MSNBC: Duval County (Florida) Supervisor of Elections Resigns

[VolcanoJen]

Steven Uhlfelder, MSNBC's Florida Election Law Expert, just reported from Tallahassee that Governor Bush announced that the Duval County Supervisor of Elections resigned a few hours ago, for "health reasons." Uhlfelder reports that he had been highly criticized for early voting problems in Duval County.

Searching for link...

ON EDIT: LINK

Duval County Supervisor of Elections resigns - Jacksonville Times-Union

Excerpt:

Duval County Supervisor of Elections John Stafford Jr. today resigned his position.

Stafford cited health concerns as the reason for his departure, which is effective immediately.

Stafford has missed most of the year's work after suffering a heart attack. Assistant elections supervisor Dick Carlberg has been leading the office, which has come under fire the past week because of its refusal to add more early voting sites.

[rkc3]

1. Sounds like repubs need healthcare as mush as the rest of us do.

How many repubs have now resigned over health or personal reasons?

I think there's quite a few.

[Unstuck In Time]

5. Is there a republican anywhere capable of saying...

"I screwed up, and I'm sorry" ????

[DenverDem]

2. Duvall County destroyed thousands of ballots in 2000.

You never heard about the massive disinfranchisement and vote fraud that happened there, but it was where the most egregious activity occurred.

[Tansy_Gold]

12. Is Duvall in Rep. Corinne Brown's district?

n/t

[libertad]

24. Yes.

[Tansy_Gold]

32. Thanks. I thought so.

As soon as I saw the headline, I was pretty sure I recognized Duvall Cty. from "Unprecedented."

And of course, I'm hardly surprised.

[Nicholas_J]

17. Destroyed 37,000 ballots

so they could not be used in the re-counts.
Said ballots were incorrectly done.

Corrine Brown filed a law suit here againt the supervisor, he immediately had to reinstate over a thousand dems who he claimed filled out their forms wrong.
His assistant who is now in charge is just as bad but they are being watched so closely that any more cheating will be difficult.

Jesse Jackson is here today railing against Republican voting abuses.

[amandabeech]

19. Didn't Duval have a 2-page Presidential ballot,

with instructions to cast a vote on each page? I seem to recall that it resulted in a very, very high number of ballots in which there was a vote for Gore or Bush on the first page, and a vote for one of the minor candidates or a write-in on the second page.

[jobycom]

27. That wasn't in the instructions

It did have a two page ballot, and you had to flip to get to the second page, but the instructions said to vote only once in each category. There were stories of voting guides which told people to vote on each page, but since sometimes there was more than one race on each page, and no one seems to have had problems figuring that out, I don't believe that was a big problem. The same people who supposedly screwed up for president could figure out how to distinguish different races for every other position.

I haven't seen a breakdown of how the ballot was laid out, and whether most of the overvotes involved a candidate from each page. That would be interesting. I've done that for the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach, and while the majority of the overvotes involved a candidate from each page, there were thousands that didn't.

[amandabeech]

34. Thanks for debunking that rumor.

I'd sure like to see those double "punched" ballots. Florida obviously will be a complete Repug mess again. *Sigh*

[ParanoidPat]

41. Here's the ballots to prove it!

Good info on Florida 2000 from, http://www.failureisimpossible.com/floridafollies/ballot_irreg.htm





The "controversy" stemmed from some people's insistence that the 'generic' instructions on how to use the Votomatic Punch Card System contained the conflicting instruction "Vote all pages" as illustrated below.

[Nicholas_J]

30. Yes

those were the invalid votes that were thrown out

[lark]

38. Yes

I live in Duval County and noticed that right off. It said vote for one candidate on each and every page, and I believe there were 5 pages of candidates for President. I couldn't believe all the names or the instructions. I even pointed it out to the poll worker. She asked me if I voted more than once and I said no, so she said obviously people are smart enough to know to disregard the directions. The problem is a lot of people didn't figure it out - as planned by the Repugs.

lark

[lark]

37. They now have the voting machines to cheat for them

I don't know if it's this way everywhere, but in Fl. the only counties that I know of to install touch screen voting are Dem. The Repug counties got the optical scan machines.

They already did a test run when Jeb ran for governor. His signature fight was against a class room size amendment. It passed by 60 some percent of the vote and he was caught before the on tape stating he had a "sneaky plan" to prevent it's implementation. If 60+ percent of Floridians wanted this, why did the results show him winning by 20-30 percnet. Even more funny, polls had it neck and neck. Later, it came out there in Orange County (Orlando) no Dem votes were counted - the machines marked every single vote as Repug.

I think Kerry will win, but I don't know if the "results" will ever be known.

Sorry to be so pessimistic. I'm having flashbacks from 2000.

lark

[Samantha]

36. There are 22,000 "overvotes" in Duval County yet to be counted

from the 2000 Election. When canvassed by the Democrats as to how many votes they had not counted, the answer was 200 - 300 at the most. This is why Gore did not chose this county for a recount. It was later discovered that the actual number of overvotes was 22,000.

90% of these are projected to have been for Al Gore. This is a county containing a large number of African-Americans, and that is where the 90 percent estimate comes from. 90% of the African-American community voted for Gore in 2000. Many of these votes were punched for Gore, but also had his name written in. Discerning the "intent of the voter" as dictated by Florida law did not come into play when counting the votes; suppressing the votes of the African-American community did.

[ParanoidPat]

42. Actually, the number of 'spoiled' ballots was 27,000......

......as detailed here, http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/111300/met_4597444.html

Monday, November 13, 2000

Story last updated at 11:12 p.m. on Sunday, November 12, 2000

Likely-Gore votes voided in Duval

By Mary Maraghy
Times-Union staff writer

Mike Langton, chairman of the Northeast Florida Gore campaign, said Sunday he was upset to find that many of the 27,000 voided presidential ballots in Duval County were in predominantly black areas.

A Times-Union review found that of the 27,000 ballots whose presidential votes were voided in Duval County, nearly 42 percent came from City Council Districts 7, 8, 9 and 10, though those districts accounted for just 20 percent of all ballots cast for president countywide. More than 11,300 of the 59,650 ballots in those four districts -- about 19 percent -- did not count in the presidential race.

Those four council districts, all north of downtown, are overwhelmingly Democratic, and voters there favored Gore. Of the votes that were counted, about 80 percent went to Gore.

In contrast, in District 4 on the city's Southside, 64 percent of voters preferred Bush. About 24,200 votes were cast for president there, with just more than 1,800 -- or about 7.5 percent -- tossed out.

"It's very disturbing that those numbers are that high," Langton said. "Something's awry here. It's disproportionately out of whack."

<More>

Looks like we need to keep a close watch on Districts 7, 8, 9, and 10 this time around! :evilgrin:

[libertad]

3. He's been in the hospital for months with heart problems and

I've heard he's extremely ill.

[Unstuck In Time]

33. Karma happens. n/t

[w4rma]

4. I wonder if the BFEE told him to do something he refused to do but instead

of blowing it wide open in the press, he put the Republican Party (his political party?) first and foremost over the nation's health and just resigned so that the BFEE could install someone else who was actually willing to go through with whatever it is.

[amber dog democrat]

7. like an offer he could not refuse.

- if he wants to stay healthy. Corleone, Soprano, * Bush - 3 great American crime families.

" Its nothing personal, its just politics"

[Boredtodeath]

6. In the middle of an early voting fiasco in Florida

And he up and quits????? In the middle of an election??????

Early voting opened in Florida today. Reports indicated it is an unmitigated disaster!

[Wapsie B]

8. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...heath reasons......

Sure, I'll buy it for half a second. Wonder why he picked now of all times to get out? Some new revelation coming out?

[libertad]

10. He actually hasn't been in his office at all this year. He's near death.

He should have resigned last year.

[VegasWolf]

11. Probably worried about going to jail if he follows Jeb again! n/t

[lark]

39. Sorry folks, this one's for real

He has not worked in eight months. I do wonder why he waited until now to resign, though???

lark

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. Dirty Duval in 2000...

....nothin' different in 2004.

PBC and Miami-Dade got all the coverage, but the bix fixing happened in Duval.

[MidwestTransplant]

13. Was this guy a Rep or Dem

Does Jeb get to apppoint a successor?

[VolcanoJen]

14. He's a Republican - great article about him here, from 2001

John Stafford Jr: Today brings an epilogue to their election dramas

I'd forgotten that Duval County had one of Florida's highest rates (9.07%) of invalid ballots.

Floridians - is Duval County heavily Republican?

[lark]

40. Duval = strong Repug

However, Duval also has a very large African-American population - and it was in those precincts that the votes were disallowed.

They also did crap like moving the precincts without notice in the urban area - all kinds of unAmerican actions.

lark

[Cerridwen]

15. Duval Country folks, who would have replaced him if he'd resigned

a year ago? Rather than waiting until it's too late to fill the position?

[libertad]

16. They just re-elected him in the last election (2002). He probably

already knew he was ill when he ran for re-election. There were several opponents including a Democrat who lost. Duval is VERY Republican, but there is hope if most of the newly registered voters are African-American Democrats. (Judging by the Voting Rally hosted by Representative Corrine Brown that they just covered on the noon news , this is the case.) In 2000, over 20,000 votes from Duval were thrown out in heavily African-American precincts, under his watch.

[jobycom]

18. Could be a sign that his conscience is taking its toll

This is the man who ran the Duvall elections in 2000. For those who don't remember: Florida was called for Gore in 2000 based on exit polls and projections based on early returns. Duvall was one of the counties that the experts watched, knowing that a heavy turnout in certain precincts was good for Gore.

After Florida was called, JEB got on the phone (he was on camera when he did it) and when he got off the phone, he assured the media things were about to change. Suddenly, all the networks announced that Florida was taken out of Gore's column because of computer glitches that miscounted votes in some key areas. Yes, Duvall was one of the two key areas. Interestingly, the computer glitches both occured in Democratic areas. The rest of the night all the voting went Bush's way, and Gore was ready to concede, when suddenly the numbers from the two Democratic regions were re-released, and Bush's lead began evaporating.

Duvall had 27,000 uncountable ballots, all from a few Democratic precincts. Somewhere aroung 20% of the voters in these districts were somehow unable to cast their ballots properly for president, though of course they did not screw up on any of the other positions on the ballot. Most of these were overvotes, where they punched Gore and someone else.

Early reports from Duvall suggested tampering. Some poll workers claimed that the ballots they handled looked like someone had been punching them with a knife, possibly doublepunching ballots that were at one time cast properly.

Later, when NORC did the handcount of the ballots, after the election, and proved that Gore won, they weren't allowed to view Duvall's ballots for a long time, and in the end, though they finally got access to most of them, there were still 2000 that Duvall refused to let them view, despite a court order requiring them to. Rumor is that these ballots were the most obviously tampered with.

I'll live the rest of my life being absolutely sure that BushCo double punched those ballots. The official excuse-- that they were all just a bunch of dumb black voters who couldn't read ballot instructions-- is sick, and beyond belief.

Maybe Stafford's conscience has destroyed his body. Maybe the fact that every dead child in Iraq was made possible by cheating in this district ways on some part of him. Maybe. I know it's sick to talk this way about a dying man, but what happened in his county under his watch has cost 4000 American lives, and 100,000 Iraqi and Afghani lives. It's hard for me to be compassionate in this case.

[gatlingforme]

20. My question is why are all these morons being re-elected?

[libertad]

23. Katherine Harris is considered a major heroine around here.

They admire the most evil, underhanded Republicans here in FL. Hundreds sent her flowers and elected her to the House. Jeb won re-election after that fiasco, too.

[gatlingforme]

25. Amazing.... Harris is the devil herself who can't even vote correctly n/t

[libertad]

26. It is pretty amazing around here. The stupidity is beyond

belief.

[jobycom]

29. Two words: The Media

Read Greg Palast's book, the best democracy money can buy, or seek out "Into the Buzzsaw," a collection of essays by respected journalists who have had major stories rejected based on political bias.

Palast describes how just as he was getting hard evidence of the corruption involving the felons list, the American media stopped running his stories. He was told point blank by, I think, CNN, that they were not going to run any more stories critical of the Florida election.

Check out the stories after the NORC hand count was released. Every headline read "Bush would have won recount!" but every story admitted, way down near the bottom, that in fact Gore won every conceivable recount. The media was not trying to report the truth, they were trying to reassure people that Bush was legitimate.

Because of this rewriting, and believe me as an historian I can tell you it's not isolated to the present media, people don't think anything much happened in Florida, and when someone points out what did happen, people are as likely to reject the evidence as some type of conspiracy theory. It's the same reason people don't know that Columbus enslaved children for sex purposes, or that in reality the Pilgrims were invited to an annual Indian feast that we know think of as a white holiday, or that there were millions of original inhabitants in this hemisphere who were deliberately slaughtered to make way for the Europeans. Journalists are afraid to report negatives about America. A rigged election would not only undermine democracy, but would call into question to whole Iraqi invasion, and they just won't do that.

So they report as though everything was basically equal, so people assume that those of us who tell the real story are just wacko, and they turn against us and back to the cheaters, who have never been revealed as cheaters.

That's why Gore didn't accuse anyone of cheating. That's why Kerry doesn't say "Bush lied" about WMDs. It goes against what the media tells people to accept, and thus, it backfires on the accuser.

On edit: It is also why Gore has been obsessed with the media since conceding. He taught a course on it at Columbia, and he is now buying a media outlet. he knows, he just can't say it all without sounding crazy.

[amandabeech]

21. Very interesting about who did the double-punching.

See my post #19 about the two-page Presidential ballot.

[jobycom]

28. I responded up there. nt

[VegasWolf]

22. Might have been that scare he got waking up next to the horses head

[Supersedeas]

31. do you smell an EASY scapegoat??? Blame the heart-attack guy for these

....errr...irregularies....errr...problems.

[struggle4progress]

35. Sounds like yet another Republican trying to stay two steps ...

... ahead of the law ...

[camero]

43. They only have one site for early voting

They have a handy scapegoat willing to take the fall there.