Posted on 10/14/2004 8:07:12 PM PDT by demlosers
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.
An obvious attempt at voter fraud by a Dem operative to make it appear Republicans are guilty? So to give the Dems propaganda fodder to cry foul.
Dems are too stupid to fill out reg cards properly.
You register by party? Where? Never heard of this. I have never been required to list a party when registering.
It doesn't matter which party you are listed under, the only thing that matters is who you vote for.
So why is this even a story?
Yep. It's too obvious. It's a set up. Sorry, but Republicans would have been smarter than that if they were trying to pull something off. It doesn't matter what the ballots say. It's how they vote.
Dems are too stupid to cheat the new computer voting machines.
Thats why 750,000 fewer rats showed up to the polls in 2002 than in 2000, while the GOP was down only 80,000.
2002 was the first year the rats couldn't burn the midnite oil punching thousands of ballots after the polls had closed in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach.
W is going to win Florida big.
i was thinking the same thing.
OR in an electronic system: make the card electronic and the computer would then show you as voted and kick you out if you go to vote and the card had already been validated for that date..
What difference does it make what party you are registered in? The only issue is who you cast your ballot for. Are they so stupid that they think they can only vote for the party in which they are registered? Oh yeah Dems are that stupid.
I agree, it's a set up. This is coordinated just like the AFL-CIO attacks on the GOP offices. This is a little too similar to the story in south Florida.
Exactly....
I am thinking the same thing. Photocopied registration forms......It looks like the Dems are in a panic over the fact that the Democrat backed group ACORN, got busted for throwing away Republican voter registration forms...and only turning in the Democrat forms.
SO..they do this to throw off attention and give them a reason to scream foul and sue.
IT DOES NOT MATTER!...IT IS A GENERAL ELECTION. NOT A PRIMARY!
So it does NOT MATTER what party is checked on the form....you still get to vote.
I live in Alachua County and am active in the GOP, and believe me, we are very careful with registrations; we go over voter regs very carefully when they come in, making sure that they are fully filled out and signed by the individual who brings them in. Registration closed last week, and we hand-carried all the forms there in time for the deadline. If anybody says that there are irregularities in Alachua County, it's because there are a bunch of rabid Democrats here who spend every waking moment thinking up dirty tricks, and this is obviously one of them.
Furthermore, this has been happening all over the state of Florida. In Tampa, ACORN workers "reregistered" voters without their knowledge - as Republicans. ACORN is a solidly Dem left-wing organization founded by Saul Alinsky and allied with the labor unions that invaded GOP offices here a couple of weeks ago.
They do this because they know it has no effect on the person's actual vote, but it sows confusion. An attempt is being made to muddy the waters. This is a concerted strategy.
Actually, this is the Dem version of the Reichstag fire (where the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag and blamed the Jews).
In any group (of registrations) I would expect a little more than 50 percent Democrat," Hill said.
Jeb Bush won by 12 points in 2002? And if you take away multiple voting with Butterfly Ballots (dimpled and hanging chads) from 2000, Republicans do quite well in Florida.
Exactly. Unions are affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party.
How does she know that these are not Pubbies that switched to Dems for the primary, and are now switching back for next years' elections?
I mean, someone voted for Chucky Schumer!
One of the Univ. of California student governments did that with student IDs: you vote, your ID's notched in a particular spot. Elections were typically spread over at least two days, for students who only came to campus MWF or T-Thur.
Then they noticed a spike in the number of students who "lost" their IDs and needed replacements during elections ... a few lost their IDs a few times in two days.
(IMO, this is just a strange story.)
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