The presidency of the United States could hinge on court challenges to the way Palm Beach County's ballot was configured on election day, key Florida supporters of Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday.
As Democrats prepared to send elections lawyers throughout the state, a group of voters filed a lawsuit Wednesday saying the county's ballot was confusing enough to merit a new presidential election in Palm Beach County.
And state Sen. Ron Klein, a vice chairman of Gore's Florida campaign, said more litigation is likely, possibly as earl than 1,800 votes as Florida's 67 counties recounted their ballots. In Palm Beach County, Democrats say, many of the 3,407 votes that went to Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan may have come from Gore supporters who were confused by the ballot's layout.
Unlike ballots in Florida's other 66 counties, which listed candidates on a single page, Palm Beach County's ballot listed 10 presidential candidates on two facing pages with a single column of punch holes running between them.
Gore was the second candidate on the left page, but the corresponding punch hole was third from the top.
"It is clear at this moment that the votes for Pat Buchanan are distinctly relevant to the question of which candidate won Florida and which candidate shall be the next president of the United States," U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, declared at a midday news conference outside the county elections office.
Buchanan's 3,407 votes Tuesday were a mere 0.8 percent of the county total. But they were considerably more than the 0.29 percent he got statewide.
Democrats also suggested that Gore may have lost thousands more votes because bewildered voters marked their ballots for more than one presidential candidate.
In Palm Beach County, 19,120 ballots -- 4.1 percent of the total -- were disqualified Tuesday because voters marked more than one presidential candidate. Only 1.7 percent of ballots were rejected for that reason in Broward County and only 2.7 percent in Miami-Dade. Those counties listed presidential candidates on a single page.
About another 10,000 ballots were thrown out because they had no names punched at all.
"The presidency of the United States hinges on the 19,000 people who have been disenfranchised in Palm Beach County by an extremely confusing ballot," Wexler said.
Reeve Bright, the attorney for the county GOP, agreed 19,000 was a large number of ballots disqualified for voting for more than one candidate.
But he and other Republicans disputed Democrats' claims the election was tainted.
"People had ample opportunity to challenge this ballot" before the election, Gov. Jeb Bush said during a Tallahassee news conference. A sample ballot was made public before the election.
"The challenge probably should have occurred, as the law allows, before the election," Bush said.
But Klein said the sample ballot did not look as confusing as the real thing.
"Until you put the ballot in the bracket, you didn't notice it was slightly misaligned," Klein said.
In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, three Democratic voters claimed they were confused by the punch-card ballots on Election Day and fear they may have accidentally voted for Buchanan. Their suit asked that the ballots be declared invalid and a new election be granted in Palm Beach County.
Andre Fladell, a chiropractor from Delray Beach, Alberta McCarthy, a city commission member from Delray Beach, and Lillian Gaines, a civic worker from West Palm Beach, filed the lawsuit in Palm Beach County Circuit Court.
The lawsuit is a complaint for declaratory relief, meaning the voters want the election results declared null and void and are asking for a re-vote in the presidential race to be held in Palm Beach County.
"We want to redo things the right way," said attorney Henry Handler, who is representing the voters.
The voters are suing the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, which includes Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, as well as candidates George Bush, Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman.
Handler said his clients were confused by the placement of the candidates' names and the corresponding punch holes on the ballot.
"They're very concerned that their votes went to Buchanan or were invalidated," Handler said.
The lawsuit claims that Palm Beach was the only county to list the candidates on two pages of the ballot.
"It is believed that such (a) format had never before been used in a Presidential election and that said format created and contributed to much voter confusion," the lawsuit states. "All 66 other counties in Florida listed all candidates in a straightforward, non-confusing manner."
According to the lawsuit, LePore was at fault because she failed to place Gore's and Lieberman's names in second place, because it appeared that Buchanan's name was in second place on the ballot.
LePore has said the ballot was proper because Gore-Lieberman was placed immediately below Bush-Cheney on the left page.
The law says the rule applies to ballots in which voters use an "X" to choose their candidates. It does not mention ballots that are hole-punched.
The case has been assigned randomly to Circuit Judge Stephen Rapp. Handler said he would request a hearing in the case within the next few days.
Handler said the law also applies to punched ballots. "We think that the law applies to any ballot that's not tabulated on a machine, a machine that self-tabulates," he said.
Another law applies when the county uses "an electronic or electromechanical voting system" with card or paper ballots. That law does not specify the order in which the parties are to be listed. But Handler said that law applies only to voting booths.
LePore said she decided to put the presidential candidates on two pages rather than one so their names could be printed in larger type more easily readable for older voters.
U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, D-West Palm Beach, noted that LePore is an elected Democrat. And while Democrats questioned Buchanan's votes from heavily Democratic enclaves such as the Century Village retirement community in West Palm Beach, Foley noted that his Reform Party rival drew a similar number of votes from the same precincts.
Wexler, though, said the number of votes Buchanan received from some heavily Democratic precincts was "inconceivable."
He also questioned the strong showing in Palm Beach County of Socialist presidential candidate David McReynolds, who was listed just below Buchanan on the right side of the ballot -- in effect to the right of and just below Gore. Of the 535 votes McReynolds received statewide, 302 were from Palm Beach County.
Klein said he and other Democrats had gathered hundreds of written statements from voters who said they were confused by the ballot on Tuesday.
"When it comes down to the fact that this is going to elect a president of the United States, the issue is so important that it needs to be challenged and looked at by a court," Klein said.
"The legal question is, was there statutory compliance in the presentation of the ballot?"
ut former Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith, a Republican, said he doubted the questions about Palm Beach County's ballot were serious enough to overturn Tuesday's results.
"Unless they can show fraud or extreme irregularity, I don't think you can have an election thrown out," Smith said.
The county's Republican state Committeeman, Kevin McCarty, said he wasn't surprised that Democrats were planning to challenge the county ballot in court.
"It's to be expected. But I hope Al Gore does the honorable thing like Richard Nixon did -- that he just concedes," said McCarty, referring to Nixon's decision not to contest his narrow 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy.
Staff writers Kathryn Quigley, Mary Ellen Klas, Joel Engelhardt and Marcia Gelbart contributed to this story.
Copyright 2000, Palm Beach Post.
Reprinted with permission.
