Vote Interrupted
Were the absentee ballots lost or stolen? Either way, it's a crime.
BY BOB NORMAN
bob.norman@newtimesbpb.com
Count the ballots. Now.
By the time you read this, you might know the identity of the next
president. Or perhaps lawyers reign and the world's fate is hanging,
like so much chad, in the balance.
Either way, Broward County is screwed. It's stuck with a dysfunctional
elections office that was plagued by technological problems,
ill-equipped early voting stations, and, worst of all, the
disappearance of thousands of absentee ballots. The question lingers:
Was that mysterious disappearance -- which threw the election into
disarray and cost countless votes -- the result of a terrible crime or
stunning incompetence? Were the ballots lost, or were they stolen? A
lot of people think they know the answer.
"Something weird is going on here," said 52-year-old Bud Warren of
Coral Springs, whose wife and son never received their ballots. "It's
another stolen election. That's my honest opinion."
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement doesn't think so. The FDLE
conducted what it called an "investigation" of the ballots last week,
and it took agents about 12 seconds to conclude that no crime had been
committed. They spoke briefly with Broward Supervisor of Elections
Brenda Snipes and then told the media, in essence, "Move along, folks;
nothing to see here."
Call me a rubbernecker, but I see some blood in the wreckage. And I
know you can't even investigate a stolen candy bar in 12 seconds, let
alone a major breakdown in the democratic process. The agency's
dereliction may seem incomprehensible until you take into account who
overlords the FDLE: a not-quite-disinterested observer of this
election by the name of Jeb Bush.
If a crime was committed, suspicion would fall naturally on supporters
of Jeb's brother, George W. Bush, since Broward is a key Democratic
stronghold and the vast majority of those ballots were surely
earmarked for Kerry voters. Further, Jeb has a special interest in the
Broward election, since he handpicked Snipes, a School Board
bureaucrat with no prior elections experience, for the job after he
removed the embattled Miriam Oliphant last year.
But no one called much attention to the FDLE whitewash. The
Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald have given lots of space to the ballot
scandal, but the coverage has been ridiculously superficial. Consider
that the media never even identified the elections employee in charge
of absentee ballots, Mary Hall.
Now consider that Hall is a highly controversial figure who helped
engineer the ouster of Oliphant, who had fired Hall last year. During
her brief hiatus from the elections office, Hall was employed in the
congressional office of Alcee Hastings. This is interesting because
Hastings' chief of staff, who got Hall the job, is a GOP operative
named Art Kennedy. As the Sun-Sentinel put it in an October 24 story
about leading black Republicans, Kennedy has "direct connections to
the governor's mansion and the White House."
Jeb Bush tapped Kennedy to help choose Oliphant's replacement. And
once Snipes was in place, a long list of county GOP leaders
contributed heavily to her recent campaign, which was run by the law
firm of William Scherer -- George W. Bush's campaign co-chair in
Broward (see "Be Very Afraid," October 28).
Am I working on a conspiracy theory that Republican operatives stole
the ballots? You bet. In Broward County, it's never stupid to theorize
that the worst has happened. Remember that we're talking about enough
ballots to fill up a small room. Literally tons of them. Kind of hard
to lose, if you think about it.
But we can't discount the idea that the problems were caused by sheer
incompetence. At this point, there's so much confusion at the
elections office that it's impossible to divine the extent of the
problem, let alone what caused it. |