Florida secretary of state faces shower of election-related lawsuits

By David Damron
Orlando Sentinel
Posted October 8 2004

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood is fending off more than a half-dozen legal challenges over the upcoming 2004 Election, and with less than a month before voters go to the polls her office expects even more lawsuits to arise.

Unlike 2000, where Florida's presidential election ended up resolved in court, this year's pivotal vote may start out before a judge or judges.

The pending lawsuits deal with a gamut of issues, from ballot initiatives and how to handle recounts on electronic machines, to the counting of provisional ballots. Other legal fights loom over early-voting sites and voter registration rules.

Critics of the state's voting system said Thursday the flood of legal clashes right before Nov. 2 exposes the partisan stripes of Hood, an appointee of Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother.

I haven't really seen [Hood] take steps to include more people in the election process, said Jerry Traynham, a lead Tallahassee lawyer in a state suit over electronic voting. They always seem to be going the other way.

Traynham represents various groups seeking a paper trail and more security measures for touch-screen voting machines. More than half of Florida voters will use the ATM-like machines on Election Day, and critics fear the machines are vulnerable to hackers or malfunctions that could skew the results. Hood's office sought to exempt electronic machines from any manual recount rules, but a judge overruled her.

A spokeswoman for Hood's office countered Thursday that many in the voting litigation ranks actually are the political partisans, filing late legal challenges that have left Hood to protect the voting process.

If these groups are not politically motivated, why didn't they bring suit in 2002? Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash said. Why did they wait until the 11th hour?

Two of the pending lawsuits, one brought by the Florida Democratic Party and another by a group of unions, argues that provisional ballots should be counted, even if a voter casts one from the wrong precinct.

An Orlando Sentinel survey of Florida's 67 counties shows that nearly half of the roughly 2,000 provisional ballots cast in the Aug. 31 primary were not counted. Many were tossed out because voters cast them in the wrong precinct.