Posted on 08/28/2003 5:27:21 AM PDT by D. Brian Carter
Broward County's elections office was littered with mail after last September's primary -- thousands of letters and cards stacked in piles in the mailroom, cubicles, hallways and even Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant's private office. Buried among them were envelopes containing uncounted votes.
Two hundred sixty-eight of those absentee ballots are now stored in a cardboard evidence box at the offices of state prosecutors in downtown Fort Lauderdale, wrapped in rubber bands and still unopened. Investigators never found hundreds of other ballots that election office employees reported seeing in the weeks following the primary.
Even though prosecutors have cleared Oliphant of criminal wrongdoing, their nine-month investigation lays out how her office has careened from crisis to crisis, botched an election and ran up a $1 million deficit.
Transcripts of the interviews they conducted depict a supervisor who cast aside veteran employees and put friends and associates with little experience in charge of the election process. They suspected the uncounted ballots were the fault of a friend of Oliphant's sister who was put in charge of sorting them from the rest of the mail even though he had a history of showing up to work drunk.
"She came in, brought her key people, displaced the talented staff that was there and they made stupid decisions not knowing the laws and not knowing better," Deputy Supervisor Ken Leb told prosecutors in a sworn statement. He termed her a "horrible administrator" and a "loose cannon."
Similar assessments came from Oliphant's friends and foes as well as current and former employees. "Wow, dumb and stupid. She never should have been elected," said Jimmy Davis, who served as Oliphant's public relations adviser but later was fired for sending personal e-mail from his office computer.
Oliphant did not return a request for comment left at her office. In an unsworn statement that she gave prosecutors, she blamed employees and perceived enemies for her office problems even though she publicly has acknowledged that she also made mistakes.
Longtime friend and one-time office manager, Lisa Strachan, was one of the few to defend Oliphant to prosecutors. She said: "If she's not told of situations, if she's kept in the dark pertaining to expenditures? Sure the buck stops with her. But was there any misconduct? Absolutely not."
In the course of their investigation, prosecutors interviewed about 100 government officials, corporate executives, employees, lobbyists, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement personnel and private citizens and served 45 subpoenas for records. They concluded that while Oliphant's actions raise questions about her competency, they could find no evidence she "willfully" neglected her duties or misused public money.
The problems that led to the financial meltdown of the elections office and the botched September election began developing soon after Oliphant took office at the start of 2001, the people interviewed by prosecutors say.
She filled key positions with people with little experience for their jobs. Her finance chief was a billing supervisor for a wireless pager company, and the person in charge of voter registration, outreach and absentee ballots had been a registrar at a small college.
Some people she hired off the street.
Leb met Oliphant in the elevator of their condo building and soon became her computer technician. Treecy Harvey was recuperating from a stroke in the home she rented from Oliphant when Oliphant suggested she apply for a job. June Lewis ran into Oliphant at a festival on Sistrunk Boulevard and said she was looking for work.
"Many times people would show up at the office on a Monday or a Tuesday and just tell me that Mrs. Oliphant had met them over the weekend and that they were here for a job," said Joe Cotter, who twice served as deputy supervisor under Oliphant. He added: "They were severely lacking in qualifications for the positions they were put in."
Employees lived in fear of Oliphant. They told prosecutors of favoritism and temper tantrums. Some said they went for months with no idea what their job title was or how long they would remain employed.
"She was very emotional about the way she assigned things and very paranoid about trusting people," said Jonda Joseph, who briefly worked in the office and now is city clerk in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. "And one person would be doing one thing one day and the next day they would be doing something else. There was constant turmoil in that way, and it made it hard to try to get things done."
Cotter left in January 2002 after reading in the newspaper that Oliphant was hiring a new deputy supervisor. His successor, Walter Foeman, left nine months later when he learned that Oliphant had been persuaded to rehire Cotter.
Bob Cantrell told prosecutors Oliphant demoted him from director of intergovernmental relations to loading-dock worker because he told the news media that 300,000 voters had been assigned new precincts only weeks before the September election.
"I don't think I have ever heard a human being come up with noises and screeches and curse(s) like she did," Cantrell said. "She told me that she wanted all 300,000 names from me on her desk on Tuesday."
The chaos was bringing the office to a standstill as the Sept. 10 election approached, say those interviewed by prosecutors.
Oliphant was amassing a $921,000 deficit with less than a month left in the fiscal year. Voters complained of last-minute changes in voting places, problems with early voting, inaccurate registration information and the receipt of more than one registration card.
"People were not trained," Cotter said. "People didn't understand what they needed to do. They did not have the funding available. I think they were trying to do it on the cheap because they had run out of money."
Barbara Adams, who was then the finance director, said she began warning Oliphant and other administrators in the office of a financial crisis in July. But Strachan said that Adams told her that she didn't want to bother Oliphant with what was occurring.
Meanwhile, a key facet of election preparation had to revolve around Oliphant.
Joseph said she had set a schedule for training poll workers only to have it scrapped by Oliphant. Oliphant told Joseph that all classes had to be planned around her personal schedule so she could go to each one.
The Sept. 10 election turned into a disaster as polls opened late and closed early. Uncounted votes were found after initial tallies were sent to the state and had to be added later. And then there were the hundreds of absentee ballots never counted.
Election office employees said they began to realize they might have a problem opening some polls on time early the previous night.
Leb said a longtime staff member, Pat Nesbitt, informed Adams around 6 p.m. that some precinct leaders had not picked up the material needed to open their polls and suggested calling employees at home to tell them to report to work at 4 a.m. so the problem could be corrected. He said Adams rejected the idea, but that Oliphant and Foeman later agreed to come in at 4 and deliver the packets themselves.
Leb said that Foeman didn't show up until an hour before the polls were to open and that Oliphant dallied at each precinct kissing babies and talking to people. She did not reach the last precinct she was to open until noon, he said.
As officials scrambled to deal with the trouble at the polls, another problem was brewing at the main office that eventually would deprive hundreds of people of their vote. Staff members said no one made a second run to the post office to pick up mail, a critical step on election day because any ballot received by the close of business must be counted.
The first sign that ballots might have been missed occurred two days later. Employees Amber Raticoff and Anthony Perez noticed two trays containing several hundred ballots underneath other mail in the mailroom.
Raticoff said the ballots were postmarked Sept. 10 and said she told Carol Hill, the assistant supervisor over absentee ballots, in an effort to get them to the county canvassing board before it finished counting the results. Hill maintained that the votes could not be counted, and the trays had disappeared when Raticoff later returned to the mailroom.
More ballots from the primary were discovered in late September and early October after Cotter was rehired and assigned people to go through the blizzard of mail that blanketed the office. About 960,000 registration cards had been mailed to voters before the primary, and more than 100,000 had been returned as undeliverable.
Employees Sharon Deas and Marianne Batin each told prosecutors that they found handfuls of ballots as they sorted through the mail. Hill also found a tray of ballots under a stack of mail that were locally postmarked up to six days before the election.
Prosecutors seized the box containing the ballots after receiving a tip from office worker Bob Adams in January that he had seen it in a file cabinet.
Little was done within the elections office as the ballots were uncovered.
Hill told prosecutors that she didn't remember the conversation with Raticoff and said the only steps she took with the ballots she found was to tell one of her employees and move them to the file cabinet. She told prosecutors that she had not thrown away any of the ballots.
"If I know nothing else, I know that's a no-no," Hill said.
She vacillated under intense questioning on whether she informed Oliphant, saying she may have mentioned in passing that there were ballots among the stacks of mail. In her unsworn statement, Oliphant told prosecutors that she was not aware of the ballots until long after the election.
Oliphant, though, was livid when rumors of the missing ballots began circulating widely in late November. According to Raticoff's statement, Oliphant accused her of telling courthouse officials about what happened and had Raticoff's supervisors chastise her for disloyalty.
The absentee ballots were supposed to be sorted each day from the rest of the mail, stamped with the date that they arrived and then taken to the division of the elections office responsible for them. Investigators tried to determine what went wrong and zeroed in on Glen Davis.
Davis was a friend of Oliphant's sister, Robin Darville, and performed odd jobs around the elections office. Oliphant said she hired Davis after he met Darville in a homeless shelter, but he said he was doing landscaping work for Darville when she suggested he apply for a job with her sister.
Davis was assigned to pick up the mail and sort out the ballots after the person who had been doing the work quit and the office began to be deluged with the returned registration cards. The office turned to him even though several employees said they believed Davis was often intoxicated at work.
Cotter said he smelled alcohol on Davis during Davis' first day at work. But Cotter heard Davis was to be left alone because of his friendship with Darville.
Prosecutors obtained a court order to force Davis to talk to them. He said he did not have a drinking problem at work and was not responsible for overlooking any absentee ballots.
"It's a lie from the pit of hell," he told prosecutors.
After the September election debacle, Oliphant turned to Cotter and then to Leb to run the office's day-to-day operations. But Leb said in his deposition that Oliphant wants more direct involvement again and said they are butting heads more often.
"Her confidence is built up again," Leb said. "Now she wants to take over running the office again, and it's a problem."
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
Where is the Democratic Party, championing the cause of the common man, with their chants of "every vote counts"? Oh, I forgot, Miriam is a Democrat.
I've been following this fiasco basically since Oliphant took office, and it is mind-boggling to me that she has not been removed, reined in, or even really taken to task until recently by the powers that be in Broward County. And, yes, it's THAT Broward County of Election 2000 fame... you would think that after the crazy mess three years ago, somebody would step up to the plate and decide to take the area out of the national (laughingstock) spotlight.
But, Miami-Dade had similar serious problems as well last fall, leading to the resignation of the elections supervisor there. Be prepared for another "constitutional crisis" next year, and once again centered in South Flori-duh.
As much as this article in today's Sun-Sentinel points out all that went wrong and all that was done wrong under Oliphant's guiding hand, they failed to mention quite a few other foibles, including the firing of a key, experienced poll worker who was replaced by Miriam's mother; the unjustified promotion of a staffer who also just happened to rent a home Oliphant owned soon after the raise kicked in; and the insane budget requests Oliphant continuously puts before the county commission.
To be fair, a lot of the support for Miriam has crumbled, and even some of her closest allies and supporters have backed off. But, it took them a long time, a lot of lost money (and ballots), and a complete loss of legitimacy before turning their back on their girl ("the first county-wide black elected official in Broward County").
More is sure to come...
Sounds like a pure liberal-run ship indeed....
I believe we are finding here in Florida that our "elected" and "apointed" officials are not doing what their job titles and descriptions indicate. They just want to float, bloat, and toe the party line...
Time to clean house...
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