MILITARY VOTES STILL BEING DENIED DESPITE AG'S PLEA
Latest information from FOX -- This came in after the article which is included below was written:
Even though the Florida Attorney General has written a letter to all counties in Florida instructing them to count all the military ballots, even the ones with NO post marks, the Florida Democratic Machine is standing by its decision NOT to count them.
If the Democrats allow this issue to stand, it could destroy the Democratic Party for the 2002 election. People may have short memories on most political matters. But when it comes to a son or daughter, grandchild, niece, nephew, husband, wife or next door neighbor, who is in harm's way protecting our freedom, voters will remember that the Democrats denied these military members of our family the right to vote for their commander in chief.
The best thing that could happen to George Bush's chance to become President is for the Democrats to continue to deny the military vote.
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http://foxnews.com/election_night/112000/military_ballots.sml
Combat Over Military Votes
Monday, November 20, 2000
By Sharon Kehnemui
Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth told county elections boards Monday that overseas ballots from the military should be counted if they have been either postmarked or signed by the individual by the date of the election.
Beth A. Keiser/AP
Monday: Protesters hold signs outside the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee.
This could open up a Republican bid to recount some 1,500 overseas ballots, primarily from military personnel, that were thrown out this weekend because they lacked the postmarks required by Florida law.
Under public relations pressure, Democrats said they did not want to appear to be excluding military personnel from the count.
"Let me just say that Vice President Gore and I would never authorize, and not tolerate, a strategy that was aimed at disqualifying military ballots," Gore running mate Joe Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.
"You know, I don't know enough about the law, and I'd say that I certainly would not want to — I would not countenance, and I'm sure Al Gore would not, any policy that was aimed at excluding military ballots. And I'm sure that that wasn't the case."
But a five-page memo drafted by Gore campaign attorney Mark Herron circulating publicly Monday revealed that Democratic officials were gearing up election observers to look for errors in the military ballots that would disqualify them.
Specifically, the memo provided a sample protest form for overseas ballots that listed 11 reasons for rejections, including late postmarks, domestic postmarks "(including Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.)," or no postmarks.
In Florida, canvassing boards threw out nearly 40 percent of overseas ballots, primarily because their postmarks were illegible or non-existent.
Judge Charles Burton, head of the canvassing board in Palm Beach County, told Fox News that his canvassers had been "pretty liberal" in accepting overseas postmarks. "If it was close, we were going to err on the side of having the vote count. The ones we excluded were really very excludable and I don't see any reason to go back over this."
But retired Army Col. David Hackworth said that it is unfair to reject military mail without postmarks, because it is uncommon for military personnel, particularly in combat or near-combat areas such as Bosnia or Haiti, to apply postage to the mail.
"In many cases overseas, it's free mail," he said, explaining that outposted soldiers don't usually stamp their mail before a carrier comes to pick it up and take it to a military post office.
Hackworth also criticized elections officials for their inflexibility.
"By a bureaucratic glitch, our soldiers have been disenfranchised," he said.
A Pentagon official told Fox News that the number of ballots thrown out in Florida does seem like "an awful lot," but he is not sure of the circumstances surrounding their disposal. He said that some ballots may have been postmarked after Nov. 7, but in those cases that doesn't mean the military personnel didn't mail them on time. Rather, by the time they reached a post office after being collected from the middle of the ocean or out in the field, he said, it was after Nov. 7.
Deputy Director of the Military Postal Service Agency (MPSA) Eugene M. DuCom told Bush campaign attorney Brigham McCown on Friday that Department of Defense (DOD) regulations require all mail processed through the MPSA to be postmarked, but that oftentimes it is not done.
"There are instances when time constraints do not allow for proper postmarking/cancellation of the mail. The last flight may be departing the ship and the mail has to get on it... No one is going to refuse to take a letter or ballot at the last minute because they do not have time to postmark it. It could be weeks before they see mail service again," DuCom wrote.
McCown, who has been observing the hand count in Palm Beach County, said that ballots came to the elections board from as far as Poland, Madagascar, Israel and Germany. Of the 55 ballots arriving from overseas, 19 were disqualified for various reasons, including illegible postmarks. McCown said that in some counties, as many as 80 to 90 percent of overseas ballots were thrown out at the discretion of the canvassing boards.
"I think the real issue is there's not consistency across the state," he said.
McCown said that ballot material is postage-free so there's no requirement that ballots have postmark/cancellation markings on them. "Why bother if there is no stamp?" he asked.
McCown said that he will continue to seek ways to include military ballots, and that Butterworth's ruling does not change much because the absentee ballots included a signature line, but no space to write the date.
Bush campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker told Fox News Monday that the campaign is undecided about what action it will take, "but it's definitely something that we're taking a look at."
