So many partisan shenanigans to get the right voters registered. Now the judge who extended Florida's voter registration deadline is trying to sort out a second voting rights case in another lawsuit brought by Democrats, who want the courts to give more protection to mail ballot voters with signature problems.
More "protection" to mail ballot voters. I can't help but laugh.
Where were the Democrats in 2012 when Mack Bernard wanted his mail-in votes protected? I'll tell you where. They were busy doing their best to STOP the court from protecting the rights of Haitian voters who cast absentee ballots for him. Ballots that rightfully would have won him the Democratic primary in then-District 27.
Does anybody remember the Mack Bernard drama four years ago?
Out-of-favor Bernard, an incumbent representative, ended up losing the election by 17 votes.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher -- unfailing queen of mischief at election time -- discarded at least 40 absentee ballots and nine provisional ballots cast in Bernard's favor. Democrat Bucher said the absentee ballots were rejected because of alleged discrepancies between the signatures found on the ballots and those in voter registration records.
Never mind that Bernard produced 38 notarized affidavits to prove the voters were who they said they were. The Florida Democratic Party leadership and the Florida Education Association wanted Jeff Clemens of Lake Worth in and Bernard out. Despite the closeness of the race, Bucher never made a further effort to discover the truth.
It was gang-up-on-Haitian-legislators time in Tallahassee. Haitian lawmakers hold moderate views, I was told, sometimes fail to toe the party line and the Dems couldn't have that. Only Daphne Campbell survived.
A South Florida political consultant told Sunshine State News at the time that Bernard and at least one other Haitian legislator might be victims of a "political ethnic cleansing" by state Democratic Party officials because of the two representatives' voting record in favor of business and school choice. The "other" Haitian referenced was the late Rep. John Patrick Julien who lost his primary by an even smaller margin than Bernard (13 votes), also to an opponent who had reportedly received the tacit backing of the Democratic Party establishment.
Bernard did challenge the decision in court. "The right to vote is perhaps the most fundamental liberty enjoyed by citizens in a democratic society," the lawsuit said.
That should sound eerily familiar to U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who used a similar line in his ruling last week to extend the voter registration deadline.
"When election officials improperly and thus illegally discard ballots without following the law or the previously approved consistent standards they have set in the past, they have the result of disenfranchising the electorate," the lawsuit continued.
Didn't matter. Bernard lost the court case.
Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis had little option but to rule against Bernard. The law states that when the legality of an absentee ballot is in dispute because of a perceived discrepancy between signatures, a circuit court judge may not consider any other evidence beyond a visual comparison of the two signatures.
Bernard's lawyer, former Republican state Rep. J.C. Planas, insisted the judge is allowed to consider other evidence. "... The canvassing board had many tools to properly identify that this was the voter. They did not take advantage of those tools to the detriment of the voter. And we believe the ... court, when evaluating the issue, should say the canvassing board should use all tools available."
Fast forward to 2016 and guess what? The state and national Democratic parties want the judge "to declare that everyone who votes by mail be given the same chance to cure a signature defect that voters who neglect to sign the ballot envelope are allowed to do," wrote the Tampa Bay Times on Friday. Judge Walker has scheduled a hearing for Monday.
The ironic part of this story is that Walker will get a lot of information to make his decision from a report by University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith. And who asked Smith to analyze all mail ballots rejected in Florida's 2012 presidential election? Why, the Democrats. Smith found that about 1 percent of all mail ballots statewide were rejected, and that in the 11 counties he studied, Democrats were more likely to have their ballots rejected than were Republicans.
Well, of course they were. The counties Smith studied included Democrat-heavy Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, where English is often a second language. And the counties together, including Alachua, Collier, Hillsborough, Leon, Osceola, Pinellas, Sarasota and Seminole, are exactly where the Democrats want to concentrate their final registration/get-out-the-vote purge.
"No right is more precious," I believe Judge Walker said. Mack Bernard could have used the judge's devotion to voting rights in 2012. Just as the Democrats use it now -- "use" being the operative word.
I think Leslie Wimes, Democratic African American Women's Caucus founder and president, sums it up best.
"I'm not surprised at the double standard," she said. "Remember, at one point our current party chair Allison Tant was with a firm that had a hand in purging people of color from the voting rolls. Her husband represented Bush in Bush v. Gore. Things with the Democratic Party in Florida are never what they seem, especially when it comes to people of color. I feel for Mack Bernard. Having those votes challenged by the very people who are now saying they shouldn't be challenged has to be tough. They stole that seat from him. No two ways about it."
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
