Overseas Absentee Battle Continues

Nov. 22, 2000 -- George W. Bush is asking a Florida state court to mandate the inclusion of thousands of overseas military ballots that were disqualified by Florida elections officials over the weekend.

The lawsuit, which covers 13 predominantly Republican counties in Florida, asks a Leon County judge to declare ballots from armed forces personnel valid, even if the ballots are lacking a postmark. The case has been assigned to Circuit Judge Terry Lewis, who earlierruled in the dispute over the deadline for certification of all ofFlorida’s ballots. It was his ruling the Florida Supreme Courtreversed Tuesday night.

Overseas military absentee ballots continue to be a point of controversy in the Florida vote, as Republicans attempt to gain political leverage by claiming Democrats have unfairly excluded ballots from armed forces personnel.

Republicans have charged since the weekend that Democrats unfairly sought to disqualify as many overseas absentee ballots from the military as possible, thinking the votes in question would favor their presidential candidate, Bush. Democrats insist they only attempted to prevent illegal ballots from being counted, with no focus on the military.

Common Ground?

At a noon press conference today in Austin, Texas, Bush called on Democratic rival Al Gore to join him in making sure disqualified military absentee ballots in Florida are counted if they “were signed and received in time [to] count.”

The Gore camp, however, is maintaining that only those legally valid military ballots should be counted.

Standing outside the vice president’s private residence in Washington, Gore campaign chairman William Daley said today the Gore campaign already is “strongly committed to seeing that all the votes are fully and fairly counted within the law, and that of course includes all military ballots that are legally cast as well.”

Gore earlier had offered to meet personally with Bush in an effort to reach common ground on the election turmoil. In his midday statement today, Bush did not directly address Gore’s proposal to meet, but suggested compromise on military ballots might be a point of conciliation.

“If Vice President Gore is seeking some common ground, I propose agood place to start: He should join me in calling upon all appropriate authorities in Florida to make sure that overseas military ballots that were signed and received on time count in this election,” Bush said. “Our men and women in uniform overseas should not lose their right to vote. I hope the vice president will personally support me in thiscall.”

Speaking in Florida on Tuesday, retiring Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a decorated Vietnam veteran, voiced the Gore campaign’s position.

“We should not be playing politics with our military,” Kerrey said, calling for military voters to be held to the same standard as everybody else. “If they have a legal ballot, it should be counted. If it’s not a legal ballot, it should not be counted.”

Kerrey added he was in Florida to counteract “irresponsible things being said by the Bush campaign that the vice president was stealing votes, that there’s election fraud, that somehow that he’s incompetent to be commander in chief,” adding that such comments were “reckless, they’re irresponsible and they’re wrong.”

Butterworth: Count Them All

Kerrey’s comments represent a change from the more defensive tone struck on Monday by the Democrats when Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a co-chair of Gore’s campaign in the state, issued a letter urging election officials to count absentee ballots from overseas that do not bear a postmark.

“No man or woman in military service to this nation should havehis or her vote rejected solely due to the absence of a postmark,”Butterworth said in a letter to the state’s 67 county electionssupervisors and other canvassing board members.

Butterworth’s letter said his office “urges supervisors andcanvassing boards to seek a clarifying opinion from the secretaryof state if they have any questions on this matter after review ofthe authorities cited in this letter.”

However, Butterworth’s letter is not binding.

Bush Camp Makes Charges

The issue rose to the surface of Florida’s murky electoral waters this weekend, when the state’s counties submitted their final tally of overseas absentee ballots on Saturday, many of which had been sent in by members of the armed forces.

Florida law mandates that overseas absentee ballots may be accepted for up to 10 days after the election, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day.

Gore had hoped that the tally of these ballots could help him make up a deficit of just 300 votes that had been announced by Secretary of State Katherine Harris on Nov. 14.

But according to the Florida Division of Elections, headed by Harris, Bush gained 1,380 votes in the last round of overseas ballots, compared to just 750 for Gore.

Those figures, which have not yet been certified, increase Bush’s overall lead in Florida to 930 votes, out of nearly 6 million cast statewide.

But roughly 1,400 overseas absentee ballots were thrown out during the last round of vote-counting due to irregularities, including the absence of a postmark or signature. Of the 3,600 overseas ballots examined, about two-thirds were from civilians and one-third from the military.

Last week, Mark Herron, a Tallahassee attorney hired by the Democratic Party, sent a five-page letter to other attorneys across the state with tips on challenging the validity of the overseas ballots.

As a consequence, prominent advisers to Bush went on the attack on Saturday, criticizing Gore in harsh terms for what they characterized as a concerted effort to get Bush votes thrown out.

“No one who aspires to be commander in chief should seek to unfairly deny the votes of the men and women he seeks to command,” said Bush campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes at a news conference Saturday afternoon in Austin, Texas.

Dems: Issue a Red Herring

Democrats have sought to portray the issue of military ballots as a red herring since there is no way to specifically know which absentee ballots were military ballots and since many disqualified ballots were from heavily Democratic counties.

For instance, 206 of 309 overseas absentee ballots examined by Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade County were thrown out.

But in Duval County, where more than two-thirds of the overseas absentee votes received after Nov. 7 favored Bush, all 141 of the ballots thrown out were from military personnel.

Lawyers monitoring the vote-counting in Duval County could distinguish military ballots from those for civilians because they were printed in red ink.

On Sunday, Gore’s running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, said the Democrats had not been singling out potential Republican voters.

“Al Gore and I would never tolerate a systemic effort to disqualify votes from our service people, our military personnel abroad,” Lieberman said on ABCNEWS’ This Week. “We want every vote counted honestly and fairly among the absentee ballots.”

And USA Today, in a survey of 14 Florida counties, has reported that just 11 percent of the overseas absentee ballots disqualified in the latest batch were thrown out for lacking a postmark.

Nonetheless, Democratic officials have recognized that their position of apparently looking to exclude any ballots of doubtful legitimacy appears to be at odds with the repeated calls Gore has made for a “full and fair” count of all ballots cast in Florida.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.