Suspicions raised over voting, registration; court actions taken

BRENDAN FARRINGTON

Associated Press

 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - University of Florida students in Alachua County may have had their voter registration switched to the Republican Party without knowing it. In Leon County, voters are receiving calls in an apparent attempt to mislead them.

In Bay County, registration cards were turned naming voters as Republican when the voters might not be.

Those are three of the newer registration issues elections officers are wrestling with around the state.

The Alachua County elections supervisors' office is sorting through 1,200 forms gathered at UF and Sante Fe Community College seeking to switch voters' party to Republican. The sorting began after officials discovered that some of the people listed didn't want their parties changed, and others hadn't previously been registered.

"They're all checked 'party change.' We don't really know at this point whether they were party changes or whether they were new registrations," said elections supervisor Beverly Hill. "I started going through them and an awful lot of them were new registrations."

She said she plans to add any new registrations to the voting rolls as Republicans, but said it was odd that the entire batch would be Republican registrations, given that most voters in the county are Democrats.

"In any group (of registrations) I would expect a little more than 50 percent Democrat," Hill said.

The situation became even more unusual when her voter outreach coordinator began calling people listed on the forms who had been previously registered.

"She said that all of them she talked to said 'No, I did not intend to change my party,'" Hill said.

In Panama City, the Bay County Sheriff's Office is investigating nearly 200 cases of apparently fraudulent registration forms turned in to election officials. County Supervisor of Elections Mark Andersen said it the activity was centered at Gulf Coast Community College. Most of the cards registered people as Republican, and several of the voters have called to complain that they are not Republican.

It's similar to a situation in Leon County, where the elections office received 3,000 photocopied voter registration forms all checked Republican. When the office began calling people, it was told by most that they didn't intend to register Republican. Most of the forms were registering Florida A&M and Florida State University students.

Now there's even more questionable activity in Leon County, said elections supervisor Ion Sancho. A voter called saying she was contacted by the office earlier in the week and told she could vote by mail. Another said he received a call from someone offering to pick up his absentee ballot; yet another was told by a caller that people could vote by checking off a sample ballot mailed by the elections office and sending it back, which isn't a legal form of voting.

"It certainly is illegal and disturbing," Sancho said. He reported the calls to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has asked the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to look into the Leon County reports, saying that blacks appear to be targeted in an effort to confuse them and suppress their votes in the Nov. 2 race between President George Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry.

"It is an attempt to create the type of mass confusion that we experienced in 2000 at the voting polls," Sevell Brown III, the group's Florida president.

After the 2000 election, which Bush won by 537 votes in a recount, there were accusations of people wrongly removed from voting rolls, blacks being tuned away as polls closed and a disproportionate number of voting machine problems in predominantly black precincts.

Also Thursday, Common Cause Florida questioned whether Florida was ready for Election Day.

Ben Wilcox, executive director of the nonpartisan group, said there was "strong and compelling evidence" that the touchscreen voting machines in 15 counties were unreliable, vulnerable to hackers and handled by poorly trained poll workers.

Voters in those counties should "strongly consider voting by absentee ballot in this election to ensure a real record of their vote," he said.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top elections official, defended her office and said elections are managed by hardworking independent supervisors in the 67 counties, all but one elected. She called it "very curious that all of a sudden at the 11th hour that there are questions being raised."

In another development, a federal judge in Gainesville on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by the state Democratic Party over how state officials want registration forms to be handled.

U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle said Democrats lacked standing to bring the voter-registration lawsuit because the lawsuit didn't include a specific voter who had been affected.

But Mickle said the state could refile their lawsuit and Mark Herron, an attorney for the party, said it would probably take that step.

Hood spokeswoman Alia Faraj said Mickle's decision was a procedural one.