Bush Won
Kerry Lost
Now get a .ing life.
john grove wrote:
> 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.
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