Republicans Sue Broward Elections Official Over Voter Rolls

POSTED: 7:00 pm EST November 1, 2004
MIAMI Republicans sued Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on Monday, arguing she failed to the list of voters who cast ballots early for Tuesday's election.

Republican officials said they were concerned that throngs of voters showing up Monday at the county's 14 early voting sites could possibly vote again Election Day. The list sent to precincts contained the names of people who voted early through Sunday.

"There isn't any sort of check to keep them from voting twice, there's nothing in place to alert the clerks that the person may have voted during the early voting period," Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee attorney chairing the Bush legal team, said of Monday's voters.

In the lawsuit, the Republican Party of Florida was seeking a preliminary injunction forcing Snipes to the list of early voters. A circuit judge in Fort Lauderdale was considering the motion Monday night.

Messages left with Snipes' office and her attorney on Monday were not returned.

Since polls opened Oct. 18, Democrats and Republicans have pressed supporters to vote early in Florida, a critical swing state where polls suggest the race between President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry is a dead heat for the state's 27 electoral votes.

In the 16-page filing, Republicans also argued that their poll watchers have not been allowed to completely view the election process at the polls, and that their attempts to challenge the eligibility of some voters has been thwarted.

The filing also cites a letter sent to Republican poll watchers from the Democratic National Committee that warns them of the criminal repercussions of intimidating or coercing voters.

Republicans argues the letter "attempts to intimidate and threaten RPOF poll watchers and observers into not challenging prospective voters who may be ineligible to vote."

Allie Merzer, spokeswoman for the state Democratic party, said party officials are concerned about the possibility of illegal challenges to voters.

More than 2 million Floridians have cast their ballots through early or absentee voting, said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood. Early voting ends Monday.

Voters were taking advantage of early voting up until the last minute Monday, with lines snaking around the buildings and voters waiting several hours to cast their vote.

At a Lauderhill mall in Broward County, about 500 people waited 51/2 hours to get to a voting machine.

"Considering what took place in history to get us to this point, standing on line for five hours is nothing," said voter Jean Parker-Ramsay.

International observers from around the globe were also in the state on Monday.

One group of international observers who are watching the election process in Leon, Miami-Dade and Broward counties said Monday that they have not seen evidence of any problems with early voting.

Seven international observers from Fair Election International, a project through San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange, have been allowed into polling places in Broward and Leon counties, but were not granted access by Miami-Dade.

Observation teams are also in other states, including Missouri and Ohio.

"So far, we have seen nothing unusual," said Roberto Courtney, executive director of Etica y Transparencia, a government watchdog group in Nicaragua. "Generally, everything has gone very well."

One other observation group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was invited by the White House to observe the election, and that group has spread about 100 observers among several states, including Florida.

Barbara Arnwine, a spokeswoman for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said there had been a handful of complaints of voter suppression in Florida called into a hot line set up by her group, the People for the American Way Foundation and the NAACP.

The complaints included the early closing of a Broward County voting site on Sunday because officials had run out of provisional ballots. At two other early voting sites in South Florida, people whom Arnwine described as "thugs" told Haitian-American voters that they needed to show identification to vote.

Also, a freelance journalist was arrested Sunday after a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff said the man ignored orders to stop taking pictures of voters at an early polling place. Elections chief Theresa LePore was enforcing a law that prohibits reporters from coming within 50 feet of a polling place's front door to interview or photograph voters.

The U.S. Postal Service said Monday it was delivering more than 8,000 absentee ballots that were ped off Saturday at processing centers by elections officials from Broward and Palm Beach counties.

For those ballots to count, they must be hand delivered to county offices by Tuesday night's deadline.

In Volusia County, a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots. However, those ballots were expected to be fed and counted onto another memory card on Tuesday. The ballots were being stored overnight in a vault at the election supervisor's office.

"We haven't lost any votes. We can feed them back in," said Deanie Lowe, Volusia County's election supervisor.