Close-up
2000 election fallout haunts Florida's secretary of state

By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Times

RED HUBER / ORLANDO SENTINEL Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, carrying her completed ballot Friday in Orlando during her state's early voting, says, "I get to my wits' end with all the continual references to 2000. The last time I checked the calendar, it's 2004."

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The Republican appointee — whose predecessor, Katherine Harris, figured prominently in the 2000 election debacle — is pretty fed up. And this year's election is more than a week away.

"These people disappoint me," she said of her many critics. "I get to my wits' end with all the continual references to 2000. The last time I checked the calendar, it's 2004."

But memories of 2000 haven't faded in Florida or in many other states where Hood's counterparts also are under fire. In Missouri and Ohio, Republican secretaries of state are accused of using their offices to sway the election for President Bush.

In Iowa and New Mexico, Democrats in charge of elections are accused of making decisions to boost the prospects of Sen. John Kerry.

The debate highlights the increasingly controversial role played by secretaries of state: interpreting state and federal voting laws and setting complex ground rules that tens of millions U.S. voters follow to cast ballots properly.

Hood, the first Florida secretary of state appointed by the governor instead of elected by voters, insists she has set her political preferences aside. Unlike Harris, who served as co-chairwoman of Bush's 2000 Florida campaign, Hood is staying out of the GOP campaign.

Others, though, straddle a blurry line between the administration of elections and partisanship.

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is serving as co-chairman of the president's re-election efforts there, while Republicans Dean Heller of Nevada and Jan Brewer of Arizona are campaigning on Bush's behalf while fulfilling election duties as secretary of state. Joe Manchin III, West Virginia's Democratic secretary of state, is running for governor while pitching in to help Kerry.

Republican secretaries of state nationwide allegedly have blocked efforts to open early polling in minority areas, where voters are likely to support Kerry. Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt went to court this summer to defeat such moves.

Some election experts called for bipartisan federal oversight of voting, pointing to GOP election officials, including Hood, who are requiring voters to check off boxes on a registration form when asked about citizenship, or insisting they cast provisional ballots in the appropriate precinct.
 
Others said many of this year's battles amount to healthy clashes of interpretation of state and federal voting laws.

"Often, accusations of partisan politics are more disagreement about interpretation over the law than actual naked partisan vote grabs," said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearinghouse of election-reform information. "They're legal arguments masquerading as partisan fights."

But voter watchdogs are doubtful and have called for a nonpartisan group to monitor elections nationwide.

"I'm concerned about things I'm seeing, especially in Florida," said Curtis Gans, who heads the nonprofit Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "We need federal standards that can be applied nationwide, with an enforcement agency to follow up on problem states."

In Florida, liberal activists fear a close race again could be marred by flawed recounts and disqualified ballots.

Local election officials have balked at Hood's rule that new registrations be discarded if applicants failed to check the appropriate box affirming their citizenship, even if they signed an oath. Some have chosen to ignore the directive, and state Democrats sued in federal court.

"We have in Florida today the specter of Katherine Harrises past," said Alma Gonzalez, special counsel to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which sued Hood's office over several issues, including the filing of provisional ballots.

"We have to sue her, wrestle her to the ground, pin the Constitution on her before she respects voters rights."

Critics said Harris in 2000 helped swing the election by resisting manual ballot recounts in many counties that could have swung the vote to Democrat Al Gore. Instead, Bush won by 537 votes.

Although Hood had nothing to do with that debacle, she can't seem to shake the comparisons to her predecessor. Voter activists question her alleged partisan politics and even her grip on reality in dealing with Florida's looming elections.

Hood, a onetime mayor of Orlando, remains defiant. She refers to the activists as political mischief-makers trying to undermine a fragile voter confidence in the election process.

"We want the light to shine on Florida and show the nation we've made changes. Yet people are trying their dead-level best to make people think we're back in 2000," she said. "That's unfair."

But many activists said Hood is more divisive than her predecessor, often placing administrative convenience over voter rights.

Gonzalez said that after claiming to run an open shop, Hood initially refused to allow activists to witness a test run of touch-screen voting machines.

This spring, the secretary of state also tried to keep secret a list of felons — not allowed to vote in Florida — who had been removed from the voting rolls; a Florida newspaper got hold of the list and found glaring inaccuracies. The "purge" list inordinately was dominated by blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, while Hispanics, traditionally more conservative voters, were left off.

This week, Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat from South Florida whose district includes Palm Beach County, where many paper ballots were disqualified in 2000, testified in federal court that the new touch-screen voting machines are "inherently incapable" of manual recounts.

Wexler sued Hood's office, seeking a U.S. District Court judge to quickly impose some short-term fixes and long-term remedies that require touch-screen voting machines to issue paper receipts like those at bank ATMs. State lawyers, representing the secretary of state, said the new technology meets legal requirements.

Hood questioned the timing and motives of the challenges.

"If there were questions that people needed answers to, why all of a sudden, at the eleventh hour, are they deluging the courts?" she said. "Where were they a year ago? Or two years ago?"