Voting

Plenty of "goofs" from an activist group doing a voter registration drive in Florida, including tossing applications of those registering Republican.
Yesterday was crazy with people doing last minute registrations. We had a hideous Supervisor of Elections, Miriam Oliphant, who was removed from office by Governor Bush for incompetence and malfeasance. She was a one-woman soap opera and there are a hundred horror stories from her time in office. She's been replaced, but she left the place in shambles.
People are very concerned about what's going to happen when they show up to vote. One lady I spoke with yesterday was attempting to register for the third time. She'd sent in the tear-off address change on the back on her card and got not response, went the motor-voter route when she changed her driver's license and got no response, and now was filling out the registration form at our building where the forms go into a pouch and are collected by the SOE office.
It's very disheartening.

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Jackass of the year

Misplaced ballots, misspent tax dollars, cronyism and intense racial polarization: Is this any way to run an elections office? A fresh look at the events leading to Miriam Oliphant’s ouster.

by Art Levine

Miriam Oliphant, buoyed by 65 percent of the vote, looked like a rising political star when she swept into office as the Broward County Supervisor of Elections in January 2001. Yet by the time Gov. Jeb Bush suspended her this past November, accusing her of “grave” neglect, mismanagement and incompetence, she had become the most despised elected official in modern American history, with approval ratings lower than Richard Nixon’s during Watergate. All told, Oliphant became a perfect storm of political self-immolation: She combined ineptitude, arrogance, volatility and mule-headed stubbornness in a uniquely toxic mix that also served to increase racial polarization in Broward County. For all that, she richly merits being selected as City Link’s Jackass of the Year.

Until the sheriff’s deputies escorted her from the Government Center building, she seemingly believed that her office was in fine shape and that the governor would never suspend her. “I haven’t violated any law,” she told the Sun-Sentinel a few weeks before she was removed. “There have been challenges dealing with inadequate budgets. I’m overcoming them.”

Her new attorney, John Contini, plans a long-shot legal challenge to the governor’s action. He claims Bush’s indefinite suspension order was unconstitutional because it violated Oliphant’s right to due process. Several of the problems — such as poll worker shortages — cited by the governor should be blamed on the County Commission, he contends: “They didn’t give her the money she needed to do the job.” Contini also argues that she’s being treated more harshly than other officials who, like her, just made mistakes.

Whatever the final outcome for Oliphant, the behind-the-scenes story of her unraveling shines a light on the dynamics of racial politics, cronyism and the pitfalls of political power in South Florida. Her primary political mentor, Broward County Public Defender Alan Schreiber, speculates about her erratic behavior in office: “I always thought she was very stable, but I think she had pre-existing psychiatric conditions, and the power was the catalyst that pushed her over the edge.”

To everyone except her die-hard supporters, Oliphant’s reign was “a total, unmitigated disaster,” as Schreiber said when she was removed. According to several government investigations and former employees, she left vital election tasks undone and went $921,000 over budget, due in large part to lavish pay increases to her incompetent cronies and $100,000 in advances to contractors who too often didn’t deliver on their services. “Nobody knew the money that was pouring out of that office,” says Richard Wallsmith, the Elections Office’s respected chief financial officer whose firing in October, along with three veteran employees, triggered new state investigations and Oliphant’s downfall.

As Ken Leb, a former deputy supervisor fired by Oliphant summed it up to the State Attorney’s Office, “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. ... She was a horrible administrator.”

Yet since she was never charged with any crime, and no official probe until the final one led to her removal, “She thought she was invincible,” one former staffer says. That belief fueled even more highhanded actions by Oliphant. One imperious move that generated outrage was her decision shortly before she was canned to give a $5,000 raise to Glen Davis, the periodically drunken mailroom employee who reportedly was a close friend of her sister, Robin Darville. (At the same time, longtime employees were given, at best, meager raises and were largely underpaid, by most government pay standards.) All this came after media accounts earlier this year revealed that Davis was the guy who didn’t open and time-stamp nearly 300 absentee ballots amid a crush of mail related to the September 2002 election; the ballots were later found buried in a filing cabinet. Considered too unsteady to drive to the post office and often absent, he was occasionally reprimanded but never fired. As her former deputy, Joe Cotter, said in a deposition, Davis was “untouchable,” largely because of Darville’s relationship with him.

Oliphant apparently also viewed him as a charity case. “Mr. Davis is a homeless man, and I hired him,” she told state investigators. She noted that he had been in the same homeless shelter as her sister, best known as the crazy-acting woman who sometimes shouted at TV reporters pursuing Oliphant.

After the media firestorm about Davis in January 2003, he was eventually transferred by Oliphant to the elections office warehouse. But as one ex-employee recalls, “She didn’t like the idea that he was working like a slave doing manual labor,” while his supervisor was earning twice as much money. So Oliphant, heedless of the political consequences, gave him the raise. (When interim supervisor Brenda Snipes took over in November, Davis was one of three Oliphant acolytes fired immediately.)

Despite such controversies, Oliphant’s dwindling band of still-vocal supporters, mostly black ministers, see her as essentially a victim of a white conspiracy. They also view her as a symbol of black achievement and political power who must be defended, even if a few concede she made some mistakes. “Wrong or right, we’re going to stand up for you, and we’re not going to let them lynch you,” says the Rev. Dennis Grant, the senior pastor of Restoration Ministries of Margate, about Oliphant. Because Oliphant declined requests to be interviewed for this story, her supporters’ perceptions may help explain Oliphant’s own views — and perhaps answer the underlying mystery about her actions: “What the hell was she thinking?”

Set up to fail?

In the world according to Miriam Oliphant and her backers, she became too independent and too pro-minority for the county’s white establishment, which once backed her. They contend she was also hobbled by underfunding and the balky County Commission-approved voting machines that she never wanted.

“Miriam is an invention of the white power system,” says Keith Clayborne, publisher of the black-owned Broward Times and a former champion of her cause. “She was never ready to take elective office, but they chose her to be a token to placate the black community. She was chosen because she had the looks and would be cooperative and didn’t know a lot. But when Miriam broke ranks, they penalized her.”

In addition, as the Rev. Dozell Varner of Mount Bethel Baptist Church contends, “The county should have done what they could do to help her, but they set her up with those cruddy machines.” That view was rejected by a Department of State report on her office, which in November concluded the error rate for the machines was normal and blamed a lack of adequately trained poll workers for widespread problems in the September 2002 primary debacle.

Most of her supporters believe she wasn’t given a fair chance to succeed and, above all, that she was victimized by the mainstream media that unfairly hounded her. “It was journalistic rape,” Varner says. As a result of that pounding, he argues, Oliphant rarely spoke to the press because she felt that her comments were distorted and reporters were already set against her.

The only leading black politician still strongly in her corner, Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Carlton Moore, says the attacks reflected a racial double standard: “It shows that when you’re black, you’ve got to be much better, and you’re going to be held to a higher standard. Are you going to tell me that every white person is perfect?”

Yet in 2001, when Oliphant became the only African-American holding county-wide office in Broward, she seemed to be on the way to fulfilling all the promise that had dazzled her earliest political mentor, Schreiber. He first arranged for Gov. Lawton Chiles to appoint her to the Broward County School Board about 10 years earlier. “She was the best-looking, most charismatic and charming candidate I’d seen in a long time, particularly in the black community,” Schreiber recalls, adding Chiles: “He was absolutely awestruck by her.”

She was a popular vote-getter during her time on the School Board, winning election twice. But there were early signs of the problems that would later dog her as supervisor: She came to meetings unprepared and relied on questions written by aides. But those weaknesses remained largely out of public view with the support provided by Schreiber’s political machine. Schreiber even dispatched an aide to coach her on issues prior to board meetings, but he now insists, “I thought she seemed to understand most things and seemed fairly articulate.” He supported her for the complex administrative post of elections supervisor, because, he says, “I thought she could handle the job — if she delegated responsibilities.”

Unfortunately, when she became supervisor, she tried to “micromanage” everything, Schreiber and former employees say, while picking a motley group of know-nothing friends and associates to be top-level administrators. More-experienced staffers were demoted or pushed out as Oliphant’s hold on the office tightened. In that regard, she showed herself to be dimmer than George W. Bush and Dan Quayle combined, because they generally chose well-educated and talented advisers. In contrast, Schreiber says, “She was so paranoid about anyone with experience and education,” viewing such a person as a potential threat to her power.

She apparently preferred staffers who were ignorant about elections, as long as they were loyal to her. Take Carol Hill, a former college admissions rep from Atlanta who was brought in as an outreach director and was later put in charge of registration and absentee ballots. As former spokesman Bob Cantrell told investigators, “[Hill] absolutely knew nothing about elections. ... I mean I got really concerned when she asked me, ‘What is a primary?’ ”

Oliphant’s hiring and recruitment of these inexperienced staffers often seemed haphazard. Ken Leb, for example, was an unemployed computer specialist who met Oliphant in the elevator of their condo, seeking to parlay a free computer assessment of her office into leads to other jobs. He was hired to do technical upgrades in the office, and was then selected as her deputy supervisor, becoming one of the relatively few Oliphant hires who learned to do a competent job. Joe Cotter, who twice served as her deputy before resigning, recalled, “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. ... They were severely lacking in qualifications for the positions they were put in.”

Some of Oliphant’s neophytes were placed in supervisory positions over more-experienced workers at higher salaries that weren’t even in the budget. A county audit found that Oliphant, her office already overstaffed, brought on 14 new employees in fiscal year 2002 as 10 people left, spending more than $500,000 for salaries that weren’t allocated in the county’s budget — the largest portion of her mammoth $921,000 deficit that year.

Hill, for example, became the boss of the experienced absentee ballots administrator, Mary Hall, a respected, 17-year employee of the office — and at a salary about $15,000 higher than Hall’s. Even when staffers bungled their jobs or got in trouble, they were rewarded. For instance, June Lewis first met Oliphant at a festival and told her she needed a job. Oliphant hired her as a top purchasing agent, and Lewis eventually spent nearly $14,000 with a company run by her son to purchase election supplies in violation of state nepotism rules. The result? She was initially given a 23 percent raise by Oliphant after being moved to another supervisory job.

Those sorts of actions bred resentment among longtime workers and furthered the us-vs.-them mentality that divided a distrustful Oliphant and her coterie from the rest of the office. Unfortunately, Oliphant’s appointees were in “way over their heads,” as Leb told investigators. Barbara Adams, who had previously worked in the collections department of a paging company, became the office’s new chief financial officer, displacing Linda Levinson, a CPA.

Adams ultimately became the closest in-house adviser to Oliphant, and as one former staffer recalls, “It was a case of dumber being led by dumberer.” (Adams refused to comment.)

Indeed, under Adams and Oliphant, the office’s financial controls collapsed, according to Michael Keeler, the county’s auditing manager. Keeler, still appalled, says, “In 16 1/2 years, it was the most egregious of any agency I’ve been involved in auditing.” He and Richard Wallsmith, a retired county budget officer who joined Oliphant’s team in January 2003, say the most rudimentary safeguards were missing. Supervisors bought goods and services — usually in response to Oliphant’s whims — without prior approval from a central purchasing department. And nobody bothered to determine if there were even enough funds in the office’s accounts to cover all the purchases. “They didn’t keep track of their spending,” Keeler says. The office’s financial woes also affected elections: Officials didn’t have all the money they needed to pay poll workers on time or update voting rolls. One result was that more mail-in ballots — 17,245 — were returned as undeliverable than were cast in the four-city November 2003 municipal elections, the final job for Oliphant before Bush removed her.

The budget shortfalls were exacerbated by spending on politically connected contracts that too often didn’t deliver what they promised, according to county auditors and state investigators. Violating state procurement law, the staff routinely paid for at least 50 percent of the work up-front but without any performance guarantee. For example, Greene Beech Advertising received $14,000 to make folding display signs, investigators found, yet allegedly didn’t produce them and refused to return the money when the contract was canceled. And Oliphant friend Rick Riley’s public relations firm received at least $70,000 to place $60,000 worth of print and broadcast ads — a job previously done for free by the elections office. The office also blew much of a $603,000 state grant for voter outreach on various unapproved expenses, including such items as “office flooring.”

While spending money like drunken sailors, Oliphant and her crew ignored the pleas of veteran employees to begin work early on such vital election tasks as recruiting and training poll workers. They were hurtling toward the demanding September 2002 election with 5,000 new machines that cost $17 million. But as Wallsmith remarks, “The key was that Oliphant wasn’t preparing for the next election but giving raises to people like Barbara Adams.”

Ken Leb told investigators, “The staff that was there year after year tried to give them advice on what to do, and they weren’t listening or didn’t react.”

Mary Hall added, “That’s how the election got messed up.”

Ghosts in the machine

An early sign of the trouble ahead came during preparations for a July Town Council race in Southwest Ranches. Then-County Commission Chairwoman Lori Parrish, who became Oliphant’s harshest critic, saw firsthand the poor training of Oliphant’s staff when they tested a sampling of the machines that were going to be used in that race. Along with a county judge and Oliphant, she was part of the three-member canvassing board observing the logic and accuracy testing of the machines. Dummy names were called out for each voting machine, and two staffers at each of about 20 machines were then supposed to place votes for the names that were called. “Normally, this takes 10 to 15 minutes, but these were taking a lot longer, and the votes would never come out right,” Parrish recalls.

Oliphant told her it’s likely the fault of the new technology. That reflected her well-founded objections the previous year to the commission’s selection — after a lobbying blitz — of a cheaper brand of machine that hadn’t been proved in large urban counties. She favored Sequoia Systems, bought by Palm Beach County, that used professional elections staff to load ballot information, rather than relying on large numbers of often ill-trained volunteer poll workers to get the machines working. She also objected that too little of the lucrative $17 million contract with the county’s choice was going to genuine minority subcontractors.

She may have been right. Even so, with elections looming, her staff had plenty of time to learn the new machines, but in subsequent testing meetings with the canvassing board before the council race, they still couldn’t master the equipment. However, when Parrish arranged for county attorneys and administrators to practice voting, the results came out perfectly.

“I say to Miriam that things don’t seem be going so well,” Parrish says. “You’re a great cheerleader [for elections], but you should hire people to complement your skills.” Oliphant smiled pleasantly but did nothing to address those concerns. Yet with enough training of poll workers to run the 24 machines used by 1,200 voters in Southwest Ranches, the election turned out to be successful, leading Oliphant to predict success in the September 2002 primary.

Parrish knew that Oliphant’s confidence was misplaced. As a member of the canvassing board, the commission chairwoman learned about even more problems in testing the machines before the far-larger September vote. “Things haven’t gotten better; remarkably, it’s now worse,” Parrish recalls. These problems were compounded by the news that poll workers couldn’t get answers from Oliphant’s overwhelmed staff about where they were assigned, and many voters didn’t get correct voter registration cards — or any at all.

“Miriam and Barbara spent all their resources putting out one fire, while four more burned out of control,” says one former insider.

For people inside the crisis-wracked office, all the stress — both before and after the primary — made life with the explosive Oliphant intolerable. Cantrell faced Oliphant’s wrath after he told a political reporter, in response to a question, that an estimated 300,000 people would be switched to new polling places because of redistricting. When the story appeared, Oliphant called Cantrell at 6:30 on a Saturday morning while he was driving to handle early pre-election voters. “She was just absolutely livid,” Cantrell said. “I don’t think I have ever heard a human being come up with noises and screeches and curse like she did. She told me that she wanted all 300,000 names from me on her desk on Tuesday.” He was pulled off his PR job and sent to the warehouse gulag to work, while she brought in Rick Riley as a spokesman, who then kept her away from the media during the mounting furor over the primary.

She also used arbitrary threats of firing to create a climate of fear, Wallsmith and others note. On some days, she told workers they were fired, then changed her mind at the end of the day. “In public, she was absolutely the ideal person,” Cantrell later told the Sun-Sentinel. “When she shut the door, the venom would fly.”

The night before the primary, it became clear that more than 30 precincts likely wouldn’t be able to open on time because precinct captains didn’t show up that evening to pick up essential election materials, including voter registration lists. When word spread to Parrish and other county officials, they frantically tried to reach Oliphant and her staff to take action but got no response. Parrish then sought approval from the Sheriff’s Office to get the warehouse opened and have deputies deliver the materials, but she was told she needed to get permission from state leaders and the governor. When she reached the Secretary of State at home, he declined to help.

At the same time, Oliphant and her senior staff, while ignoring frantic calls from county officials, learned by 9 p.m. that the supplies weren’t picked up by precinct captains. Pat Nesbit, the experienced head of poll worker recruitment, urged Barbara Adams, Oliphant’s chief confidante, to make sure the staff was called at home that evening to come in early the next morning, primary day, to pick up the materials and deliver them, according to Ken Leb’s deposition. But Adams and Oliphant, demonstrating the pigheadedness that came to mark their entire reign, decided it was too late to call staffers. Even when another black supervisor of elections, Gertrude Walker of St. Lucie County, called Oliphant before midnight and urged her to contact her staff or the Sheriff’s Office to deliver the materials, Oliphant decided to ignore that advice, too.

The next day, she showed up at the voting center warehouse about 6 a.m. and brushed off the suggestion of a Division of Elections observer that she call the Sheriff’s Office for help. “I’ll deliver them myself,” she declared. She left the warehouse at 7 a.m., when the polls were supposed to open, and drove around to the precincts casually delivering the supplies, so the last precinct didn’t open until noon. “She was busy, from what I was told, kissing and hugging everyone,” Leb stated. “Her priority was not to get these things delivered. It was to schmooze.”

While the glamorous Oliphant was preening and glad-handing, primary day turned into a disaster that ultimately led to calls for her removal. About 25 precincts opened late, too many poll workers didn’t show up, and machines malfunctioned, frustrating thousands of voters. In subsequent days, hundreds of uncounted absentee ballots would be found under mountains of unopened mail. And when the scope of the fiasco became clear on Election Day, the governor issued an executive order at 3:45 p.m. requiring that polls stay open two hours past the 7 p.m. closing time. But Oliphant ignored it until it was too late. She instructed the staff to wait for further instructions from her and didn’t give the go-ahead to contact precincts until 6 p.m., too late to notify many of the 800 precincts. As a result, numerous voters, despite news bulletins about the governor’s order, had precinct doors slammed in their faces by workers who didn’t get the word to stay open.

The primary-day fiasco and the weeks that followed set the template for most of Oliphant’s arrogant rule until she was dismissed last month. She blamed the County Commission, elderly poll workers, the machines, even the voters — everyone, that is, except herself. She adamantly refused to apologize for nearly two weeks. As Carlton Moore explains, “She was saying others did it because she felt that ‘I didn’t get what I wanted [to run the election].’ ”

Her stubbornness was threatening to cost Oliphant her job, until Schreiber prevailed on her in a bluntly worded meeting to accept the commission’s offer to turn over day-to-day control of her office to her former deputy, the skilled Joe Cotter. Offering a halfhearted apology for the primary, she was reduced to little more than a figurehead, forced to allow county employees to play a major role in training poll workers and staffing the precincts for the November 2002 general election. As part of the deal, Cotter could quit with full salary if she disparaged him or interfered with any personnel decision. Behind the scenes, though, “she was plotting from day one on how to get rid of him,” recalls a former administrator.

Her hopes of returning to full power were doubtless encouraged by black leaders who rallied around her, furious that she was being made a scapegoat for the primary-election mess that they said wasn’t her fault. At church meetings, speakers denounced the “racist plot” to discredit her and remove her from office. The apparent racial anger strengthened her hand politically; The Broward Times even stoked outrage over the purported white conspiracy by comparing Parrish to a Ku Klux Klan member and dubbing Schreiber a “slave master.”

So when the November 2002 general election went smoothly thanks to the work of 1,100 county employees, Oliphant felt emboldened to grab power again. She started a political purge, dumping Cantrell in December because he agreed to speak to state prosecutors. That decision, in turn, led Cotter to announce his decision to quit in January and file a lawsuit against her.

With that, the commission became determined to get rid of her, but she was saved by Gov. Bush. He decided in January that he wouldn’t remove her unless there was evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Black political support for her seemed just too strong then, and besides, he didn’t seem to care if Florida’s biggest Democratic county couldn’t count votes properly.

This should have been the year that allowed Oliphant to survive until the 2004 election, but she once again unleashed the real Miriam and soon self-destructed. Until this fall, she ducked all the major political bullets aimed at her, with no investigation finding criminal or ethical misconduct. The March municipal elections went smoothly, thanks to massive help from the cities. She even got an additional bailout of $921,000 over her original budget from the County Commission.

But all that wasn’t enough for her. Feeling both politically invulnerable and under assault by the commission, she launched a lengthy budget war with the county, storming out of a meeting when the commission didn’t give her another $290,000 for legal and cell phone bills. All the while, she kept insisting on a politically absurd $14.7 million budget for fiscal year 2004 during tense discussions with county officials.

“She felt it was political suicide to accept anything less than the $14.7 million,” observes Wallsmith, who favored compromise. Oliphant’s belief was that if she accepted the roughly $9 million and election manpower the county was offering, she would be ruined if she later needed additional funds to cover costs for the March presidential primary.

Unfortunately, her credibility was destroyed during the budget dispute when it became even clearer that she was a policy airhead. Parrish and former aides note that Oliphant couldn’t answer even the most rudimentary questions about her own budget proposals and just started reading from the beginning of her prepared statements over again. And at one point, when Parrish asked her about how many outstanding absentee ballots she expected for an upcoming election, she told them the office sent out 14,000 and 6,000 were returned, so she expected 20,000, repeatedly failing to grasp the elementary school concept that subtracting the 6,000 got you 8,000. “It was so frustrating dealing with her that we gave up,” Parrish said.

Even supporters at the time, such as Keith Clayborne, were embarrassed by her shaky grasp of issues — and literacy — during commission hearings. “She made herself look stupid,” he says. “We tried to help her, but she couldn’t answer questions coherently.” During one prep session before a meeting, he was shocked by a report that she and her staff were planning to submit. “It was absolutely atrocious, with misspellings and verbiage you couldn’t understand,” he recalls. Oliphant reassured him that it was just a draft, so when she presented the same report to the commission, “I almost had a heart attack,” he says.

Yet it wasn’t such incompetence that finally did her in but her foolhardy desire for revenge. When she read the critical but honest depositions of some of her most talented employees and then fired them in October, she unleashed a whirlwind of two state investigations that found an office still in chaos and utterly unprepared for the upcoming March primary. The firing of the admired African-American employee Mary Hall also cost Oliphant dearly in support of black politicians and The Broward Times, helping pave the way for the governor’s suspension order Nov. 20. Now, she faces a trial in the state Senate.

“She thought, ‘I’m untouchable,’ ” one former aide says now. “But guess what, Miriam? You’re not.”