Palm Beach County should heed state advice, stop tossing ballots | www.mypalmbeachpost.com

The tossed ballots in Lake Worth are still a big story in Florida. The Palm Beach Post came out with another strong stance on the disenfranchisement of Lake Worth voters today, click title for link. I urge all my readers to get the paper and read the entire editorial today. 

The editorial, at the end, mentions a $3,440 bill the Supervisor of Elections Bucher sent to Lake Worth to cover her office's legal fees related to the matter. Ugh. 

The Post doesn't specifically advise the City what to do with that bill, but I, and many others, have some good suggestions. One good way would be to treat the bill like the same way those 14 ballots were treated.

Two excerpts from the editorial:

When it turned out that Palm Beach County elections officials threw away at least 14 legitimate votes in the August primary elections, Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher stubbornly defended the decision.
Yes, those voters had a right to vote, she said. But her workers hadn’t known how to process their provisional ballots and mistakenly mislabeled or left parts of the ballot envelopes blank. Bucher’s solution: to disenfranchise those voters entirely, throwing away their ballots and never counting them. She brusquely dismissed any questions about the legality of her decision.
Now state elections officials have declared that her actions violated state law, and they have directed Bucher to do more to protect voters’ rights in the future. Bucher, who has declined to comment on the state’s ruling, should heed the advice.

[Later in the editorial...]

Still, Bucher argued that the incomplete ballot forms created doubts. Since it would be illegal to look at the ballots directly, she decided to deep-six them. She claimed that doing so was required by the law.
Thankfully, the state Division of Elections sees it differently. In a memo to Bucher last month, the department’s director ruled that just because a canvassing board has doubts about in which precinct or primary a vote was cast, that doubt “does not alter the board’s duty to count the ballot.”
It continued: “If the canvassing board is unable to determine where the provisional ballot was cast and which ballot style was used, the canvassing board should adhere to the statutory requirement that the provisional ballot is to be counted.”
You’d think Bucher would be thankful for this clarification. But so far she’s remained silent. Instead, she’s sent the city of Lake Worth, which first raised the issue, a $3,440 bill – to cover her own legal fees.