Dems Call Fla. Voters About Ballots
By John Solomon
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Nov. 10, 2000; 9:39 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON -- Faced with a cliffhanger election, the Democratic Party
directed a telemarketing firm on Election Night to begin calling thousands
of voters in Palm Beach, Fla., to raise questions about a disputed ballot
and urge them to contact local election officials.

The Democratic National Committee paid Texas-based TeleQuest to make the
calls Tuesday night - while polls were still open - alerting voters in the
heavily Democratic enclave in Florida of possible confusion with the ballots
they cast.

"Some voters have encountered a problem today with punch card ballots in
Palm Beach County," the script for the call said. "These voters have said
that they believe that they accidentally punched the wrong hole for the
incorrect candidate."

"If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole for
the incorrect candidate, you should return to the polls and request that the
election officials write down your name so that this problem can be fixed,"
the script said.

The firm took the names and numbers of voters who said they may have cast an
errant ballot, providing the Democratic Party a list of about 2,400 voters
in the county who thought they may have misvoted.

If voters were about to go to the polls, the script called for the caller to
instruct them to "be sure to punch Number 5 for Gore-Lieberman" and "do NOT
punch any other number as you might end up voting for someone else by
mistake."

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus said the party had
been making traditional get-out-the-vote calls all over the country Tuesday,
but shifted gears in Palm Beach after hearing local news reports about
possible voter confusion.

"Once we were informed by local news accounts of the magnitude of the
problem with confusion about the ballot, we shifted our scripts to make sure
that people who were voting were aware of the questions and confusion around
the ballot," she said.

The maneuver indicates that long before Americans awoke to the reality of
the Florida ballot dispute, Democrats were already mobilizing voters there.
The concern has focused on Palm Beach, where 19,000 ballots were
disqualified and hundreds of voters have said they mistakenly voted for
Patrick Buchanan while trying to vote for Gore.

Within hours of the phone campaign, hundreds of Democratic voters had called
election officials in Palm Beach to complain they may have been confused by
the ballot and voted for the wrong candidate.

Some Palm Beach County voters have filed lawsuits seeking a new vote.

The outcome of the dispute is key because George W. Bush is leading Gore by
a mere 327 votes after a statewide recount. The winner of Florida will lay
claim to the electoral votes needed to become the nation's 43rd president.

The calls indicate that Democrats were concerned about Palm Beach problems
even before they knew Florida's vote would end in a razor-thin margin, said
American University political science professor Candice Nelson.

"To the extent there have been accusations that Democrats didn't cry foul
until they realized Wednesday that Bush may have won, this cuts the other
way," she said.

Nelson and other political and legal experts said the calls were perfectly
legal but could have contributed to what appeared to most Americans to be a
spontaneous explosion of concern in Florida the morning after the election.

"I think those kinds of calls make perfect sense," Nelson said. "In terms of
people getting riled up, it would be a tactic that might energize voters who
might otherwise not have realized they may have mistakenly voted for the
wrong candidate."

One Florida Democrat said Republicans would take similar action had the
tables been turned.

"They'd be fighting this thing tooth and nail for months and months," said
Wayne Brewer, 45, of Juneau, Fla.

"They knew they ... lost, and now they want to win on an assumption," he
said, speaking outside the government center in West Palm Beach.

Wade Scott, an account manager with TeleQuest, said Democratic Party
officials contacted his company shortly before 6 p.m. EST Tuesday to make
the calls.

With only an hour to go before Florida polls closed, his company mobilized
all of its telemarketers to make some 5,000 calls in less than 45 minutes,
Scott said.

"It was a very short burst of calling for our industry," Scott said. He said
only about 100 of the voters in Palm Beach it contacted hadn't voted, and
about 2,400 felt they may have made a mistake on the ballot.

© Copyright 2000 The Associated Press



John Fitzgerald
Muse, Oklahoma
ICQ# 38640855


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