Falling Chads Threaten Florida Bush Total
NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2000
Tiny bits of paper littering the floor during the Palm Beach County hand recount are evidence of mishandled ballots that are wrongly adding votes to the Gore tally.
The small specks of paper known as chads drop off the ballots as they are examined by recounters, thereby enabling the Democrat recounters to decide on their own who the voter, who invalidated the ballot by punching two holes, really intended to vote for and making the ballot valid, GOP lawyers charge.
"Chads were seen on the floor during the process," Benjamin Ginsberg, general counsel for the Bush campaign, wrote this week to Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, according to the Washington Times. "This produces further evidence that mishandling of the ballots, not voter intent, potentially was yielding new votes."
"There were chads all over the place," Reeve Bright, an attorney for the county's Republican Party told the Times. "The more people who handle them, the more that fall off. I told a computer operator that we ought to bag them all up and sell them on the Internet."
Mark Wallace, the lead Republican attorney monitoring the recount , yesterday attacked the hand count of 462,000 ballots set to begin this morning in Palm Beach County, warning that the ballots could suffer more damage.
"What will you do to preserve the sanctity of those ballots?" Mr. Wallace asked county canvassing board chairman Charles Burton during an afternoon meeting, according to the Times.
"The same thing we've always done," Burton snapped.
During Saturday's marathon 12-hour hand recount of 4,600 votes, the Times reports that "stacks of ballots were lined up on three long tables in a small conference room where 17 elections workers, observers and the three-member canvassing board gathered to find out if a total recount was needed. Ballots were stacked, they were held, they were waved about and they were grabbed."
"The chads have been in every room there has been a recount," Mr. Wallace said. "And to boil this down to which small paper rectangle is punched out is arcane."
"What we had is three Democrats holding up the card, flipping it around and passing it around. All kinds of people touched these so all kinds of things were happening to them."
More than 19,000 voters in this county had their votes set aside because of errors, cases in which either no candidate was selected or two were selected. The Times notes that is hardly uncommon. In 1996, 17,000 ballots were disqualified here.
Experts have warned that deliberate mishandling of ballots is a vote fraud tactic that has been used by Democrats in the past. They warn that enough misplaced chads could threaten Bush's tiny, 300-vote certified lead in the state.
Evidence such as counting room floors littered with fallen chads could be used by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to justify a refusal to accept hand recount totals submitted by the three counties now conducting them.
Police Say Florida Democrat Had a ‘Votamatic’ in His Car
By Chris Vlasto and David Ruppe
Nov. 15 — Several days after presidential votes were tallied in what has become the hotbed of Florida’s post-election confusion, police in Palm Beach County confiscated a ballot-box mechanism from the car of a well-known local Democrat.
The mechanism, called a “Votamatic,” did not contain any ballots. It’s a device used on some types of ballot boxes to punch votes through ballot cards, which are then tallied by computers.
According to a police report filed at the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office and obtained by ABCNEWS, Irving Slosberg, 53, pulled the mechanism from his car and handed it over to police on Nov. 11 after denying to a county government employee that he had it.
When told of the incident, Palm Beach County’s supervisor of elections, Theresa Lefore, declined to press charges, according to the report.
“She noted that this incident did occur during the hand count of the presidential election and Lefore stated she did not wish to pursue further this matter at this time due to extenuating circumstances,” it said.
No further action was taken.
County Official Contacts Authorities
Slosberg, a 53-year-old resident of nearby Boca Raton who owns a handbag company, recently won a seat in the state Legislature amid allegations he tried to buy his election.
The unidentified officer who filed the report had been working a special elections detail when he was contacted by Denise Cote, director of public affairs for Palm Beach County. Cote said she believed Slosberg had an official Palm Beach County ballot box, according to the police report.
Cote told the officer she first wanted to speak with Slosberg alone to convince him to give the machinery back, but she asked the officer to stand by. Ten minutes later, Cote returned to the officer and said Slosberg had become confrontational and denied having the mechanism.
“I asked Mr. Slosberg to return it to me, and he said no, he intended to use it,” Cote told ABCNEWS.com. She said Slosberg did not say how he wanted to use it and he declined to say how he had obtained it.
“I was told by the county’s attorney’s office that it must have been taken from a voting booth, because there was no other way that he could have obtained it,” Cote said.
When the officer asked Slosberg whether he had the item, Slosberg led the officer to his car and handed over the Votamatic, according to the police report.
ABCNEWS tried to contact Slosberg, but he was not available for comment.
Elected After a Recount
Slosberg won his new seat during a heated and extremely close election.
Just days before a Democratic runoff, which he won, his opponent, incumbent Curt Levine, filed a state ethics complaint, accusing Slosberg of trying to buy the election by giving away thousands of handbags and paying retirees phony consulting fees.
Slosberg’s defeat of Levine practically guaranteed him a term that reportedly pays nearly $27,000 a year for representing the Boca Raton district. On Nov. 7, he defeated a lesser-known write-in candidate, Robert A. Sloan III, in the general election.
In the primary election, Slosberg had barely squeaked past Levine. He reportedly had 50.5 percent of the votes to Levine’s 49.5 percent. Slosberg was declared the winner after a recount of the votes.
‘It Disappeared’
A Palm Beach Post political columnist wrote Monday that Slosberg had been “schlepping” the mechanism around the county government center “like a traveling election equipment salesman.”
“He was happy to provide a demonstration of the county’s ballot problems for anyone with a TV camera last week,” wrote columnist George Bennett.
But Slosberg was no longer toting the visual aid Saturday night, after Mary McCarty, a Palm Beach County commissioner, demanded to know how he got his hands on a piece of official county voting machinery, Bennett wrote.
“It disappeared,” Slosberg said Sunday when asked about the Votamatic.
Electoral College Has Endured
NewsMax.com Wires
Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2000
WASHINGTON (UPI) - When Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her first act as senator-elect from New York, called for the abolition of the Electoral College, there was a mini-storm of controversy. But the idea of abolishing the Electoral College appears neither far-out nor radical – it is approved by a majority of Americans, 61 percent to 35 percent, according to the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll.
So far, the limited discussion of this issue has taken place without reference to the major attempts to abolish the Electoral College that took place in the decade from 1969-1979 with strong support from Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.
Nixon, who had bad memories of the effect of the winner-take-all features of the Electoral College on his election attempt in 1960, and even worse fears of what George Wallace might have done if his 1968 electors had held the balance of power the year before, told Congress early in his term that he would support any plan that eliminated individual electors and distributed the electoral vote of every state "in a manner more closely approximating the popular vote."
Republicans, who generally do better in smaller states, liked the "overrepresentation" of those states by the addition of two Senate seats per state, and therefore also liked the idea of electing a president on the basis of one vote per congressional district, with the two statewide votes going to the state winner – the system already in place in Nebraska and Maine.
Democrats, who controlled the House, did not like these ideas and preferred direct popular vote.
The amendment they proposed in response to Nixon's suggestion, which passed the House in 1969 by an overwhelming vote of 338-70, provided for direct popular election, with 40 percent required to win, and a run-off if no candidate got to 40 percent.
The amendment left to future congressional legislation the filling of vacancies caused by the death, resignation or disability of nominees before the election or of victors in the post-election period.
Nixon endorsed the House proposal and recommended it to the Senate.
But when it reached the Senate floor in September 1970, small-state and Southern senators filibustered the bill. Two attempts at cloture – the technical term for the super majority (60-40) required to end a filibuster – failed, and the resolution was laid aside on Oct. 5. Nixon and Congress went on to other matters.
Early in his term, Jimmy Carter, who had just eked out a narrow win in the Electoral College, revived the House amendment by including it in his election reform package of March 22, 1977.
Since everyone knew the House would approve it again, the proposal started in the Senate. After months of debate, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the plan on Sept. 15, 1977, by a vote of 9-8. But the Senate leadership knew it faced another filibuster and had many priorities greater than the amendment. It agreed that the bill would be allowed to die and be brought up again early in the next Congress, the 96th.
On the first day of the new Congress in January 1979, Senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, proposed the amendment again. Unfortunately for its proponents, blacks and Jews joined conservatives and Southerners in opposition to the changes, arguing that their influence was maximized in the Electoral College by their ability to swing the vote in large, well-represented, urban states.
Although the members of this left-right coalition were recruited by very different arguments, there were enough of them to defeat the bill when it got to the Senate floor in July. The Senate voted in favor by 51-48, 15 votes less than the two-thirds required under the Constitution.
Since the next five presidential elections were won by relatively large margins, the question of the Electoral College failed to agitate anyone until this year, when all the old arguments have revived once more.
It seems that Americans are aware of the weaknesses of their system only when they demonstrate themselves, but rapidly forget its problems when they are not thrust before them. And it's a safe bet that, although a majority of the population supports a change in the Electoral College, the minority that supports it is well enough represented in the political system to ensure that the Electoral College will once again endure.
