'Dirty tricks' muddy citizen petitions

Scary stuff? Indeed. The emergency rules — as much as the “danger” they identify — pose a threat to the health, safety and welfare of democracy in this state.

Both orders stem from Senate Bill 866, an election bill passed by the 2008 Legislature.

The first directive (1SER08-2) deletes a requirement that county supervisors of election record verified petition signatures on initiative petitions in the statewide voter registration system. The order contains a stunning admission by Secretary of State Kurt Browning:

“Discrepancies have existed in the numbers of signatures being verified in the statewide voter registration system for initiative petitions. These discrepancies seriously undermined the reliability of the number of signatures recorded. The secretary of state lacks confidence in the accuracy of signature verification numbers.”

Translation: The state openly admits its procedure for verifying signatures and validating petitions is error-prone and wholly unreliable. This official acknowledgement is as damning as any complaints from Florida Hometown Democracy or other citizen groups attempting to get constitutional amendments before the voters.

“This should get us on the ballot,” says Lesley Blackner, president of Hometown Democracy, which claims to have submitted 820,000 petition signatures. A total of 611,000 are needed to qualify for the November election.

At last report, the state had tallied 592,561 FHD signatures. Yet the state’s numbers have been in question ever since the election division abruptly stopped posting updated figures weeks before the Feb. 1 filing deadline. Officials said their computers crashed.

Tallahassee’s admission of a faulty verification system undermines the state’s “official” tally and leaves everyone guessing as to what the real numbers are. Now the secretary has rushed new rules into effect by executive fiat — without hearings and without a recount.

If you think that’s surreal, check out Browning’s second emergency order, 1SER08-3.

Expanding the state’s signature revocation law (also in SB866), the administrative order implements a new “standard” revocation form. Again, Browning determined that the “health, safety or welfare” of Floridians required immediate action.

But there’s a big problem here, too. In their rush, the Legislature and the secretary failed to heed the state’s 1st District Court of Appeal, which struck down the revocation process altogether — back on April 22.

In its unanimous ruling, the court declared revocation unconstitutional. The justices affirmed that the Florida Constitution gives citizens the right to propose amendments without legislative “assistance” — or interference.

By continuing to toy with the petition process and, now, blatantly flouting the law, legislators and the secretary of state exhibit what Blackner brands “incompetence and dirty tricks.”

That Florida’s elected and appointed officials use “emergency rules” to undermine the constitutional right to petition is bad enough. This is the dirty tricks part. Even more pernicious is the system’s failure to do its job.

“The state’s mechanism for handling ballot petitions clearly hasn’t kept up,” says Blackner, whose crew has observed chaotic counting operations at supervisors of elections offices from Miami and Pensacola. “We’re still running Florida like it’s a little agricultural state of 3 million people.”

Amid officials’ admitted confusion and their extra-legal connivance, visions of Little Haiti come to mind. And as Haitians well know, a democracy without agreed-upon rules and standards is no democracy at all.

Charlie Crist got things rolling downhill when he signed SB866. Where are you now, governor? 