Florida's secretary of state in the spotlight

S.V. Date  in the Palm Beach Post
Sunday, August 8, 2004

TALLAHASSEE For a decade as mayor of one of Florida's largest cities, Glenda Hood was seen as a rising Republican star with one problem: little visibility outside Orlando.

Seventeen months after signing on as Gov. Jeb Bush's secretary of state, Hood now has plenty of visibility, getting hundreds of newspaper headlines all over Florida.

They sum her up like this: the woman who tried to give away the state library, and now, at least among many Democrats, the woman who is continuing former Secretary of State Katherine Harris' pro-Republican leadership of the state elections office.

For two months, Hood defended a list of "potential felons" that would remove them from the voter rolls. Only after the media obtained the list through a successful lawsuit and found major errors that may have favored Republicans did she reverse course and discard the list.

She continues to stand by the new "touch-screen" voting machines used in the state's most populous counties in the face of complaints that the machines do not produce a permanent paper record of votes a feature even the state Republican Party cited when it recently urged Miami-Dade Republicans to use absentee ballots.

And Hood is considering reopening the qualifying period for a Republican to seek the seat of Sen. Dave Aronberg of Greenacres after the Republican candidate withdrew upon admitting that someone else signed his name on the required oath pledging loyalty to the U.S. and state constitutions. One top GOP state senator has said Bush is trying to recruit a Republican to run against Aronberg.

Hood's defenders argue that criticisms of her, which mainly come from Democrats, are not fair. It was not her idea to give away the state's $10 million collection of books and rare documents to a private South Florida college. It was Bush's.

Similarly, Hood is now taking the heat for decisions being made in Bush's Capitol suite, not in Hood's office in the nearby R.A. Gray Building, although it is Hood who is carrying them out, one top state Republican said privately.

"The agencies have become entirely the alter-egos of the governor's office," the source said. Bush spokeswoman Jill Bratina denied that the governor micromanages his department heads.

"We respect their expertise," she said. "The decisions that are made by the secretaries are their decisions."

But whether her own decisions or her boss', whether fair or unfair, the criticisms continue to come fast and furious, with little sign of letting up before the November election.

Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein of Delray Beach said he heard only good things about Hood as mayor of Orlando and had hoped she would get politics out of the state elections office.

"Unfortunately, in a very partisan administration, the office becomes a reflection of that," Klein said. "That's bad for Florida, and it's bad for people's confidence in government."

Hood said she does not pay attention to that kind of talk. "I don't deal with that. I just look forward," she said. "I work for all Floridians. I work with all parties."

Received high marks as mayor

Hood, 54, had finished two-and-a-half terms as Orlando mayor before looking to join Bush's administration in late 2002.

Although a Republican, Hood was known as a moderate. As mayor, she had to work with Democrats on the city council, and many of the city's problems traffic congestion, growth management, inner-city blight transcended political labels.

She won generally high marks from residents of both parties, winning her 2000 reelection with 75 percent of the black vote and 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, rare numbers for a Republican.

Still, Hood was a loyal Bush supporter, serving as one of his co-chairs for his 2002 reelection after having campaigned for him in 1994 and 1998, and for his brother, George W. Bush, in 2000.

And when Jeb Bush started casting about for a secretary of state, Hood made her interest known.

Voters in 1998 had passed a constitutional amendment converting the secretary of state from an independently elected Cabinet position to a governor's appointee.

In the bitter aftermath of the 2000 election, Democrats had criticized Harris for openly campaigning for her party's presidential candidate and for allowing GOP operatives to work out of her Capitol office during the recount.

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said that it was that concern, of even the appearance of partiality, that led him to recommend to Bush's elections task force that the function be placed under a non-partisan commission, with the group then hiring a director.

"I advocated that in 2001, and I advocate that today in 2004," said Sancho, a Democrat who has drawn the ire of fellow supervisors for questioning the wisdom of embracing touch-screen machines.

The task force's 78-page report stated that the group "tabled the idea of an independent, non-partisan elections board to replace the existing state Division of Elections," citing the legislature's efforts to deal with the 1998 amendment.

"And deal with it they did, in my opinion, in the most irresponsible manner that they could have," Sancho said, describing the decision to put the office under the governor. "It was a huge mistake."

Hood said Friday she was sensitive to the issues inherent in a partisan politician taking control of the state's top elections office and has made a point to stay out of politics since accepting the job.

"From day one, I said it was not appropriate for me to be involved," she said.

The Department of Community Affairs also was to be subsumed under the new Department of State, so that Hood would oversee the state's growth management functions as well as its elections, cultural activities and corporate registration roles.

Battle over the books

Hood's leadership of Orlando and her Republican status, however, were soon drowned out by her handling of the State Library.

Bush, as early as November 2002, had pushed the idea of saving $5 million a year by abandoning a collection that takes up 11 miles of shelves in the Gray Building and includes such treasures as a 1589 map of Sir Francis Drake's attack on St. Augustine, the diary of Gen. Thomas Jesup, who captured Seminole leader Osceola, and the original plans for Walt Disney World from the 1960s.

The plan for abandoning the collection changed several times: Originally, Florida State University would have taken over management of the collection in the Gray Building. Then, the school would have physically taken custody of the collection on its campus which drew opposition from university President T.K. Wetherell because the state did not intend to pay the university to do this.

The last proposal would have sent the collection to Nova Southeastern University in Broward County, which would have received $5 million over four years for taking the books and documents off the state's hands.

It was the last straw for librarians, historians, genealogists and others, who organized a statewide campaign to oppose the changes. On March 4, 2003, some 300 librarians protested, both in the Capitol during Bush's State of the State address, and then at the Gray Building, making a human chain around the structure and chanting: "Send Bush to Nova."

Hood came out to talk to the protesters.

"She was not well received," recalled Debra Sears, who that summer was fired from her job after 18 years of running the library.

In the end, the publicity campaign worked. The legislature refused to go along with the changes that Bush and Hood had pushed. For good measure, lawmakers also refused in 2003 to merge the State and Community Affairs departments.

Reversal on felon list

If the State Library issue got Hood acquainted to statewide controversy, the elections issues this year have put her in the middle of national controversy.

Democrats, led by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, have attacked touch-screen voting machines, which they say are error prone and cannot be trusted because they do not produce a paper-trail for manual recounts.

And a number of activist groups protested the department's creation of a list of potential felons as filled with errors that would keep legitimate voters from casting ballots. After a successful lawsuit by media outlets to make the list public, reports quickly showed that the list was flawed: It did not identify felons who happen to be Hispanic because a Florida Department of Law Enforcement database used to make the felon voter list identified people by race but not by ethnic group.

Hispanic voters in Florida have traditionally voted Republican, while black voters who were identified on the felon list overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

Bush and Hood have argued that Democrats are inappropriately trying to question the legitimacy of the coming elections an argument that was undercut last week when the state GOP sent out mailers in Miami-Dade County urging Republicans to vote by absentee ballot because touch-screen machines "do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount."

And Hood, while initially defending both the secrecy of the felon list and then its accuracy, eventually reversed course and discarded it for the coming elections. She has since ordered two internal investigations into how it was produced with such errors, which she hopes to have in hand before the Aug. 31 primary.

"I was very concerned by the issues that were raised," Hood said.

Sancho, the Leon elections supervisor, said he does not know Hood very well or know much about her record in Orlando.

He said he does think that her office has made decisions that have made his own job more difficult releasing in May, barely 100 days before the primary election, a felon list that would require making substantial changes to the voter rolls.

"Regardless of the list being accurate or inaccurate, that was a stupid thing to do," Sancho said. "They're closing their eyes to the realities of the environment that we work with."

But even with all the problems and criticisms that being in the spotlight has produced, Hood said she is glad she took the job two years ago.

"I knew there would be challenges," she said. "I'm very honored to have been chosen."