... anaplastic thyroid cancer," said Dr. Peter Singer, chief of clinical endocrinology at USC's Keck School of Medicine.

Make no mistake: we are likely about to decide the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation.

GOP poll watchers to intimidate FL voters

Florida and Ohio are running neck and neck in the vote suppression game. Both states have actively sought to disqualify thousands of new registrations on flimsy grounds. Florida was just given the OK to do so by a judge.

We’ve recently heard of GOP plans to pay “volunteers” $100 each to intimidate voters in Ohio, and now we have confirmation that similar tactics will be employed in Florida.

The GOP cries “fraud,” and holds up what they say are false addresses and funny names from registration lists, but they have already been caught playing illegal games with voter registrations, so I think it’s highly likely that they may have created many faulty registrations themselves. This serves to gum up the process as well as giving them the “proof” that they need to justify their intimidating tactics.

They plan to put “Poll Watchers” in certain precincts (I have no doubt that, coincidentally, most precincts staffed with GOP watchers will be in poor and minority neighborhoods.) to challenge certain voters. Now, the way the system works in Florida, just one or two challenges, even if they are without merit, can shut down the entire precinct, as each poorly trained poll worker must weigh in with an opinion as the whether or not the challenged voter should be allowed to cast a ballot.

Working people will not have time to wait in line forever. They will get discouraged, or just have to get back to work, and they will leave the line. Every lost vote is a small victory for the GOP.

Election Protection Volunteer provides on way that you may be able to help.

TBO.com.

The Republican Party said Tuesday that it may equip its Florida poll watchers with lists of voters whose registrations appear fraudulent, then use a little- known section of state law to try blocking them from voting as they arrive at the polls.

Democrats quickly denounced the unprecedented tactic but did not rule out the possibility that they, too, may file eligibility challenges next week.

With both sides amassing armies of lawyers, the prospect of the fight working its way into neighborhood polling stations is frightening county elections supervisors because the arcane procedure is so unwieldy it could shut down entire stations each time it is exercised.
......

(Florida Republican Party adviser Mindy) Tucker Fletcher would not identify which voters the Republicans believe have fraudulently registered to vote, but in comments this week she specifically complained of felons and voters with false addresses on the voting rolls.

The Republicans have compiled a list of voters that likely provided faulty addresses.

Tucker Fletcher said the party conducted widespread mailings to newly registered voters of all parties and created a database of the name and address on mailings that were returned by the post office. She would not say whether that list would be used in any potential challenges at the polls of voting rights.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Tuesday that it had obtained a portion of that database, which lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville.

Tucker Fletcher said the partial list obtained by the BBC ``is not going to be used in any way to challenge voters.''

Uh, would that denial have anything to do with the fact that the Jacksonville list may well be illegal, since it looks to have been compiled using race as a factor?

(back to the TBO.com article)

Under the state's challenging provision, observers must file an affidavit detailing their cause for suspicion. The voter then is notified and asked to fill out an affidavit of his own.

Browning said, ``At this point, that voter is going to be incredibly, incredibly ticked off.''

Voting in the entire polling place is then suspended as all poll workers present are required to convene to take a vote on whether the voter should be allowed to cast a ballot. Majority rules.

If a majority of poll workers - who have received no more than 20 minutes of training on the procedure - decide the voter should not vote, a provisional ballot is provided to the voter that will be sealed in a secrecy envelope and considered by the county's canvassing board in the days after the election.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said he had never encountered a challenge in 16 years. Browning said he had encountered a challenge only once in his 24- year career.

Matt Miller, a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, said, ``All the Republicans are able to talk about are, No. 1, scare voters from the polls and, No. 2, raise questions about the election.''

Repugs lay groundwork for spurious claims of fraud

TAPPED expresses almost exactly the thoughts I was having this morning, thus saving me the trouble of actually having to write anything.

First, the GOP, using what appear to qualify as illegal methods, has attempted to mislead thousands of Democratic-leaning voters in Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, into thinking they'd be registered but are not. (And Ed Gillespie, whose own outfit is funding these efforts via Sproul & Associates and God knows what other firms and consultants, is alleging Democratic fraud in precisely those states! Black is white. Up is down.) Consequently, those thousands of people are going to show up at polls and probably run into a lot of confusion and paperwork and problems. At the same time, Republican secretaries of state and election officials in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere are pushing interpretations of election statutes that further muddy the waters for those who do get to vote.

Having done as much as possible to create the conditions for a confusing election, the GOP is getting ready to cast the inevitable results of that confusion -- people turning up in the wrong precincts, people who've moved from the neighborhood they originally registered and are trying to vote wherever they live now, and so forth -- as symptoms of outright election fraud. On Election Day, the GOP will challenge as many votes as they can at the polls, on whatever pretext is handy. They've already said they will. And then, if they're behind at the end of the day, GOP officials will start alleging massive voter fraud in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere, whatever the facts on the ground are.

14,000 new voters disenfranchised

Remember the flap about the superfluous “citizenship checkbox on Florida voter registration forms? Basically, the state says that a new voter must both sign a pledge that affirms citizenship and check the little box on a different part of the form.

The state wanted to disqualify thousands of new voter registration forms (in the name of combating fraud). A judge just ruled the state can go ahead and throw out these new registrations.

Funny how Repugs deride that bureaucracy thing, except when they embrace it.Ruling allows Florida to reject incomplete voter registrations

Florida election officials will not be required to process incomplete voter registration forms for the presidential election, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King said the three prospective voters for whom the lawsuit was filed did not have the legal standing to pursue the case, which was backed by the AFL-CIO.

But he gave the union a chance to file a new version of the lawsuit next month with people who meet the standard.

That leaves the AFL-CIO and the Advancement Project, a social action group, on the losing side of an attempt to force election officials to accept incomplete registration forms before the Nov. 2 election.

The forms were from people who signed to affirm their eligibility, but failed to provide an identification number, such as from a driver's license or a Social Security card, or check boxes affirming their citizenship, mental capacity and felony status.

Applicants filling out registration cards are required to sign a form, affirming that they meet eligibility requirements, but applicants must also check separate boxes on the form.

Attorneys with the Washington-based Advancement Project said the plaintiffs would file an appeal by Friday. The group argued that the rejections disqualified more than 14,000 people across the state, with a disparate effect on minorities. Nearly 45 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks.

Broward: 1,000's of ballots missing

Local10.com - Vote 2004 - Local 10 Uncovers Big Ballot Mystery

Local 10 has received many phone calls from viewers in Broward County who say they have not received the absentee ballots –- and the news from the elections office doesn't sound good.

Local 10 has learned that many as many as 58,000 ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and 8 could be missing.

The Broward County Supervisor of Elections office is saying only that the situation is "unusual," and they are looking into it.

Gisela Salas, Broward Deputy Elections Supervisor, said, "I hate to say 'missing' at this time because that has not yet be substantiated. Some ballots are starting to arrive. But there is an extraordinary delay."

An elections office representative told Local 10 that the office has investigated with the U.S. Post Office what might have happened to the ballots, but so far, no one has been able to figure it out.

"It is unusual. It's a puzzle on the part of our office and the postal service," Salas said. "Our office did make the delivery and the post office assures us they were processed. What happened is in question."

The postal service told Local 10 late Tuesday that they don't have 58,000 ballots floating around. They did say that they have several employees assigned to deal only with ballots and they are being delivered in one to two days -- once they get them.

How Will You Vote?

As far as the voters go that haven't received their ballots, the elections office is now suggesting that they take the opportunity to vote early.

Since many who request absentee ballots cannot physically vote in their county, there are likely to be some angry voters.

Repugs target black Jax

Palast has the story.

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Election supervisor Ion Sancho believes some voters are being intimidated
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

Mass challenges

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

Republican state campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher
A Republican spokeswoman did not deny that voters would be challenged at polling stations
In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney, Ralph Neas, noted that US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of black residents.

Get Up with MorningWood

UPDATE - The results are in, and the winner is None of the above with black ink. Thanks for voting!

HELP ME VOTE: Call 813 239 - WOOD or leave a comment. (The polls have closed!)

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Marathon

Marathon was a big success. THANK YOU for your continuing support of MorningWood and WMNF!

Blogging on the radio

Help Me Vote!

I’ll be filling out my Hillsborough County Absentee Ballot right on the air this morning. I have yet to decide if I should follow the instructions on the ballot itself and use only a number 2 pencil, or pay attention to the insert that mentions nothing about a pencil, but happily suggests that a pen will do just fine.

Also, there are a few races in which I’ve yet to make a choice. Help me vote by calling in (813 239 - WOOD) or leaving a comment on this post (Scroll to the end of the post to leave a comment. When asked for an email address, make one up if you don’t feel like leaving your real one.)

At the end of the show, I’ll tally up the votes and pencil (or pen) in a vote for the candidate that you pick for me, using the method that you prefer. Really.

Of course, there’s a catch: to simplify matters immensely, I’m only including the Hillsborough County Commission race between the Zel Miller Democrat /moral crusader Bob Buckhorn and the equally stomach turning pro-development Repug and former Killer Bee Brian Blair.

Honestly, I can’t bring myself to vote for Bob, but voting for Brian could conceivably be even worse. I wish we had a real choice in this race, but we don’t. So it’s up to you: Bob Buckhorn, Brian Blair, or None of the Above?

As well as the choice for County Commission, please vote for your favored method for filling in the absentee ballot: Number 2 Pencil, Blue Ink, or Black Ink.

The “winner” will be announced just before 6:00, and I will mail my absentee ballot this morning after my show. It should be in Buddy Johnson’s office by tomorrow, and lost behind a file cabinet before lunch.

In other news...

Halloween is almost here. I’ll play some themed songs for the occasion, and I’ll shamelessly use those cuts to segue into a “Wolf” theme that will persist throughout the morning. Oh, and I’ll play some entirely unrelated stuff just ‘cause I feel like it. Or maybe there’s some logic to my choices. Check the playlists (below) and decide for yourself.

Why wolves? Well, they’re scary, except when they look like harmless puppies on an overly dramatic and unintentionally funny campaign ad... (to view the video, click on the image from the “Latest Video” and then pick the “Wolves” video. Sorry - no direct link.)

And in the spirit of fairness and balance, a few words from the wolves:

We are not Terrorists! George W. Bush incorrectly labelled my wolfpack as a terrorist threat. We are NOT terrorists. We do not associate with terrorists (unless you count that pesky wolverine) and FRANKLY, we don't even like terrorists!

We are a peaceful pack of wolves. All we want in life is:

Live in tree-filled forests.

Drink clean water from our rivers and streams.

Breathe fresh and clean air.

We were tricked by George W. Bush

Anyway, wolves will be featured prominently throughout MorningWood today.

New Underwrithing?

Well, as those of you who pledged during marathon already know, we’ve gotta pay the bills ‘round here, and during marathon, MorningWood picked up a new underwriter, but I think there may have been a mistake - perhaps this outfit thinks that WMNF is one of those Christian right non-commercial stations, ‘cause the demographic they seem to be aiming for in this underwrithing announcement might be just a little bit more conservative than most MorningWood listeners. But maybe I’m being hasty. Here: decide for yourself - will this group be satisfied by MorningWood? (Warning - Links in this paragraph NOT work friendly!)

Goodies:

Well, one, anyway. Hymn Against Empire, the MP3 I plan to have played right after the 5:00 NPR headlines, the poem put to the music of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Actually, the link is to the author’s sight. Go and grab the MP3 or video or whatever you want. (Link via skippy the bush kangaroo)

Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

WMNF Community Radio

WMNF is a non-commercial community radio station that celebrates local cultural diversity and is committed to equality, peace and social and economic justice. WMNF provides broadcasts and creates other forums to serve the community by the exposure and sharing of these values.

BlogWood Blogged

BlogWood Headquarters is located on a major downtown artery, thus making it the perfect location for actions such as this one. Still, despite the logic of the choice, I am honored to have been chosen, or at least to occupy a building that was chosen, for this little bit of free speechifying.

(Note - the Kerry sign was hung by authorized BlogWood volunteers and has been up for a few weeks. The Freeway Blogging sign mysteriously appeared and was discovered just this morning.)

CodePink

FREEWAYBLOGGER.com

BlogWood Ballot

Here, at last, are the official BlogWood endorsements for President and everything else. Clicking this link will open a pdf file with a sample Hillsborough County Ballot that you can print and take to the polls. (Includes amendments. For a more detailed, amendment only endorsemtent cheat sheet, click here.)

Note - several races have no endorsement.

Hillsborough County Sample Ballot with Endorsements

Vote soon!

Orlando freezes over

The Orlando Sentinel may be even more conservative than the Tampa Tribune, so this endorsement was surprising, to say the least. Expect more jeers and whining form “conservatives” who aren’t intellectually honest enough to admit that there man is a failure as a conservative and a failure as a leader.

OrlandoSentinel.com: Opinion

Four years ago, the Orlando Sentinel endorsed Republican George W. Bush for president based on our trust in him to unite America. We expected him to forge bipartisan solutions to problems while keeping this nation secure and fiscally sound.

This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations. We turn now to his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, with the belief that he is more likely to meet the hopes we once held for Mr. Bush.

Our choice was not dictated by partisanship. Already this election season, the Sentinel has endorsed Republican Mel Martinez for the U.S. Senate and four U.S. House Republicans. In 2002, we backed Republican Gov. Jeb Bush for re-election, repeating our endorsement of four years earlier. Indeed, it has been 40 years since the Sentinel endorsed a Democrat -- Lyndon Johnson -- for president.

But we cannot forget what we wrote in endorsing Mr. Bush in 2000: "The nation needs a leader who can bring people together, who can stand firm on principle but knows the art of compromise." Four years later, Mr. Bush presides over a bitterly divided Congress and nation. The unity following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- the president's finest hour -- is a memory now. Mr. Bush's inflexibility has deepened the divide.

Four years ago, we expressed confidence that Mr. Bush would replace the Clinton-Gore approach of frequent military intervention for one of selective involvement "using strict tests to evaluate U.S. national interests." To the president's credit, the war in Afghanistan met those tests. But today, U.S. forces also are fighting and dying in a war of choice in Iraq -- one that was launched to disarm a dictator who did not have weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea have worsened.

Before the Iraq war, Mr. Bush brushed aside dissenting views -- some within his own government -- about Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. And because the president failed to round up more international support, more than 80 percent of the coalition forces in Iraq are American troops, and the United States is spending $1 billion a week on the conflict.

Four years ago, we also called on Mr. Bush to pay down the nation's multitrillion-dollar debt before cutting taxes or increasing spending. Yet since then, he has pushed through massive tax cuts, and the national debt has risen from $5.8 trillion to $7.4 trillion. Discretionary spending -- not including defense and homeland security -- has risen 16 percent over three years. The president has not vetoed a single spending bill.

Mr. Bush has been unwilling to reconsider any of his tax cuts, even as the rationale for them -- a huge budget surplus -- has vanished, and the country has gone to war. Other presidents have raised taxes to pay for wars; Mr. Bush is borrowing the money, leaving the bill for future generations.

Four years ago, we called it a "disgrace" that 43 million Americans lacked health insurance. That number has risen under Mr. Bush to 45 million. Yet the plan he now touts on the campaign trail would reduce the ranks of the uninsured by less than 20 percent, and he has not offered a way to pay for it.

Mr. Bush has been a disappointment in other crucial areas. He has weakened environmental protections, pushed an energy policy that would perpetuate America's oil dependence and given up on free-market agricultural reforms that could jump-start trade talks.

Indeed, Mr. Bush has abandoned the core values we thought we shared with him -- keeping the nation strong while ensuring that its government is limited, accountable and fiscally responsible.

We trust Mr. Kerry not to make the mistakes Mr. Bush has.

Mr. Kerry's two decades of experience in the U.S. Senate have given him a solid grounding in both foreign and domestic policy. There is no disputing his liberal record representing Massachusetts, but we believe he has moved to the middle. In this campaign, he has put forth a moderate platform with fiscal discipline at its core.

Despite his differences with Mr. Bush over the wisdom of the war, Mr. Kerry recognizes the imperative of securing and stabilizing Iraq. He would intensify efforts to enlist more foreign help, and speed up training of Iraqi forces and reconstruction in the country.

Mr. Kerry would bolster national security by adding 40,000 troops to the overstretched U.S. military, and doubling its special forces. He would accelerate the program that secures nuclear material in the former Soviet Union before it can fall into the hands of terrorists.

Mr. Kerry would enhance homeland security by doing more to protect ports and other vulnerable facilities. Unlike Mr. Bush, he understands that government accountability and civil liberties must not be needlessly compromised in the name of the war on terrorism.

Mr. Kerry's health plan would extend coverage to 27 million Americans, more than three times as many as Mr. Bush's plan. Contrary to what the president has been saying on the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry's plan would be voluntary, and include private-sector options for coverage.

Also to Mr. Kerry's credit, he has pledged to strengthen environmental protections. His energy plan would do far more to promote conservation and alternative fuels.

Mr. Kerry proposes to pay for all of his plans, primarily by repealing tax cuts for Americans earning more than $200,000. He has not called for tax increases on middle-income Americans.

Mr. Kerry has committed himself to reinstating pay-as-you-go rules that helped turn deficits into surpluses during the 1990s. Such rules would force him to scale back his plans if he can't pay for them.

In sum, we believe Mr. Kerry would be a more bipartisan and effective leader than Mr. Bush. In the Nov. 2 general election, the Sentinel endorses John Kerry for president of the United States.

GOP hates democracy

Most people would consider thousands of newly registered voters coming to the polls to be a sign of a healthy democracy at work. The GOP calls it “fraud.”

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.

Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.

Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.

Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.

The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than Republicans from large turnouts, said they had registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible ones.

Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.
......

"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''

......

The preparations for widespread challenging this year have alarmed some election officials.

"This creates chaos and confusion in the polling site," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, an international association of election officials. But, he said, "most courts say it's permissible by state law and therefore can't be denied."
......

The parties are also preparing to battle over voter qualifications in Florida, where they had until last Tuesday to register challengers. In Fort Myers, Republicans named 100 watchers for the county's 171 precincts, up from 60 in 2000. But Democrats registered 300 watchers in the county, a sixfold increase.

Stupid Repug Tricks

Pasco: Election chief warns of absentee scam

Pasco elections officials have a warning for the county's absentee voters: Don't give your ballot to a stranger claiming to be from the elections office.

They're not who they say they are.

"The people who are soliciting your ballots in this manner are not elections officials," Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning warned Thursday.

The warning came after a phone call from a west Pasco woman. Other Florida counties have gotten similar complaints.

"We've had a bunch of them - 100 at least," said Bob Sweat, elections supervisor for Manatee County. "It's probably going on all over the state of Florida."

MacKenna calls for Buddy's resignation

In a press conference today, Rob MacKenna, the Democratic candidate for Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections (SOE), responded to new “lost vote” revelations by calling for Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson to resign.

It’s too bad that as the challenger in this election, Rob’s call for Buddy’s resignation will be seen as little more than a campaign stunt, because Buddy really needs to go. Judging by his performance since being appointed last year, Buddy is either a complete partisan hack, or he lacks the skills to run an election. OK - to be fair, I guess it doesn’t have to be either/or - it’s very possible that Buddy is an incompetent partisan hack.

The latest revelations from the SOE’s office have to do with the 245 “lost” votes from the primary election. Buddy has been downplaying the significance of this error, and is quick to blame human error for causing the computer to eat all those votes.

Today, published reports revealed that Buddy’s office was aware of the missing votes immediately following the election, but they did not notify Buddy, and Buddy did not notify the Secretary of State until well after the deadline for certifying the counts.

Responding to Rob MacKenna’s call for his resignation Buddy said today that this situation arose form the “most improbable of circumstances... end of story.”

MacKenna says that serious questions need to be asked, and he feels that Buddy’s excuses are “incredulous.”

Buddy blames Dan Nolan, his lame duck chief of staff, and a man whom Buddy was praising effusively in a published story just last week.

Nolan said Wednesday he would leave his $85,000-a-year position "as soon as the job is done here," which he defined as the date the general election vote is tabulated. He said he has no job offer on the table but expects to parlay his experience as a motivational speaker into something in the area of executive training and development.

Johnson offered only praise for Nolan and said he would seek a replacement by looking to other qualified military officers with experience at MacDill Air Force Base.

The same article struggles to find praiseworthy examples of Nolan’s job performance. It seems that his bigggest accomplishment was calling in a repair man.

In July, just a few weeks before the primary, elections officials discovered that the tabulation software refused to read ballots. No one could figure out why.

"I'm getting to the very nervous stage," Nolan wrote in an e-mail to an executive at Sequoia Voting Systems, manufacturer of the county's $13-million touch screen voting machines. "We don't seem to be getting anywhere."

Nolan demanded that Sequoia dispatch a technical troubleshooter. A $75-an-hour technician arrived a short time later and fixed the problem.

Pretty impressive, eh? He can use email and everything!

None of this bodes well for the ongoing election. Early voting has commenced, and serious questions remain as to whether Buddy is ready to handle the crush of voters, including thousands of newly registered first timers, that is inevitable on November 2.

Vote for Rob MacKenna for Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections.

Running for election, supervisor hides missing ballots

Tampa’s election chief Buddy Johnson seems more concerned with his own election than with performing his job. Appointed by Jeb! to serve out the term of Pam Iorio, Tampa’s new mayor, Buddy has repeatedly dropped the ball this election year.

The latest revelation stems from the primary election incident in which Buddy lost 245 votes from a single precinct, disenfranchising those unlucky voters.

That’s bad enough, but it now turns out that his office was well aware of the problem and covered it up, allowing incorrect vote totals to be certified by the state, thus nullifying any remedy.

Then, taking a cue from the handbook of W, Buddy waited until a Friday afternoon to notify the press of the problem. Oh, and he lied to the County Commission.

One Hillsborough County Commissioner calls these actions “malfeasance.” “Criminal” might be a better word. “Incompetence” is too kind.

On Sept. 3, one day after the Hillsborough County Canvassing Board met and certified the results of the primary election, Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson's staff made a startling discovery.

Their records seemed to show that 245 voters had cast ballots the elections office couldn't find.

Those 245 votes were significant. They had the potential to change the outcome of at least one race: In the Republican primary for the District 47 seat in the Florida House of Representatives, Bill Bunkley had lost to Kevin Ambler by just 130 votes.

Yet Johnson's staff told no one outside the elections office about the 245 vote discrepancy, according to an internal report obtained by the St. Petersburg Times that details the investigation into the lost votes.

Hillsborough elections officials notified neither the county attorney's office, the canvassing board, the state division of elections nor any primary candidates that 245 votes were unaccounted for. In fact, while the investigation into the missing votes dragged on for 13 days, the elections staff did not even tell Johnson about it.

Johnson, who was appointed elections chief last year when Pam Iorio quit to run for Tampa mayor, was not told of the discrepancy until Sept. 16, according to the internal report.

By then, the 10-day period for a candidate to challenge the result of the election had expired. That statutory clock began ticking after the canvassing board certified the election results as official. The challenge period ran out Sept. 13, three days before Johnson was even made aware of the problem.

"That's awful," Hillsborough County Commissioner Pat Frank said when told about the handling of the missing votes. "It's malfeasance.
......

"It's really serious," Frank said. "And Buddy is responsible for what goes on."

Thursday, Johnson agreed he should have known about the problem. A three-term GOP legislator who is himself up for election against Democrat and computer programmer Rob MacKenna, Johnson said he had "a most unpleasant conversation" with his staff when he was finally told of the vote discrepancy.

"Do I wish my staff would have made me aware? In hindsight, yes," Johnson, 52, told the Times. "If I had known earlier, I would have acted sooner. ... I'm not clairvoyant."
......

Johnson's chief of staff, Dan Nolan, oversaw the investigation.

Nolan, 50, is a former Army colonel with U.S. Central Command who joined the elections staff shortly after Johnson was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush. He said Thursday that initially he was convinced that the 245-vote discrepancy was an administrative paperwork error that would be quickly resolved. In retrospect, he should have treated the problem with "a greater sense of urgency" and informed Johnson and others about it, Nolan said.

"I screwed this up," said Nolan, who signed on with Johnson for a limited tour of duty and expects to leave some time after the general election. "The responsibility is mine. There is no excuse."

According to his internal report, Nolan began his inquiry Sept. 3 when absentee manager Sharon Smith notified him that the office showed 26,935 certificates signed by early and absentee voters, but just 26,690 early and absentee votes cast - a difference of 245.
......

Johnson first learned of the situation from Nolan on Sept. 16. That same day, Johnson composed and forwarded a letter to Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees the state's Division of Elections.

Johnson wrote that the 245 votes were lost because of "human error by a veteran election staffer in setup and implementation" of an early voting machine. He also said it did not appear the votes could be counted in Hillsborough's final election results because they had been found after certification.

He was right. For purposes of official results, the votes made by 245 voters who went to the West Gate Library were wiped out.

Johnson waited 24 hours before notifying the media. In an e-mail to news outlets at about 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 17, Johnson said he was "extremely disappointed that this error has occurred." He emphasized that the lost votes did not change the outcome of any election and promised additional management safeguards.

Johnson provided no background about when his staff had begun looking into the discrepancy, and made no mention of being kept in the dark himself for 13 days while his staff hunted down the missing votes.

Three weeks after notifying the state of the lost votes, the County Commission called Johnson to account for the oversight that excluded the votes of 245 residents. Commissioner Kathy Castor, whose district includes the West Gate Library early voting site, asked Johnson to appear and provide assurances the episode would never be repeated.

Johnson gave those assurances and boasted of his office's handling of the problem.

"I'm proud of my staff," he told the commission on Oct. 6, according to a transcript. "I'm proud of myself in the immediate release of the information, and we did release all of this information immediately.

"This happened a month ago, and we have not withheld, we have not done anything to disguise this, this issue in the least. I'm very proud of that transparency."

Told Thursday of the office's internal report, Castor said, "That's different from the statements (Johnson) made at the County Commission."

Castor said it helped explain "the overwhelming resistance" she encountered in getting Johnson to provide a full accounting of the lost votes to commissioners.

"He sure did not want to appear before us," she said. "He practically begged not to come."

Minimum Wage Rally

Thursday in Tampa, you can join a rally in support of Amendment 5, the November ballot initiative that will raise the state's minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 per hour. Here are the details:

Rally for Amendment 5, with workers, students, and elected officials including State Senators Tony Hill and Les Miller, and Representative Bob Henriquez

Thursday, October 21, 11:45 a.m.
Hillsborough County Center Building
601 East Kennedy Blvd. Tampa

More Florida registration tricks

These days, people move around a lot, especially younger folks and those who have not settled in to a long term employment position. So, you move, you fill out a few forms to update your address, and you’re done, right?

Uh, no, at least as far a voter registration is concerned. See. despite the fact that
this form is easily found and advertised as all you need to change your address with Hillsborough’s Supervisor of Elections, there is a minor problem: it can only be used by people who are already registered to vote in Hillsborough County.

In other words, if you moved from, say, neighboring Pinellas County, and filled out this form and mailed it in, you would be out of luck. You would not be registered within Hillsborough County, and Hillsborough authorities might just notify Pinellas that you moved, thus rendering your previous registration invalid.

This happened to a friend of mine. He dutifully filled out the COA form and mailed it in well before the registration deadline. A few days ago, having received neither confirmation nor any other communication from voting officials, my friend called Hillsborough SOE Buddy Johnson’s office and was given the bad news.

Luckily, Pinellas has not yet purged him from their rolls, and he is still maintaining a residence in Pinellas, so, legally and morally and practically, he’s probably good to go, but he’s lucky. He found out before election day that he had a problem, and he has the time and other means necessary to go back to his old county’s polling place and vote.

Why is it so difficult to register and maintain one’s status? Why is a form which is made widely available online have absolutely no warning that one must have moved only within the county in order to use the form? Why didn’t the SOE office contact this voter and inform him that the wrong form had been used?

Were these policies put in place in the name of combating fraud, or in order to maintain the integrity of the election?

Note - a provisional ballot would not have helped in this situation, since it would doubtlessly be thrown out as soon as the SOE determined that the voter was not registered in Hillsborough County.

Repugs fight "fraud" by disenfranchising new voters

Remember: in GOP circles, “fraud” and “integrity” are the words used to argue against allowing people to vote: the GOP never “suppresses” the vote, they just fight “fraud” and look out for the “integrity” of the election.

They’re starting early this year.

The Republican Party of Florida on Tuesday asked to intervene in a lawsuit that seeks to force the state to accept voter registration forms on which voters signed an oath that they are United States citizens but failed to check off a small box confirming that fact.

The suit, filed in Miami by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Florida Legal Services, says Secretary of State Glenda Hood's decision not to count those registration forms disenfranchises otherwise eligible voters.

Republican officials say the citizenship checkoff is intended to prevent voting fraud, so the party took the rare step of asking the judge to allow it to intervene so it can then ask the judge to dismiss the case.

Our liberal media

The Tribune’s non-endorsement endorsement of Kerry is raising eyebrows. SP Times:

Al Austin, a Tampa resident who serves as finance chairman for the Republican Party of Florida, said the editorial was an unfair indictment of Bush - and an unspoken endorsement for Kerry.

"I thought their comments were just totally wrong," said Austin. "They aren't even on the fence. They took an entire page to be critical of the president, and the criticism of Kerry was very brief."
......

The Tribune piece ran on the same day that another newspaper owned by Media General chose to withhold its presidential endorsement.

Sunday, the Winston-Salem Journal ran an editorial under the headline "Bush Has Gone Astray," in which the editorial board offered no presidential pick.

Journal editorial page editor Linda Brinson said the non-endorsement was "the best decision we could make" as a publication owned by Media General, a company known for its conservative leanings.

Ray Kozakewicz, manager of corporate communications for Media General, said the company does not get involved in the editorial decisions of its 26 daily newspapers.

"Each newspaper is locally operated by the editorial team," he said. "It's a local decision in each case."

But Brinson said there is a sort of understanding between Media General and its publications when it comes to presidential endorsements.

"Whereas our editorial decisions day to day are completely our own, there is - when it comes to presidential elections - we understand that Media General newspapers have a set of values and views and a philosophy that sort of determines who we choose to endorse," Brinson said.

"Our inclination is to try very hard to endorse a Republican, but in this case we just could not do it," she said. "Bush had not lived up to our expectations. We felt he had really been a failure. But neither could we clearly come out and say Kerry stood for those values, either."

Brinson described the Journal as "the most liberal" of the Media General papers, while the Tribune has long been considered anything but liberal in its editorial stances.

Wingers can’t stand it when intellectually honest conservatives jump ship due to irresponsible behavior and incompetent leadership.

Early voting late

PB Post

Frustration gripped voters throughout Palm Beach County and across Florida as those who decided to take advantage of the first statewide exercise in early voting were greeted with long lines, malfunctioning machines and few people who could answer their questions.

In what many interpreted as a grim harbinger of the Nov. 2 presidential election, some who lined up at the eight early polling locations from Jupiter to Belle Glade to suburban Boca Raton and Delray Beach said their faith in the election system was shaken.

Bruce R. Bennett/The Palm Beach Post

enlarge

Walter Pagowski (right) of Greenacres was among the first to cast his ballot Monday morning at the Supervisor of Elections Office on Military Trail in suburban West Palm Beach. At left is M.J. Griesan of West Palm Beach. Early voting continues through Nov. 1.

"We're trying to tell the world that we're a democracy, follow our lead," said Ethel Bornstein, 64, who waited an hour and a half to vote outside the county branch library on West Atlantic Boulevard before giving up. "We're painting a very bad picture to the world, for whatever reason."

Many witnessing what they called mass confusion on the first day of early voting said they are convinced that the stage is set for an ugly repeat of Florida's 2000 election debacle.

Hillsborough County early voting locations.

Other counties, see your local elections office.

Get Up with MorningWood

Get Up with MorningWood, on 70,000 Watt Community Radio WMNF 88.5 fm, Tampa, and streaming at wmnf.org 4 to 6 am (eastern) every Tuesday!

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MARATHON

THANK YOU!

MorningWood surpassed the goals for calls and money. This community just bought another 6 months of commercial free radio. Y’all rock.

I also want to thank Pho Quyen Restaurant for providing tasty food to MorningWood volunteers.

Election Protection

Join me and thousands of other citizens who want to make sure that every registered voter is allowed to vote and that every vote counts. We all remember what happened during the 2000 election and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The Election Protection partnership needs your help – especially in Florida.

Volunteer today to at Election Protection

Blogging on the radio

“Good News is Rock N Roll” (If you recognize the reference, be the first to call the studio line during MorningWood with a coherent answer and I’ll send you something special. Just mention BlogWood and demand a fabulous prize. 813-239-WOOD)

I’m sure that everyone with an Internet connection has heard the Jon Stewart Crossfire clip by now. If not, here it is. I’m gonna play the audio this morning after 5, and that led to a big “news” theme for this morning.

Just before the 5:00 news headlines, I’ll have a tribute to 3 of my favorite right wingers, hypocritical hateful white males who are often in the news. Featuring songs and commentary on Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly, you can look forward to hearing such soon-to-be classics as “Jerry Falwell Destroyed the Earth,” “Hillbilly Junk,” and “Falafel Combo.”

Intermittent blogging on the radio as the mood strikes. I’ll also have commentary by Jim Hightower at 5:30 or so.

Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

WMNF Community Radio

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BlogWood Florida Voting Guide - Part I: Amendments

AMENDMENT 1 - NO

Official Title : Parental Notification of a Minor’s Termination of Pregnancy

Official Ballot Language: Proposing an amendment to the State Constitution to authorize the Legislature to require by general law for notification to a parent or guardian of a minor before the termination of the minor's pregnancy. The amendment provides that the Legislature shall not limit or deny the privacy rights guaranteed to minors under the United States Supreme Court. The Legislature shall provide exceptions to such requirement for notification and shall create a process for judicial waiver of the requirement for notification.

More attempts by rich white males to put their dirty laws all over a woman’s body. Vote NO.

AMENDMENT 2 - NO

Official Title: Constitutional Amendments Proposed by Initiative

Ballot Language: Proposing amendments to the State Constitution to require the sponsor of a constitutional amendment proposed by citizen initiative to file the initiative petition with the Secretary of State by February 1 of the year of a general election in order to have the measure submitted to the electors for approval or rejection at the following November's general election, and to require the Florida Supreme Court to render an advisory opinion addressing the validity of an initiative petition by April 1 of the year in which the amendment is to be submitted to the electors.

This is Jeb!’s attempt to slap down the democratic process in Florida. Why does Jeb! hate democracy? Vote NO.

AMENDMENT 3 - NO

Official Title: The Medical Liability Claimant’s Compensation Amendment

Ballot Language: Proposes to amend the State Constitution to provide that an injured claimant who enters into a contingency fee agreement with an attorney in a claim for medical liability is entitled to no less than 70% of the first $250,000.00 in all damages received by the claimant, and 90% of damages in excess of $250,000.00, exclusive of reasonable and customary costs and regardless of the number of defendants. This amendment is intended to be self-executing.

Republicans are pissed that lawyers can get rich by going to bat for people who deserve compensation. Vote NO

AMENDMENT 4 - YES

Official Title: Authorizes Miami-Dade and Broward County Voters to Approve Slot Machines In Parimutuel Facilities

Ballot Language: Authorizes Miami-Dade and Broward Counties to hold referenda on whether to authorize slot machines in existing, licensed parimutuel facilities (thoroughbred and harness racing, greyhound racing, and jai alai) that have conducted live racing or games in that county during each of the last two calendar years before effective date of this amendment. The Legislature may tax slot machine revenues, and any such taxes must supplement public education funding statewide. Requires implementing legislation.

Gambling, like drugs, is a victimless “crime.” I am for the decriminalization of all victimless crimes, including gambling, prostitution, and drug use. Vote YES.

AMENDMENT 5 - YES

Official Title: Florida Minimum Wage Amendment

Ballot Language: This amendment creates a Florida minimum wage covering all employees in the state covered by the federal minimum wage. The state minimum wage will start at $6.15 per hour six months after enactment, and thereafter be indexed to inflation each year. It provides for enforcement, including double damages for unpaid wages, attorney's fees, and fines by the state. It forbids retaliation against employees for exercising this right.

Don’t buy into the tired old argument that raising the minimum wage somehow hurts poor people. Vote YES.

AMENDMENT 6 - NO

Official Title: Repeal of High Speed Rail Amendment

Ballot Language: This amendment repeals an amendment in the Florida Constitution that requires the Legislature, the Cabinet and the Governor to proceed with the development and operation of a high speed ground transportation system by the state and/or by a private entity.

This is Jeb!’s other attempt to slap democracy in the face - the people have spoken and they said they want high speed rail. Jeb! doesn’t like being told what to do, but that’s too bad. Vote NO.

AMENDMENT 7 - YES

Official Title: Patients' Right to Know About Adverse Medical Incidents

Ballot Language: Current Florida law restricts information available to patients related to investigations of adverse medical incidents, such as medical malpractice. This amendment would give patients the right to review, upon request, records of health care facilities' or providers' adverse medical incidents, including those which could cause injury or death. Provides that patients' identities should not be disclosed.

The AMA is concerned with doctor’s profits, not the wellness of patients. More information for the consumer is good. Vote YES.

AMENDMENT 8 - YES

Official Title: Public Protection from Repeated Medical Malpractice

Ballot Language: Current law allows medical doctors who have committed repeated malpractice to be licensed to practice medicine in Florida. This amendment prohibits medical doctors who have been found to have committed three or more incidents of medical malpractice from being licensed to practice medicine in Florida.

The real way to keep insurance costs down is to keep incompetent doctors from making more mistakes. Vote YES.

Here's a one page pdf version of this guide that you can print and take to the polls, or share with your friends.

Jeb! was warned of felon list flaws

So, as BlogWood readers already know, Jeb! knew. Nothing surprising here, just more confirmation that for the Bush family, acquiring and maintaining power trump silly pie in the sky ideas like democracy and stuff.

Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice from leery state officials to "pull the plug" on a flawed felon voters list before it went out to county election offices, according to a published report over the weekend.

Computer experts in the Department of State and Florida Department of Law Enforcement were concerned about the software program that matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the purge list of 48,000 names, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.

Jeff Long, a computer expert with the FDLE, told his supervisor in a May 4 e-mail that Paul Craft, the Department of State's point man on the purge list, had recommended it be scrapped.

"The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're "going live' with it this weekend," Long wrote in an e-mail obtained by the newspaper after a public records request.

Two months later, Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database after acknowledging that 2,500 people on the list had their voting rights restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black.

Also, Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list because of an error when the two state databases were merged.

When is some intrepid reporter gonna do an in-depth interview with family man Ed Kast? I bet he knows a little about this story.

Much more on Florida’s felonious list.

Vote early

Early voting starts today.

In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson has added several libraries to the list of polling sites for early voting that starts today.

In Pasco County, Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning has hired an additional 25 poll workers to run the early voting sites so his staff can continue preparing for Nov. 2.

And in Pinellas, Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark expects to at least match the 50,000 voters who cast ballots early in the 2002 gubernatorial election.

Today kicks off the state's first experience with unrestricted early voting in a presidential election. Tens of thousands of voters are expected to cast ballots at elections offices, libraries and other sites in the next two weeks.

The option has been available for years under Florida law but in a very limited way - mainly for voters who had a legitimate reason they could not go to the polls on Election Day. The Legislature loosened the restrictions in 2001.

"We've found it to be very popular," Johnson said. He expects more than 36,000 Hillsborough residents to vote in the next two weeks, triple the number who voted early in this year's primary.

Registered voters must bring a photo and signature ID - usually a driver's license - to any of the sites during the hours elections officials have set for early voting. All counties must offer at least two weekend days for early voting.

Note to SP Times:

NO, voters do NOT need a photo ID - the SP Times should take 30 seconds to fact check against their own archives.

The sign that Pasco election officials stick in grass outside polling places reads, "Photo and Signature Identification Required."

It might seem straightforward - state law says voters are required to show their ID before casting their ballot. But some activists say such language is a deceptive shorthand for the law and could prevent people from voting.

"Voters were turned away because of signs like this in 2000," said Courtenay C. Strickland, director of the voting rights project at the ACLU of Florida. "Those are misleading and can result in disenfranchisement."

The group recently wrote the state's elections supervisors, asking them to display signs - and arm poll workers - with information that more accurately reflects state voter-identification laws. While the statutes require photo and signature identification, generally they also allow people without such ID to vote after signing an affidavit.
......

"The misinterpretation of "ID Required' signs by both poll workers and voters alike, who took such polling place signs to be complete statements of Florida law rather than the misstatements that they are, led to lost votes in the November 2000 election and more recently in 2003,"......

Lightning strikes twice? Tribune fails to endorse Bush

The Tribune enjoyed a moment of infamy earlier this year when it mistakenly published an editorial bemoaning the home team’s loss of the Stanley Cup when, in fact, the Lightning had actually just won the cup. Oops.

The lightning snafu came to mind on Sunday as I read the Tribune’s scathing non-endorsement of their man Bush. This is a paper which has proudly backed Republicans forever, and their editorial at times reads like, well, this blog, and many other left leaning publications. This time, though, it’s no mistake: the Tribune is actually showing signs of a smattering of intellectual honesty.

W e find ourselves in a position unimaginable four years ago when we strongly endorsed for president a fiscal conservative and ``moderate man of mainstream convictions'' who promised to wield military muscle only as a last resort and to resist the lure of ``nation building.'' ......

As stewards of the Tribune's editorial voice, we find it unimaginable to not be lending our voice to the chorus of conservative-leaning newspapers endorsing the president's re- election. We had fully expected to stand with Bush, whom we endorsed in 2000 because his politics generally reflected ours: a strong military, fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility and small government. We knew him to be a popular governor of Texas who fought for lower taxes, less government and a pro-business constitution.

But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re- election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a ``uniter not a divider'' within the United States and the world.

Neither can we endorse Sen. Kerry, whose undistinguished Senate record stands at odds with our conservative principles and whose positions on the Iraq war - the central issue in this campaign - have been difficult to distinguish or differentiate.

It is an achingly difficult decision to not endorse a candidate in the presidential contest, and we do not reach this decision lightly.

The Tribune has endorsed a Republican for president ever since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, with one exception. We did not endorse in the 1964 presidential race because, as we said at the time, ``it is our feeling that unless a newspaper can recommend a candidate with complete conviction that he be the better choice for the office, it should make no endorsement.''

Like the country, this editorial board finds itself deeply divided about the president's prosecution of the war and his indifference to federal spending.

Bush Overstated The Evidence

Although Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, the nation rallied behind him after the terrorist strikes of 9/11. He transcended the political divide and became everyone's president the moment he picked up that bullhorn on the ashes of ground zero and promised the terrorists that they would hear from us. Aside from a few dancing extremists, the world stood with us.

Bush told us to wait, and we confidently stood with him. With surety and resolve, he struck Afghanistan and the hillside holes of al-Qaida extremists. For taking out the Taliban and bringing about national elections in Afghanistan this month, the president deserves much credit. While we still haven't caught Osama bin Laden, the ace of spades, our troops have successfully caught and imprisoned many other al-Qaida leaders.

But before securing Afghanistan, Bush grew convinced that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America and so directed soldiers and supplies there.

His administration terrified us into believing that we had to quickly wage war with Baghdad to ensure our safety. Vice President Dick Cheney said he had ``irrefutable evidence'' that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear program. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrongly asserted that aluminum tubes found in Iraq could be used only for nuclear weapons. And the president himself said he couldn't wait for a smoking gun in the form of a ``mushroom cloud.''
......

When Gen. Eric Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, said that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure a postwar Iraq, his argument was dismissed and the general summarily pushed aside.

But after Baghdad fell, we saw how insufficient troop numbers led to the looting of hospitals, businesses and schools - everything but the Oil Ministry, which our forces secured.

At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with great hubris that the uprising was ``untidy'' but not unexpected. And the president himself challenged the enemy to ``bring it on.''
......

Still, despite deliberate steps to rebuild Iraq, we find ourselves today in an open-ended war that has taken the lives of 1,081 American servicemen and women, and wounded or maimed 7,862 more. Financially, the war has cost us $126 billion - money that could have been better spent securing the homeland - and is a major reason for the largest federal deficit in history.

More Fear Ahead

What bothers us is that the president says that even knowing what he knows now, he still would have invaded Iraq because Saddam had the ``intent'' to make nuclear weapons and was a ruthless dictator who killed his own people. If this nation-building succeeds, the president says, we will have built a friend in the Middle East.

Because of the invasion, one other renegade country - Libya - decided to disarm its nuclear program, a real success for the president.

Still, we are troubled by Bush's talk about a broad ``forward strategy of freedom'' to ``transform'' the Middle East. We believe it unwise to use our military to impose democracy on Arab countries, which would rather determine their own future. We fear this model of forced democracy will only fuel recruiting campaigns for terrorism.

And how about Iran and North Korea, who have considerably more advanced nuclear capabilities than Iraq ever had? Are we going to brashly send our overstretched military to war there too?

An American president should take the country to war only as a last resort, only after exhausting every diplomatic channel and only after asking demanding questions and weighing concrete evidence. On the Iraq war, President Bush failed on all counts.

The Iraq war came about because of a profound failure of intelligence that went unchecked and unquestioned by the president, who shows no sign of having second doubts. He admits to making no mistakes except for a few presidential appointments - presumably disloyal people who dared to speak up.

Bush's re-election campaign continues to stoke fear. ``You better have a president who faces these terrorists down before they hurt us again,'' he said in the first debate.

Cheney, who continues to maintain that Iraq was in league with al-Qaida despite evidence to the contrary, went so far as to say that electing Kerry would invite another terrorist strike.
......

However, although the numbers from recent months are more promising, the tax cuts did not spur the expected job growth. The nation has lost jobs during the Bush presidency, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to oversee a net loss of jobs.

But while the recession, 9/11 and profligate spending by Congress have grown the deficit, two-thirds can be traced back to the president's tax cuts, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
......

Bush has yet to veto a single spending bill. Even Franklin Roosevelt scaled back New Deal programs after Pearl Harbor.

The result: Bush has turned the $150 billion surplus he inherited into a $450 billion deficit.

At one point, Congress tried to impose some fiscal discipline. Lawmakers said they would not pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit if the cost exceeded $400 billion over 10 years.

So what did the administration do? It fudged the numbers.

Thomas Scully, former head of the Medicare agency, threatened to fire chief actuary Richard Foster if he dared to tell lawmakers that the true cost stood between $500 billion and $600 billion.

To make matters worse, the president's law prohibits Medicare from negotiating the best prices from pharmaceutical companies.

Against this backdrop of spending, Bush announced a mission to Mars and support for a missile shield defense system, a Cold War throwback that would be nice to have but wouldn't stop the car bombs and speedboats that are today's terrorists' weapons of choice.
......

Yet, while throwing money at programs of questionable urgency, Bush has failed to adequately fund the Department of Homeland Security. Penny- pinching there means firefighters and police still lack radios that can talk to one another, cargo shipments at airports and seaports are not screened, and hospitals and biohazard labs feel underfunded and underequipped.

Government Behind Closed Doors

At the birth of the 9/11 millennium, President Bush rallied us around a new world order that required some loss of freedoms so that the government could do a better job of protecting us.

He passed the Patriot Act, which, while not perfect, gives law enforcement agencies the much-needed ability to talk with one another.

While we supported the Patriot Act, we are concerned by the president's relentless attack on open government.

According to the libertarian Reason Foundation, Bush has nearly doubled the number of classified documents, urged agencies to refuse Freedom of Information Act requests and invoked executive privilege wherever possible.

His administration doesn't want citizens to know when hazardous chemicals are routed through their towns, how the repair of tenuous electric grids is going or who was at the table to form the nation's energy policy.

Typical of this administration, only industry lobbyists and like-minded people were allowed at the table to craft the energy plan. People who might dissent - consumer groups and conservationists - were not invited.

Within a year of Cheney's energy task force, the administration had given billions in subsidies to energy firms and begun weakening pollution laws while opening up wilderness areas to exploitation. The administration misled people by calling a plan to weaken pollution controls the Clear Skies initiative. As one example, the new law allows coal- burning power plants to avoid installing pollution-control equipment during renovations.

The Failed Compassionate Conservative

President Bush told us that he was ``uniter, not a divider,'' but shortly after taking office, his administration took a sharp right turn that has divided this country.
......

Probably most disappointing, however, is his leadership in Washington.

Besides the White House, Republicans control the House and the Senate and all committee chairs. But rather than reach across the aisle, this president has deepened the divide in Congress, where Republican leaders have uninvited Democrats from conference committees where differences are reconciled. We would not condone such behavior from Democrats and shouldn't accept it from Republicans.
......

People view Bush as a man with strong convictions. And while he's clearly convinced of the rightness of his ways, that doesn't mean he's always right.

This president doesn't try to hear from people who disagree, choosing instead to keep the counsel of staunch supporters. He disdains news conferences and brags that he doesn't read the newspapers. He counts on his core group of insiders to tell him what he needs to know.

When asked if he consulted his father, the only other president to have waged war against Iraq, Bush unabashedly said that he spoke to a ``higher father.'' Presidential decisions about sending men and women to war should be based on fact, not prayer.

Repug registration tricks

Sounds kinda silly, changing someone’s party registration, and it’s not like they’re gonna be turned away from the polls in the general election, but all these little annoyances add up - they’re like a false fire alarm - keeping the elections supervisors busy with unnecessary crap while an arsonist does some real damage to the election elsewhere.

Also, look for the Rupugs to use examples like these to call for “reform” of voter registration - they hate the fact that it is so easy to register and to vote.

University of Florida students in Alachua County may have had their voter registration switched to the Republican Party without knowing it. In Leon County, voters are receiving calls in an apparent attempt to mislead them.

Those are two of the newer voter registration issues elections officers are wrestling with across the state.

The Alachua County Supervisor of Elections Office is sorting through 1,200 forms gathered at UF and Sante Fe Community College seeking to switch voters' party to Republican. The sorting began after officials discovered that some of the people listed didn't want their parties changed, and others hadn't previously been registered.

It's similar to a situation in Leon County, where the elections office received 3,000 photocopied voter registration forms all checked Republican. When the office began calling people, it was told by most that they didn't intend to register Republican.

Now there's even more questionable activity in Leon County, said Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho. A voter called saying she was contacted by the office earlier in the week and told she could vote by mail. She asked if her husband could do the same.

The only problem is, the elections office made no such call.

Another voter told the office he received a call from someone offering to pick up his absentee ballot and deliver it to the elections office. Yet another caller was told they could vote by checking off the sample ballot being mailed by the elections office and sending it back, which isn't a legal form of voting.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has asked the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to look into the Leon County reports, saying that blacks appear to be targeted in an effort to confuse them and suppress their votes.

Krugman weighs in, touching on some of the more infamous recent incidents. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion:

The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable.

Dred Scott and Oprah

Very bizy with my day job right now, but here’s some debate related fodder for your consumption.

President Bush left many viewers mystified last week when, answering a question in his debate with Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, he invoked the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery.

The answer seemed to be reaching far back in history to answer the question about what kind of Supreme Court justice Bush would appoint. But to Christian conservatives who have long viewed the Scott decision as a parallel to the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, the president's historical reference was perfectly logical — and his message was clear.

Bush, some felt, was giving a subtle nod to the belief of abortion foes, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that just as the high court denied rights to blacks in the Scott case it also shirked the rights of the unborn in Roe, which many conservatives call the Dred Scott case of the modern era.

"It was a poignant moment, a very special gourmet, filet mignon dinner," said the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, a prominent conservative advocacy group based in Washington. "Everyone knows the Dred Scott decision and you don't have to stretch your mind at all. When he said that, it made it very clear that the '73 decision was faulty because what it said was that unborn persons in a legal sense have no civil rights."

Sheldon, who said he confers frequently with Bush and his senior campaign advisors on outreach to religious conservatives, though not in this instance, credited the use of Dred Scott with raising the abortion issue to "a very high level" and "back to the front burner."

"It didn't just slip out by accident," Sheldon said.

And for those who are despairing that W has the wimmin’s vote locked in, well, there’s hope as long as Oprah’s on the side of light...

There was Oprah, doing what she does so freakishly well, cheerleading and extolling and impressing upon, getting women up and getting them angry and demanding that they exercise their hard-won right to vote and demanding that they quit dissing their feminist ancestors, the ones who worked so damn hard for suffrage and for freedom of choice and for the right to tell powerful sexist Republican men where they can shove their repressive sexist antichoice bigotry.

This was her fabulous, much-needed message: Take your rights for granted at your peril, ladies. Move, or else. Choose how you want the laws to treat and respect you and your body -- or someone else, someone who hasn't touched a vagina for 30 years and who thinks sex is only tolerable in the dark, fully clothed and with a respectable prostitute, will choose for you.
......

This has been the GOP's message to women since, well, forever: Be like Laura Bush -- submissive, matronly, heavily shellacked and ever flashing a disquieting mannequin grin, off in the corner reading stories to the kids and cutting lots of pretty ceremonial ribbons and keeping quiet about the Important Stuff and never having sex and always be standing just out of the spotlight, secondary and inferior and in the background. You know, right where you belong.

Truly and sadly, few indeed are the powerful and articulate public female voices in our major media to counter this ideological poison. Who, Barbara Walters? Not exactly hotly connected to youth and issues of the day. Katie Couric? About as female empowering as a terrier. Martha Stewart? Busy designing barbell cozies for the prison gym. The wholly queasy pseudo-feminists on the wholly awful "The View"? Please.

And while plethoric are the powerful women working behind the media scenes, execs and pundits and writers, senators and world leaders and even forthright, independent wives, and while there are plenty of strong-willed, outspoken female celebs making their voices known, in terms of visibility and raw power and sheer reach, nobody can touch Oprah. Which is exactly why her message was so wonderful.

Here's the bottom line: 50 million eligible women didn't vote in 2000, and 22 million of them were single and nearly every one of them probably thought their vote doesn't matter and it isn't really worth it and who cares anyway because no matter who wins, everything's still pretty much run by rich powerful men anyway. Which is, you know, sort of true. But not quite.

Because as Oprah knows, there are powerful men who get it and who love women and who understand their issues and who have cool articulate daughters and opinionated self-defined multilingual firebrand wives (Hi, Teresa), and there are aww-shucks antichoice Texans with lifeless token wives who think your body is government property and you should just pipe down and keep your damn legs closed and go pray to an angry Republican God to forgive your plentiful vagina-induced sins.

Hey, it's your choice. But not for long.

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Blogging on the radio

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Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

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W’s Corporate Cronies Calumniate Kerry

Sinclair Broadcast Group owns TV stations that reach 25 percent of US households.

Sinclair is a heavy donor to Republican candidates and a supporter of right wing causes.

Sinclair ordered all of its ABC affiliates to preempt the edition of Nightline in which they paid tribute to American Iraq War casualties by reading the names of the dead.

Sinclair has now ordered all of its stations to preempt regular programming in order to air a 90 minute virulently anti-Kerry documentary style film just days before the election.

Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, owner of the largest chain of television stations in the nation, plans to preempt regular programming two weeks before the Nov. 2 election to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John F. Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War.

Sinclair has ordered its 62 stations, some of which are in the critical swing states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin, to air "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" during prime-time hours next week. The Sinclair station group collectively reaches 24 percent of U.S. television households.

"Stolen Honor" focuses on Kerry's antiwar testimony to Congress in 1971 and its effect on American POWs in Vietnam. Kerry testified that U.S. forces routinely committed atrocities in Vietnam. The film, produced independently of Sinclair, includes interviews with former POWs who say their Vietnamese captors used Kerry's comments to undercut prisoner morale.

Sinclair, based in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley, decided to air the film after it was rejected for airing by the major broadcast networks, vice president Mark Hyman said. "This is a powerful story," Hyman said. "The networks are acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending [the POWs] don't exist. It would be irresponsible to ignore them."
......

Sinclair's top executives, including members of the controlling Smith family, have been strong financial supporters of Bush's campaign. The company made news in April when it ordered seven of its ABC-affiliated stations not to air a "Nightline" segment that featured a reading of the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq; a Sinclair executive called that broadcast "contrary to the public interest."

Sinclair also is one of the few station-group owners that puts corporate opinion on its local newscasts. Hyman delivers conservative commentaries called "The Point."

Sinclair controls the programming at Channel 38 WTTA, Tampa.

Pick up the phone. Then write some emails. And a FAX or 2.

WB 38 WTTA Tampa Bay
7622 Bald Cypress Place
Tampa, FL 33614
P: 813 886 9882
F: 813 880 8154

Sinclair Advertisers

Sinclair Stations

Voters wait for absentee ballots

The fight over whether or not Ralph Nader would be on the ballot is being blamed for the tardy arrival of absentee ballots in Hillsborough County and elsewhere.

Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson has been full of excuses lately as he tried to downplay his incompetent handling of the primary election, but his opponent Rob MacKenna is letting him slide on this one, saying that the delays were understandable.

Rob may be being a little kind, since at least one supervisor was able to overcome the odds and get ballots out in time.

Ion Sancho, Leon County's veteran supervisor of elections, said he mailed all of his 8,000 absentee ballots Sept. 27 and some have been returned.

``We figured out exactly what we needed to do, did it, and got our ballot printed,'' he said. ``The process has gone without a hitch.''

Ion Sancho is the same one who was at the forefront of the fight against the seriously flawed Florida felon list, and he is constantly fighting for the rights of voters to vote. Jeb!’s Buddy could learn a lot from a guy like Ion. Too bad Buddy is such a closed-minded old fool.

Schools and terror: be scared, stay scared

Remember: a scared electorate invariably votes to stay the course. It’s in W’s best interests to keep us nervous and jittery.

Here’s what most every news outlet is saying about the schools / terror scare:

It began two weeks ago with the discovery that a suspected Iraqi insurgent was in possession of information about schools in Florida and five other states.

The information included a single page from a Lee County schools handbook.

As a precaution, the FBI alerted state authorities.

By Friday, school districts in the Tampa Bay area were sending letters to parents and principals. News of the discovery was moving on national news wires, and a day earlier a local TV station played it as the lead story at 11 p.m.

Hoping to head off further anxiety, Florida law enforcement and education officials held a news conference Friday to downplay the reports. They also defended their decision not to make the information public.

"We believe your children are as safe in school as they are at home," said Florida Education Secretary John Winn, who first learned of the incident Thursday.

The widespread reaction to the discovery underscores the extent to which school districts, three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, react with extreme caution to any potential threat.

"But there was no specific threat to Florida schools," said Mike McHargue, Florida Department of Law Enforcement director of investigation. "Rather there was a single page from (Lee County's) local school code of conduct (handbook)."

The page was a list of four busing zones for the district's schools. No Florida school floor plans were recovered, contrary to some reports in national media, said FDLE Deputy Commissioner Scotty Sanderson.

Lee County's sheriff and superintendent were notified of the information within hours, state officials said. "Upon discussion with local officials we decided there was no specific threat," McHargue said. "No public good would be served by going public with that information."

School district officials in Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon and California also were told by federal officials that information about their districts was on a computer disc found in Iraq. The disc was discovered after the arrest of a suspected Iraqi insurgent in Baghdad.

Here’s what they’re leaving out.

it could not be established that this man had any ties to terrorism. He did have a connection to civic groups doing planning for schools in Iraq, the official said.

A person with no known ties to terrorists who is helping to plan and rebuild schools in Iraq downloaded some school plans from the Internet. Be afraid.

Duval county does not want blacks to vote

Jacksonville, which comprises the whole of Duval County, is infamous for having thrown out 25,000 or so ballots cast in predominantly black precincts during the 2000 election.

Apparently the game plan for 2004 includes throwing out new registrations and making it all but impossible for black people to vote early.

Voting early in Florida is a relatively new phenomena. It allows busy voters a chance to vote in person for 2 weeks before the election, including Saturdays. Most counties set up early voting locations in many convenient places. Duval is setting up only one early voting place, and it is far away from any black neighborhoods.

This Navy town bills itself the "Bold New City of the South," and the shiny skyscrapers, riverside cafes and stadium preparing to host the 2005 Super Bowl attest to the claim.

But the scene at the Duval elections office this week looked more 1964 than 2004:

Nearly a dozen African-American civil rights leaders stood at a counter, demanding the white elections boss help them ensure that as many of their constituents as possible can vote.

Tightening his lips, the voting official curtly replied that they were out of luck. No, he could not try to correct voter registration forms that were turned in incomplete. No, he would not consider opening early voting offices convenient for African-American neighborhoods.
......

No county produced more spoiled ballots than Duval - nearly 27,000 - and they were concentrated in African-American neighborhoods. An estimated one in five black votes was tossed out in Duval, three times the rate of white votes.
......

More than 300 miles south, maps on the wall of John Kerry's Florida campaign headquarters in Fort Lauderdale include bold circles around predictable political regions: the Democratic bastions of southeast Florida and swing voter battlegrounds of Tampa Bay and Orlando. Less predictable are the circles around Duval County. This, after all, is a conservative area where Bush won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2000.

This Republican stronghold is a crucial piece of the Kerry-Edwards Florida strategy. The campaign is paying for a steady run of TV ads and has planted at least three paid staffers in Duval.

Al Gore put no paid staffers in the area, bought limited advertising, and visited Jacksonville once early in 2000. Kerry has visited twice and John Edwards once.

The goals are modest.

"If Kerry gets 42 percent of the vote in Duval, he wins Florida," predicted Mike Langton, chairman of Gore's northeast Florida campaign.

Gore won 41 percent of the Duval vote thanks to heavy turnout among African-Americans, who backed Gore nine to one.
......

Many Democrats believe Gore would be in the White House but for the massive voting problems in Duval. Voters complained of longtime polling places being moved, of their names missing from voting rolls and phone lines jammed at elections offices amid all the questions arising Election Day.

The biggest problem, though, was the ballot. Elections Supervisor John Stafford printed the lengthy list of mostly obscure presidential candidates on two pages. Many, including first-time African-American voters mobilized by church and union groups, cast a vote on the first page and another on the second. A ballot with two presidential votes is invalid and not eligible for recount examination.

In Duval, about 22,000 presidential ballots were uncounted because of double votes and 5,000 because no presidential vote was recorded. Most spoiled ballots came from predominantly African-American precincts that Gore won with at least 80 percent.

Some still call it a concerted effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters, but a bipartisan Jacksonville commission concluded the problems stemmed from mismanagement and were unintentional.
......

Last month, FCAN and other groups filed a formal complaint with the state Division of Elections about Duval's elections office potentially failing to process registrations in time for the Oct. 4 deadline. The complaint noted that the leader of the office complained of "too much" voter registration in Jacksonville.
......

Jacksonville activists say they worry about how many registration forms will be discarded because of missing information and question how aggressively elections officials have tried to correct them. Thousands have yet to be processed, but elections officials say they know of about 1,500 registrations that are invalid because of missing information.

Then there's early voting. Elections offices must open 15 days before Nov. 2 to make voting more convenient. Early voting, which can be done at elections offices and designated city halls and libraries, is a crucial part of get out the vote efforts.

Miami-Dade has 20 early voting sites, Hillsborough 11, Pinellas nine, Orange nine. Jacksonville, which covers most of Duval County, in land area is the largest city in the contiguous United States. It will have a single early voting site.

It's in downtown Jacksonville, with scarce parking and nearby construction projects that complicate access. It's miles from black neighborhoods.
......

On Wednesday, the same day the local Florida Times-Union newspaper editorialized that people should feel no obligation to vote, a group of black ministers and representatives of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference visited Duval's elections office. Reporters in tow, they asked for at least four more early voting sites.

Carlberg said that he lacked adequately trained personnel and that it's too late to consider.

"I never thought about (adding early voting sites) at all," Carlberg said, stressing that he was complying with state law.

Republicans get 2nd chance; Dems left to sue

Manatee County is mostly Republican. In Manatee County, if a newly registered voter made a mistake on a registration form, the voter has been given a chance to correct the application in time to vote this November. This is laudable.

The only problem is that in just about every other county in Florida, the local elections chiefs are following the directive of the Florida Secretary of State and are rejecting thousands of applications because they contain tiny little inconsequential errors or omissions.

So, if you live in a wealthy, mostly Republican county, you have a better chance of being able to vote this year than your neighbors who live in, let’s say, Jacksonville, a city with a high percentage of black Democratic voters where 25,000 or so votes were thrown out in 2000 due to “spoilage.”

Supervisor of Elections Bob Sweat is giving Manatee County residents a chance to correct any mistakes they made recently on the Florida voter registration form, and he intends to still let them vote in the Nov. 2 general election.

Sweat plans to allow at least 41 county residents who filed incomplete registration applications by the Monday deadline to belatedly fill in the blanks without losing eligibility to vote next month.

He has allowed after-the-deadline corrections to be made by registration applicants for years, but it is unclear whether the Florida Division of Elections or courts may step in soon and stop his practice.

"This will probably end up in court like everything else," said Sweat, a Republican first elected in 1984.

Sweat said he did not know how many of the 41 applicants asked to be registered as Democrats, Republicans, no party affiliation, wrote in the name of another party or left that voluntary question blank.

"I didn't bother to look," he said.

He said he realizes that flawed registration applications have been declared invalid and voters thus ruled ineligible to vote by election supervisors in other counties.

Sweat said the law gives no clear direction on whether incomplete applications may be amended after the deadline and still leave those prospective voters eligible to vote, so he will give applicants the benefit of the doubt.

"I don't mind standing up for this. I think I'm right," Sweat said Thursday. "My feeling has always been, if I had the application by the deadline and it was signed (by the applicant), we would give you the opportunity to make corrections. If the law is not specific, if we err, we err on the side of the voter."

"It would have saved us a lot of work just to reject them, but that isn't right," he said. "The intent to register is there."

What a simple and elegant concept: if the intent to register is there and the applicant makes a simple mistake, allow the application to be fixed. Too bad this theory is only applied in a Republican county.

Election litigation

SP Times:

The courtroom battles include:

A federal lawsuit filed in Tallahassee by Democrats challenging the way Hood's office has handled voter registration forms.

Hood has recommended county election officials reject forms on which voters did not check a box identifying themselves as U.S. citizens. State election officials say the forms are incomplete and cannot be accepted.

Democrats say the forms include an oath voters sign that they are citizens. A voter who signs an untrue statment risks prosecution for perjury.

U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle has given lawyers for Hood until Tuesday to respond.

A Democratic Party challenge in federal court of the rules Hood established for provisional ballots, which are used when elections officials cannot find a voter's name on voting rolls. She says they cannot be counted unless voters file the ballot in their home precincts. Democrats say the rule violates the U.S. Constitution and federal voting laws.

The suit, filed in federal court a week ago, alleges that Florida's rule could block legally registered voters from having their votes count. U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle of Tallahassee will hear from lawyers for both sides today.

A lawsuit in state court over provisional ballots, filed by labor unions, is scheduled for a hearing before the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The unions contend Hood's provisional ballot rules violate the Florida Constitution and state laws which require only that voters cast ballots in their home counties. Hood's office says Florida law requires the ballots be cast in home precincts.

A lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party in state court is scheduled for a hearing early today before Tallahassee Circuit Judge Janet Ferris. It challenges a ruling by Hood that has blocked Democrats from replacing Jim Stork, who dropped out of the race against U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw of Fort Lauderdale.

Hood said Democrats could not replace Stork with another candidate because Stork waited until after a Sept. 21 deadline to try and withdraw.

Provisional ballots no panacea

Record numbers of new voters will by swarming the polls this year, and many will undoubtedly have problems.

Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson, Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections, had major problems conducting August’s primary vote, including the loss of hundreds of votes, and, it seems, he is having a hard time processing all the new voter registrations his office is getting.

...... Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson announced a record-breaking 19,000 last- minute voter registration applications received by Monday's deadline. The mountain of paperwork means not all may receive a voter identification card during the four weeks before the election, according to his office.

That's why authorities are urging new voters to check their registration status online, if possible, but the ease of this varies by state. Hillsborough voters can check by telephone with the election supervisor's office.
......

One trouble spot could be provisional ballots. These are used when voter registration is in doubt, for those erroneously purged from voter rolls or for first-time voters who signed up by mail and have identification problems at the polls.

Now, Jeb!’s Buddy knew damn well that he was gonna get flooded with applications - it’s a well documented trend this year. So why didn’t he hire extra staff or schedule some serious overtime to deal with the last minute apps? Uh, could it be that most new registrations are Democratic?

Ah, but if a voter has problems on election day, as the article says, a provisional ballot is available to make sure that all votes are counted. Oh, wait...

Across Florida, two of every five provisional ballots cast in the primaries were thrown out, a survey by the St. Petersburg Times found.

Canvassing boards rejected 41 percent of the approximately 2,000 provisional ballots cast in the primaries.

The 851 rejected ballots make up a tiny fraction of the total vote, normally not enough to change the outcome of an election. But that could have changed the course of the presidency in 2000, when President Bush won by 537 votes.

Labor unions with Democratic ties have gone to court to make sure more provisional ballots count. They say the votes could change Florida's election if the presidential race is as tight as it was in 2000.
......

The AFL-CIO and other labor unions say a state law requiring provisional ballots in a voter's assigned precinct is unconstitutional. The Florida Constitution requires only that voters cast ballots in their home county, lawyers say.

The Florida Supreme Court will hear arguments next week and may rule before the Nov. 2 election.

Ron Labasky, a lawyer who represents the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, predicted widespread turmoil if the high court ordered counties to count all provisional ballots.

The ballots were designed to eliminate problems from 2000, when voters were turned away from the polls when workers mistakenly thought they weren't registered to vote or were felons prohibited from voting.

The Times survey found that the highest number of rejected provisional ballots were in Duval, Miami-Dade and Broward counties, the same counties that figured prominently in the 2000 recount.

Hillsborough and Pinellas threw out more than half of their provisional ballots. Orange County rejected 80 percent.

The reasons varied: Scores of people were not registered to vote after all. Others had voted in the wrong precinct. A few were felons and ineligible to vote.

WTF? “Widespread turmoil?” From counting democratically cast votes?

Anyway, provisional ballots aren’t gonna be a cure-all, which is scarey, considering all the problems that are already beginning to emerge.

Law enforcement officials are investigating voter registration irregularities in at least three counties in Florida, and election supervisors fear that the problem is so widespread it could lead to massive confusion on Election Day.

Third-party groups, including tax-exempt organizations known as 527s that engage in political activity, have been conducting voter mobilization drives in an attempt to persuade new or apathetic voters to turn out in support of their causes — mostly Democratic — on Nov. 2.

But problems with the applications, already reported to authorities in Miami-Dade, Duval, Monroe, Leon, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, could result in people who thought they had registered showing up at the polls only to discover they aren't eligible to vote.

Officials are investigating in Miami-Dade, Leon and Pinellas counties.

Of the forms collected by the voter mobilization groups, many are incomplete, have suspicious signatures or may have been forged, elections officials said Wednesday.

They have created an accountability problem that the legislature is expected to address in the session beginning in March, the incoming Senate president said.

Supervisors are concerned about "the quality and the timeliness of the work being received" and about the lack of accountability for the application-gatherers, said Bill Cowles, Orange County supervisor of elections and president of the statewide supervisors' association.

Supervisors have 15 days after the Oct. 4 closing date to report new registrations to the state Division of Elections. Potential voters whose applications were incomplete or unsigned are out of luck if they did not correct their forms by the deadline.

Applications bundled

Many of the third-party groups delivered bundles of applications, some collected as long ago as January, on the final day. Cowles said he received about 15,000 registration applications Monday, which he called "a disservice to voters."

"It is taking the control, the education and the accuracy of the work out of our hands," he said.

Voters who have not received registration cards by the end of October should call their elections office to check on the status of their applications and to find out where their polling places are, Cowles said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating voter registration irregularities in Miami-Dade County and anticipates more complaints as supervisors sort through the applications, a spokesman said Monday.

In Leon County, elections officials are investigating 1,500 applications, including many from Florida A&M University students that were photocopied. All were for registration as Republicans.

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said most of the students contacted by his office indicated they had chosen "No Party Affiliation" and his office registered all of the applicants as independent.

In St. Petersburg, the state attorney's office is investigating allegations that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group pushing the minimum-wage ballot initiative, fraudulently changed party affiliations on voter-registration applications.

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said she received dozens of applications collected by an unknown third party at a high school, all completed in the same handwriting and with similar signatures. LePore plans to send them to state elections officials but said the questionable applications left her in a quandary.

The 1995 National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter Act," took registration out of the exclusive domain of supervisors.

"It's also opened the door for fraud," LePore said. "We can't investigate unless there's something really glaring."

It is a third-degree felony to lie on a voter registration application, but state law provides for no penalty for those who sign up voters but do not hand in the paperwork or wait until the last minute, depriving voters of the opportunity to make corrections.

Does anyone else see a huge loophole for Rethuglican trickery here? Let’s see: an organization can “lose” any apps that do not have the right party affiliation. Or perhaps just hold apps ‘til the last minute, causing confusion and headaches.

Mix in a thousand or so obviously questionable registrations, spread the word that Democratic organizations are being sloppy, start talking early and often about provisional ballot and registration fraud, and the stage has been set to throw hundreds of thousands of new voters’ votes into question.

Keep a wary eye out for the words “integrity” and “fraud” (pdf file) in the coming weeks.

Finally, for those who think this is a minor issue that only affects a handful of voters, remember that the 2000 election was not stolen with one overwhelming tactic - it was a combination of dozens or more cases of disenfranchisement in Florida combined with old-fashioned thuggery during the recount fight, the death of a thousand cuts.

Help uphold voters rights - volunteer on election day.

Union protest stirs Storms

Isn’t it rather ironic that the party responsible for flying paid DC interns in to Miami to stage a white riot and to intimidate and stop the counting of legally cast ballots is now whining about an effective, non-violent tactic employed by union members this week?

Members of the Hillsborough County Republican Party on Wednesday denounced a labor union protest that erupted in their Tampa office the day before and labeled protesters' tactics as "brownshirt" and "terrorist."

The group of Republicans - which included County Commissioners Ronda Storms, Ken Hagan and Jim Norman - held a press conference behind the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign office on Platt Street and said the Democratic party and its presidential candidate, John Kerry, were to blame for the protest.

"Kerry supporters intimidated our volunteers," said Hillsborough Republican party chairman Al Higginbotham, who also said protesters used "terrorist tactics."

Higginbotham provided no evidence that the union members acted at the behest of anyone but their own leadership, but said "We know they weren't Bush supporters." A spokesman for the AFL-CIO said neither the Kerry-Edwards campaign nor the Democratic Party had anything to do with the protest. He said the event was a legal and peaceful protest of the Bush administration's new rules, which threaten to cut overtime for millions of American workers.

"They are the ones making this a political issue," Eddie Acosta, an organizer with the AFL-CIO, said of the Republicans.

About a dozen union members entered the Republican office Tuesday afternoon wearing shirts that read "Hands Off Overtime Pay."

They chanted slogans and stomped their feet and left after the police arrived.

Similar protests took place throughout Florida and the United States, Acosta said, as a way to send a message to the Bush administration after lobbying and phone calls didn't work.

The new rules say that an employer can classify a worker as an executive and not pay overtime even if the worker doesn't supervise anyone.

Workers are losing jobs and health care benefits, and their wages aren't improving, Acosta said.

"For him to say that now is the time to take away people's overtime pay is outrageous," he said. "That's what this is about."

The Republicans said they were willing to listen, but that they won't put up with the protesters' brutish methods.

"These are brownshirt tactics," Storms said, alluding to the Nazi militia of Hitler's Germany.

"If you can't win by any other method than intimidating little old ladies making phone calls, that's a sad day in politics."

Stan Fields, 41, a volunteer and Republican campaign coordinator for South Tampa, said the protesters "ran" the two interns, three phone callers and handful of volunteers into a back room by crowding into the front office and marching around.

Brownshirts? Terrorists? This from the party of John “I need your library and bookstore records” Ashcroft, the party that wont let even mild dissenters anywhere near their candidate, the party which arrests those who disagree, the party that hires armed thugs to intimidate legal voters, the party which is against the free and open sharing of ideas and culture and art...

Here’s the deal: this was a creative, effective and legal protest by the working class. The protestors were non-violent, occupied public areas of the offices, and left as soon as instructed to do so by police. There were never any allegations of physical intimidation or threats, despite the implications of Ronda’s Nazi rhetoric.

Contrast this week’s union protests to Miami in 2000, when the Rethuglican party financed a “stop the counting” riot in Miami-Dade. That incident helped to disenfranchise thousands of Floridians by ensuring that their legally cast ballots would not be counted.

So, in Ronda’s world, paid thugs who thwart democracy are heros, but working people taking time off to protest an unfair labor rule by creatively exercising their freedom of speech are Nazis.

Registration roundup

Preelection legal challenges abound

Civil rights groups, organized labor and Democrats intensified pressure Tuesday on Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to further open elections, now just 27 days away.

The American Civil Liberties Union threatened to take Hood to court over her directive to elections supervisors regarding incomplete voter registration applications. A coalition including the ACLU demanded action regarding manual recounts for touch-screen voting systems. And the Florida Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments in a challenge from labor unions over provisional ballots.

More news here and here and here.

Now, that last one’s interesting, because it deals with some very fishy looking registration forms.

A spot-check of voters who were registered using photocopied forms indicates that they really did sign up to vote, Leon County's elections chief said Tuesday, but doubts continue about their choice of party.

Leon County received about 1,500 photocopied voter registrations, mostly from Florida A&M University and nearby black neighborhoods. The overwhelming majority registered as Republicans, which made Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho suspicious because the FAMU precincts are lopsidedly Democratic.

His staff has contacted 36 voters so far, all of whom said they signed color registration forms, not the black-and-gray photocopies forwarded to Sancho. And only one of the 36 said he intended to sign up with the GOP.

Voters aren't required to designate a party when they register, and members of all parties can vote in the Nov. 2 general election. So for voting purposes, party registration won't matter until the 2006 primaries and people have plenty of time to switch.

But there's still the question of whether the signatures on the forms are originals as the law requires. Sancho revealed Monday that he asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate.

It's possible that an organization running low on registration forms made copies and that the forms were filled out and signed with a black felt-tip pen, which can be difficult to distinguish from a photocopy.

The FDLE will help verify voter-registration documents from counties where elections officials suspect fraud or forgery, a spokesman said, but agents are leaving it to election supervisors to interview voters.

"The Department of Law Enforcement is not trying to engage in a broad-brush policing of elections," said Tom Berlinger, an aide to FDLE Commissioner Guy Tunnell. "What we're trying to do is to assist the Department of State and supervisors of elections if they are having difficulty establishing whether a registration document is valid."

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating accusations that FDLE agents intimidated black voters in Orlando by going to their homes to interview them about alleged voter fraud.

Does anyone else smell a coming campaign to stifle voter registration (or perhaps a looming court challenge to disenfranchise many newly registered voters)? I mean, it seems to me that a group which despises free and open elections might be motivated to flood elections offices with bogus registration forms so that they could point back to the urgent problem of “fraudulent” applications supposedly submitted by money grubbing “outsiders” who wish to taint the integrity of the electoral process.

More here.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating 1,500 voter registration forms received by the Leon County elections office that apparently were altered to register local students as Republicans.

County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said it was suspicious enough that the registration forms were all photocopies, but the new voters were also between the ages of 18 and 24, a group that often registers with no party affiliation.

''When we saw that all of these individuals were registered as Republicans, a buzzer went off,'' Sancho said.

Most were students at Florida A&M University, Florida State University or Tallahassee Community College. The office began calling the applicants, contacting a couple of dozen before deciding to turn the forms over to the FDLE.

''Once it became clear that their information did not jibe with the information on the application forms, that's when we decided to act,'' Sancho said. ``The overwhelming majority of them had not selected the Republican Party as the party they wanted to be registered in.''

The Leon County case is one of several being looked at around the state. In some cases, there are reports of bogus addresses, forms coming in with false information and registered voters who are being reregistered without their knowledge.

In Leon, the alleged fraud could have meant the 1,500 applicants wouldn't be allowed to vote. Sancho, however, said he is placing the people on the voting rolls with no party affiliation.

Both major political parties criticized the alleged fraud.

''It's absolutely despicable, but not surprising,'' said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox. ``After the year 2000, we should do whatever we can to make sure we have a fair electoral process.''

Republican Party spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher placed the blame for some of this year's registration problems on the many independent groups signing up new voters.

''It's unfortunate when you have all these groups from outside the state coming in here and trying to take over the elections process and they are motivated not by what's best for Florida but by making money for themselves,'' the spokeswoman said.

More GOP vote suppression

SP Times:

It's not enough for new Florida voters to swear an oath that they are U.S. citizens, Secretary of State Glenda Hood says.

They also have to make sure they check a little box on their voter registration form.

Otherwise, they should be barred from voting Nov. 2, Hood says.

The result: Potentially hundreds of Floridians won't be able to vote because they failed to check the box even though they signed the form.

Hood's strict interpretation of state law drew the ire Monday of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Florida campaign chairman and third-party groups that have registered thousands of voters in Florida.

"This is really in my opinion a technicality," said U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, Kerry's Florida campaign chairman. "If you sign the form, under the threat of prosecution if you lie, that should be good enough to allow them to vote."

Meek stopped short of accusing Hood, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, of playing partisan politics.

"But this is the very same office that went out of its way to make sure Ralph Nader was on the ballot," Meek said. Democrats, who fear Nader will undermine Kerry's chances of winning, sued unsuccessfully last month to keep him off the ballot.

Hood said last week that thousands of people could be turned away from the polls Nov. 2 because their voter registration cards were rejected for technical reasons. Most registered through third-party groups that are not as careful as elections officials, Hood said.

But the head of one of those groups said Hood should err on the side of voters.

"All things being equal the secretary of state should be moving mountains to let people vote," said Brian Kettenring, head organizer for Florida ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which announced Monday it had 212,317 new voters in Florida. "We believe the secretary of state should be giving voters every benefit of the doubt."

More, from Herald.com:

Broward County residents who skipped over a box on their voter registration form will be barred from voting in the presidential election, while Miami-Dade residents who made the same omission will be allowed to cast ballots.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees elections statewide, said Monday that Broward was following her instructions in disqualifying those who failed to complete the form.

But she indicated that there was no way to force Dade to follow the same procedure. And Dade said it was sticking to its plan of not disqualifying voters for skipping the citizenship box if they affirmed elsewhere with their signatures that they are U.S. citizens.

So, is Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson gonna reject forms from Hillsborough County residents based on a technicality? Well, so far, he’s only been able to find one form on which the only mistake made was the citizenship box, and he rejected it. He’s gleefully rejecting thousands of other forms for multiple little mistakes and other irregularities.(Back to SP Times)

Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson said only one form was rejected because the citizenship box wasn't checked.

More than 6,600 other forms were rejected for a variety of reasons.

"It's very, very, very rare that that particular field is the only incomplete field," Johnson said.

And as these dedicated GOP public servants work to maintain the integrity of the election by disenfranchising thousands of hopeful first time voters, let’s not forget that sometimes it’s okay to fix an official election form - at least, it’s okay if you’re a Republican.

the Martin County absentee ballot case. In that lawsuit, local Democrats have been arguing that because Republican election officials allowed GOP volunteers to take home incomplete absentee ballot applications and correct them, every absentee ballot cast in that county was compromised. Their preferred solution is to throw out all of the approximately 10,000 absentee votes, which would give Gore a net gain of more than 2,000 votes.

Final arguments will be heard Thursday at 1 p.m. EST in the Seminole County case, a precursor to the Martin County suit. Hanging in the balance are that county's 15,000 absentee votes. Democrats allege that county election supervisor Sandra Goard illegally allowed Republicans to set up shop in her office and fix thousands of absentee ballot requests from Republicans.

In one of Wednesday's most charged moments, Democratic attorneys read aloud testimony from Goard, who has held the supervisor post in Seminole County for 23 years. She admitted to permitting two Republican Party representatives, including the party's regional director, Michael Leach, to add missing voter identification numbers to about 2,000 absentee ballot applications filed by Republican voters. Goard also acknowledged that Florida law did not permit her to take such an action and that she had not provided Democrats with the same opportunity.

Glenda E. Hood
Secretary of State
Florida Department of State
R. A. Gray Building
500 S. Bronough
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250
Phone:850-245-6500

Contact individual county Supervisors of Elections and ask them if they plan to follow Glenda Hood’s advice to disenfranchise new voters.

Volunteer to help people who face obstacles voting on election day: Election Protection Volunteer

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Marathon

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Blogging on the radio

A brief history of recent voter intimidation schemes.

As this just released report from the PFAWF and the NAACP puts it,

In a nation where children are taught in grade school that every citizen has the right to vote, it would be comforting to think that the last vestiges of voter intimidation, oppression and suppression were swept away by the passage and subsequent enforcement of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. It would be good to know that voters are no longer turned away from the polls based on their race, never knowingly misdirected, misinformed, deceived or threatened.

Unfortunately, it would be a grave mistake to believe it.

In every national American election since Reconstruction, every election since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, voters – particularly African American voters and other minorities – have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression. The bloody days of violence and retribution following the Civil War and Reconstruction are gone. The poll taxes, literacy tests and physical violence of the Jim Crow era have disappeared. Today, more subtle, cynical and creative tactics have taken their place.
......

voter intimidation and suppression is not a problem limited to the southern United States. It takes place from California to New York, Texas to Illinois. It is not the province of a single political party, although patterns of intimidation have changed as the party allegiances of minority communities have changed over the years.

Voter intimidation and suppression thrives today, often pushed by the GOP under the guise of protecting the integrity of elections or rooting out fraud.

With John Ashcroft in charge of the Justice Department, priorities that for years were aimed at protecting the rights of voters at risk of being disenfranchised have now shifted to reflect the partisan “integrity” strategy. Rights are yesterday’s news, and today’s hip, party loyalist Ashcroft hire is hot to deny the vote to any minority group that might tend to vote Democratic.

On October 8, 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft stood before an invited audience in the Great Hall of the Justice Department to outline his vision of voting rights, in words that owed much to the rhetoric used by L.B.J. and Lincoln. “The right of citizens to vote and have their vote count is the cornerstone of our democracy - the necessary precondition of government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Ashcroft told the group, which included several veteran civil-rights lawyers.

The Attorney General had come forward to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft’s proposal favored the “integrity” side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would “deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice.”

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access. That has traditionally been the province of the lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, whose role is defined by the Voting Rights Act. In a subtle way, the Ashcroft initiative nudged some of these career civil-rights lawyers toward the sidelines.

Addressing the real but uncertain dimensions of voter fraud means risking potentially greater harm to legitimate voters. “There is no doubt that there has been fraud over the years - people voting twice, immigrants voting, unregistered people voting - but no one knows how bad the problem is,” Lowenstein says. “It is a very hard subject for an academic or anyone else to study, because by definition it takes place under the table.” And, despite its neutral-sounding name, “voting integrity” has had an incendiary history. “One of those great euphemisms,” Pamela S. Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, says. “By and large, it’s been targeted at minority voters.”

Which brings us to our brief history of recent voter suppression tactics employed by the GOP. Kind of a Rethuglican Greatest Hits from 1981 to 2002. (pdf file)

I’ll include such classics as armed guards at polling places, videotaping of minority voters, fake immigration stakeouts, aggressive challenges of voters approaching the polls, and more. Tune in for all of the fascist favorites!

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Hour 1 planned playlist

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Last Chance to Register

Midnight deadline.. You need to do it in person at your local office.

More info here - fill out the form and carry it in.

The books will close at midnight tonight for registering to vote in November's election, amid an unprecedented voter drive in Florida that has both presidential campaigns claiming success and overwhelmed election supervisors scrambling to finish the paperwork.

E-voting mysteries

SP Times:

In the Aug. 31 primary, the population of a small town - 12,498 voters - appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.

No one is sure why those voters didn't vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes.

Local residents declined to vote in even greater numbers in Hillsborough races for property appraiser, School Board and some judges. In fact, the "undervote" - the phenomenon in which citizens push an activation card into a touch screen voting machine but have no vote tallied for one or more races - was significantly higher in Hillsborough than in many other large Florida counties.

Palm Beach County, which uses the same Sequoia Voting Systems machines as Hillsborough, saw an undervote ranging from 3.1 percent to 8.4 percent of voter turnout, depending on the race. Broward, which uses optical scan voting machines, had an undervote of 6.4 percent on the one race open to all voters.

Hillsborough's undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9 percent in the race that re-elected State Attorney Mark Ober, to a whopping 17.5 percent in the race in which Charles "Ed" Bergmann was elected circuit judge.

In Pinellas County, which uses Sequoia machines, the undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9.1 percent in a School Board race to 13 percent in a judicial contest.
......

Hillsborough's tabulation of votes in August was beset by two significant problems: A computer server slowed to a crawl and delayed election night results; and 245 votes were never counted because a machine at an early voting site was not activated properly.

Buddy Johnson, Hillsborough's supervisor of elections, attributed the glitches to human error and believes voters should have complete confidence in the touch screen machines.

Johnson believes undervoting occurs when voters decline to vote because they know little about a race, or when they simply want to send a message that they don't care for any of the candidates on a particular slate.

"People just undervote," Johnson said.

Rob MacKenna, an Eckerd Corp. computer programmer who is the Democratic challenger to Johnson, strongly disagrees. To address the undervote question, he says, local government must pay for a paper-trail audit system as both a check on the electronic voting system and a boost to voter confidence.

MacKenna's skepticism about the cause of the undervote stems from the presidential preference primary last March, where a single question was listed on the ballot but where 255 Hillsborough voters, or 0.76 percent of the turnout, had no vote tabulated. Had 255 residents driven to the polls, signed in, walked to the touch screen machine, then decided to abandon the whole idea?

MacKenna refuses to believe it.

"The big question is, are we losing people's votes?" MacKenna said. "That's what the preliminary data seems to suggest. And that's the No. 1 thing we can't have."

Democrats register voters; Republican administration throws out forms

One big difference between the 2 major political parties is voting. Republicans traditionally want to “protect the integrity of the vote,” which is code for disenfranchising minorities and keeping voter participation low.

Democrats, on the other hand, truly want to “Get Out the Vote” and work toward this goal through voter registration and education.

Well, Democrats are doing their jobs (yes - to be fair, GOP groups have voter drives too, but, as a general rule, Dems defend monority voting rigtrs, and the GOP does its best to disenfranchise any group that may be leaning Democratic, especially blacks.)

Elections offices and independent groups across the region are feverishly working on last-minute voter registration efforts before the deadline arrives Monday evening.

With the hotly contested presidential race, voter registration for the 2004 election is way up - far surpassing registration numbers from 2000.
...

Since the 2000 election, more than 1-million new voters have registered in Florida, state elections officials say, an increase mirrored throughout the Tampa Bay area.

In Hillsborough County, new registrations this year are three times the number registered in 2000. Pinellas County registration applications are piling in by the thousands.

Registration efforts are going strong through the weekend. Some elections offices have extended weekend hours, and registration drives are taking place at some Kmarts, Michaels Arts and Crafts stores and at the University of South Florida Sun Dome, where filmmaker Michael Moore will headline an event Sunday.

Unfortunately, Republicans are doing their jobs too.

Potentially tens of thousands of people who think they are registered to vote could be turned away at the polls Nov. 2 because their voter registration forms were not completely filled out.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood said some groups registering voters are turning in application forms missing information, such as unchecked boxes on whether applicants are citizens, mentally incompetent or felons.

Also, she said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating claims that some groups turned in fraudulent application forms or switched people's party registration without telling them.

Rectification Effort Blocked

A group seeking copies of the incomplete applications in an effort to help people complete them said some counties turned over thousands of forms until Hood's office informed supervisors that state law prohibits them from handing out copies of voter records except to specified organizations, such as political committees and parties. Now, the Washington-based Advancement Project is not receiving any of the forms and fears thousands of people will not be able to vote.

``Clearly way over the number that could determine the election,'' said Judith Browne, a lawyer with the group, which promotes multiracial participation in the democratic process. She was referring to President Bush's disputed 537-vote victory in Florida that gave him the presidency in 2000.

During that election, state and local elections officials were criticized for a host of issues, from people mistakenly removed from voter rolls to the infamous ``butterfly ballot'' in Palm Beach County that may have confused voters, leading them to vote for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

Although the Advancement Project is not registering voters itself, it assists groups that are, including America's Families United, which tries to register voters in poor and minority communities.

America's Families United is suing the Duval County elections supervisor to get copies of 1,441 rejected applications there. Browne said a judge ruled against the group Friday. Previously, the Advancement Project received copies of forms from Miami-Dade, Orange, Hillsborough and other counties. In Miami-Dade and Broward alone, Browne said, 12,000 incomplete ballots were turned in.

``It seems like every time that we try to take steps to help voters to make sure they get on the rolls and to make sure they are protected, the state and the counties put obstacles in the way,'' she said.

Acting Duval Elections Supervisor Richard Carlberg said his office is trying to call the 1,441 applicants to let them know they won't be able to vote unless the forms are completed, but he said many of the phone numbers on the forms are not working numbers.

Hood said her office is only trying to help elections supervisors follow the law and that incomplete forms must be rejected.
......

Many people could show up at the polls and be told they cannot vote, Hood said. She acknowledged that some people will blame her office.

``We recognize there are always going to be individuals out there that are going to throw bricks, who are going to try to erode voter confidence. That is most unfortunate,'' she said. ``Our responsibility is to make sure that we protect the integrity of the voting process and that we work in partnership with our supervisors to do so.''

Yeah, that’s the ticket...the integrity of the voting process...

(Of course, it’s okay if you’re a republican.)

...... An illegal favor? Longwood resident Harry Jacobs' suit pivots on a favor that Seminole elections chief Sandra Goard did for the Republicans. Goard allowed two GOP operatives to add voter identification numbers to more than 4,000 flawed absentee ballot applications that had been rejected before the election. The workers were then allowed to resubmit the corrected applications.

Jacobs says that violated a strict 1998 Florida law -- enacted after rampant absentee ballot fraud surfaced in Miami -- that says only the voter, an immediate family member or legal guardian may fill out an application for an absentee ballot.

Two years ago, the state election office ruled that it was OK for political parties to mail and collect the absentee applications, but the voters or their close relatives or guardians must provide clear identifying information, including their voter registration numbers.