Exclusion from absentee-vote recount angers Democrats

By John Lantigua, Jane Musgrave

Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Thursday, September 02, 2004

It was a hard-nosed standoff.

Supervisor of elections officials growling on one side of the counter, telling Democratic Party activists they had to get out of Dodge — or at least off the premises.

The Democrats insisting on their rights, refusing to budge and risking arrest.
 For about two hours Wednesday, from 4 to 6 p.m., the electoral process in Palm Beach County became not only a bit sloppy, but nasty. A discovery that absentee ballots had been miscalculated led to a recount of more than 31,000 votes.

In the end, all of the results released the previous night stood — including Arthur Anderson's victory over incumbent Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore. But the fact that the recount was carried out without members of the public present angered some Democratic political activists, office holders and other observers.

The scene deteriorated until the elections staff called a deputy sheriff to confront the Democrats. Deputy Jason Hager, who looks bigger than your average NFL defensive tackle, filled the doorway, and diminutive state Rep. Irv Slosberg, D-Boca Raton, gazed up as if he were seeing The Terminator.

In the end, Hager and County Attorney Denise Nieman defused the confrontation, although the Democrats still were miffed.

"The memo they sent out about the recount confused me," said state Rep. Susan Bucher, D-Royal Palm Beach. "It said the totals were about 6,000 off but races wouldn't be affected. I wanted to see this recount, but when I got here they said I couldn't — that it was machine recount, not a manual recount, and it wasn't open to the public."

A host of Democrats complained: Bucher; Slosberg; state Rep. Shelley Vana, D-Lantana; Carol Ann Loehndorf, chairwoman of the county Democratic Executive Committee; Brad Harper, brother of state Rep. James "Hank" Harper, D-West Palm Beach. Other would-be observers, including NAACP representatives, had just left after raising their own objections.

"I told them they were violating the law," said Bucher, but she couldn't tell them the exact statute that was being broken. "So one of them slid the statute book across the counter at me and said, 'Here, you look it up.'

"For the next 45 minutes, nobody would talk to us and then they tell us it's 5 o'clock, they're closing and we have to get out. It's the public that pays for all this, and what they did was wrong."

Bucher produced a statute that applied to manual recounts, but the elections staff rejected it.

Suspicions about process

"The intent of the law is clear," she argued, but she got nowhere with the elections staff. Neither LePore nor any of the three members of the county canvassing board were in the building.

"When you act like that, you create suspicions about the process," Loehndorf said. "The public has to have confidence in the process and this isn't the way to do it."

Gerald Richman, an attorney for the Democratic Party, finally arrived with a pertinent document: a copy of Florida Division of Elections Rule 1S-2.031, which states clearly in its top line: "All procedures relating to machine and manual recounts shall be open to the public."

At the same time, Charmaine Kelly, the highest-ranking elections official on hand, was speaking with Nieman, the county attorney. It also turned out that the recount already had been completed and it was decided that the results would be given to the Democrats immediately.

That calmed the protesters to a degree.

"We were just waiting for the call from the attorney," Kelly said. "We wanted to make sure we did the right thing."

In the end, by creating suspicions, the staff ended up compounding the original mistake — the miscounting of the absentee ballots. Although only 31,095 were received, somehow 37,839 were counted.

When the canvassing board met at 11:30 a.m. to announce final results, Palm Beach County Court Judge Barry Cohen, the chairman, was forced to make the embarrassing revelation of the need for a recount.

"We don't know what happened," Cohen said, although apparently some ballots were passed through counting scanners more than once.

Election workers began feeding the record number of absentee ballots through the machines at about 11 a.m. and finished several hours later. Official results will be presented at 10 a.m. today.

In the end, Anderson's margin over LePore decreased from 5,533 votes to 4,051 but still was enough to avoid a mandatory recount.

The need for a recount brought back visions of the 2000 presidential election debacle, when weeks of nationally publicized recounts turned on hanging chads and pregnant dimples. LePore's role in that controversy as the designer of the infamous butterfly ballot set the stage for Tuesday's showdown, as Democrats vowed to throw her out of office to punish her because they blamed her for keeping Al Gore out of the White House.

Absentee voting urged

As part of those efforts, leading Democrats urged party faithful to cast absentee ballots, saying voters shouldn't trust the electronic machines because they don't produce paper records. Those admonitions pushed absentee voting to record levels.

The other main glitch was that vote-counting was slow in the county. The last precinct wasn't tabulated until long after Miami-Dade and Broward counties had finished counting votes.

County Commissioner Tony Masilotti, a member of the canvassing board, attributed the delays to the size of the county.

"We're the biggest county east of the Mississippi River. Votes have to come from 60, 70, 80 miles away," he said.

If, as many have argued, Tuesday was a test run for November's presidential election, he advised people to learn patience.

"It takes time and it will take even longer in November."