 |
 Gore's Lead 10 Times Over Bush's Palm Beach Post Review: Over-Votes Cost Gore the Election Florida Protesters Scorn Arrival Today of George W. Bush |
|
By Jack Nichols
Ms. LePore claims that she'd presented the controversial ballot to Palm Beach Democratic leaders prior to the election, a claim they steadfastly deny. Many believe that in collusion with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's forces she deliberately sabotaged Democratic voters. They emphasize that she was not accessible on Election Day, November 7, to respond to voter complaints and difficulties. Although Broward County ballots with chads and dimples had been accepted by Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, thus establishing a statewide standard for the acceptance of such ballots, Ms. LePore and other Palm Beach officials failed to recount local ballots in a timely matter. This is because the Palm Beach Supervisor , unlike Broward County officials, deliberately stopped the Palm Beach count on Thanksgiving Day. This delay allowed Katherine Harris to blithely reject Palm Beach's late-arriving tallies. The apparent collusion between Katherine Harris and Theresa LePore and the subsequent struggle waged by the Bush camp to prevent vote recounts is, says, Bob Kunst of the Oral Majority, "the missing link that A.P. and the media in general has ignored. The election was purposefully stolen. The media is trying to hide this fact in the name of what they dubiously call 'stability' "
Negative responses to Katherine Harris, on the other hand, came from a broad cross section of Floridians last week. Ms. Harris had been chosen to present the winner of a horse race with a trophy. The Daily Racing Form carried a brief reference to the occasion, a story oddly ignored by the mainstream media. The Daily Racing Form's Mike Welsch wrote: "Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State who was a central figure during the disputed presidential election, was booed lustily by the 19,150 at Gulfstream on Sunday as she presented the trophy following the Rampart Handicap. "I've never been booed in my life," Harris told reporters in the winner's circle." On Sunday Kunst spoke to GayToday from Tallahassee, on his way into the Florida Panhandle where he will protest George W. Bush's arrival today. "There are anti-Bush demonstrations happening all over Florida today," he exulted, "in Tampa, Orlando, and even Jacksonville." Mary Frances Barry, chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission which is investigating the Florida voting fiasco, was interviewed on C-Span yesterday. She expressed astonishment over the all-too-obvious travesty Florida's election system had become. As a historian, Ms. Barry noted, she was not so naïve as to think there had been no other instances of voter irregularities in the annals of U.S. elections. "But," she said, "we have not had anything like the level of allegations about peoples' inability to even get to the polls as we had in Florida this time."
Ms. Barry, an Independent voter, also indicated that Gov. Jeb Bush, who had promised to turn Florida's voting machinery into a "world class" system, had also been less than forthcoming. "We wanted to question him for a long period of time," she noted, "but he kept saying, or his assistants kept saying that he couldn't come, or he had to give a speech or some other reason." Jeb Bush did show up at the Civil Rights hearing, however, if even for a short period. Ms. Barry indicated that his negligence spelled a violation of Florida law which plainly requires a method for the handling of voter complaints. "We found out one important thing," she said, "and that is that he had not established any process to do that." |
