Politics

The Triumph Of Paw-litics

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 24, 2001 / 11:50 AM EDT / CBS

A county elections official in Florida wants a criminal investigation to find out how a poodle showed up on the voter rolls.

Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Theresa LePore contends criminal activity got Cocoa Fernandez on Palm Beach County's voter rolls July 11.

Cocoa's owner — retiree Wendy Albert — is suspected of fraudulently filling out the election card to embarrass the county's election office.

A felony fraud charge would carry a maximum five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine.

LePore said Albert's address appears on Cocoa's election card. But Albert, a 62-year-old retiree living in Lake Worth, denies wrongdoing.

"It's kind of scary with all the problems we've had in Palm Beach County," said Albert. "Even a dog can vote."

LePore says voters are asked for picture identification at polling places before casting ballots. Absentee ballots, however, can be cast without any verification of identity.

Palm Beach County was home to the infamous butterfly ballot, which some Democrats say was so confusing it cost former Vice President Al Gore votes in the 2000 presidential election.

The punch-card ballot listed candidates on either side of a column of punch holes. Some Democrats contended they were confused about which hole to punch and accidentally voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.

Amazing Race: look back on the 2000 election.

The Cocoa controversy comes amid the latest round of investigations and recriminations from the controversial 2000 election:

This week, delegates from the Oregon state Democratic Party approved a resolution calling for Congress to investigate five U.S. Supreme Court justices for their role in the last presidential election. The court's 5-4 decision effectively decided the bitterly contested election for Republican George W. Bush.
A report last week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology blames flawed voting technology and registration problems for up to 6 million uncounted votes in the 2000 election.
Earlier this month, a New York Times investigation into overseas ballots that helped Mr. Bush win the presidency found that Florida election officials, facing intense GOP pressure to accept military votes, counted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights approved a report in June that suggests blacks disproportionately had their ballots discounted in Florida's elections, leading to widespread violations of the Voting Rights Act.
As far back as February, a review of 10,644 uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County showed Gore would not have gained enough votes to overtake Mr. Bush in Florida when those votes were combined with results from three other counties where the vice president requested manual recounts.