There are further signs that Republican operatives played a covert role in advance work to jimmy the Florida election. Xavier Suarez, the very same "mayor" of Miami who was thrown from office because of massive voter-fraud in the infamous 1997 election, worked for the Republicans on the 2000 presidential election. Suarez currently serves on the executive committee of the Miami-Dade Republican Party. What's more, Suarez told Feed Magazine that right up to election night he "helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County."  ³³  

Ousted Miami "mayor" Xavier Suarez during the 1997 vote-fraud scandal

"Dade County Republicans have a very specific expertise in getting out absentee ballots," he said proudly. "I obviously have specific experience in this myself."  ³⁴  

This is profoundly shocking to anyone who knows that Suarez was found guilt of illegally tampering with some 5,000 absentee ballots in the 1997 election. Indeed, absentee ballots had put Suarez over the top in the election when he "won" twice as many as his rival. Incredibly, even after the stringent legal reforms following the 1997 Miami vote-fraud case, Florida still has no independent oversight of absentee ballots until they are actually counted.

Some of Suarez's brand of "specific expertise" may have been evident in Seminole County. A lawsuit there nearly succeeded in throwing out 15,000 absentee ballots because the elections supervisor, Sandra Goard (an elected Republican), had illegally allowed two GOP operatives to "correct" thousands of pre-printed absentee ballot applications that mistakenly printed birth dates instead of the legally-required voter IDs.  ³⁵  

Without the voter ID numbers, the law says the applications are automatically void, and no third party can "correct" them. Period. But when the Republicans realized what had happened, they called Goard, who agreed to let them correct the applications as long as they brought their own laptops loaded with the ID data. Goard had her staff retrieve the voided applications from storage and sort the Republican ones from the rest. She then provided a room for the men to work in. For "15-21 days" (they're not sure?), the party hacks worked there — completely unsupervised. Meanwhile, the helpful Goard made sure Democrats' applications with similar errors were thrown away, as required by law.

According to trial transcripts, the two GOP operatives "corrected" at least 2,100 absentee ballot applications – nearly four times the majority Bush "won" by in Florida. Incredibly, it came out during the trial that a large number of these had "scrambled" ID numbers and should have been rejected (again). Instead, Goard illegally instructed her staff to process the applications anyway and send these completely illegal absentee ballots to the Republicans.  ³⁶  

Under Florida law, the suit should have won handily. The violations were clear, categorical, and largely uncontested. Previously, counties had their absentee ballots thrown out for far less. But perhaps because of GOP public pressure on the judge (a Democrat), the incredible ruling was that these actions "had not violated the spirit" of Florida law, nor the "sanctity" of the ballots – a patently absurd conclusion that flies in the face of the law.

As important as the Seminole case was, the real significance of it may have eluded the court and observers alike. The room these men were allowed to work in, unsupervised, contained 18 computers linked directly to the mainframe computer containing the state's voting database. During the trial, GOP lawyers said this didn't matter because "as far as anyone knows," the two men did not have the passwords to those computers.  ³⁷  

Such a "defense" is absurd. Even without passwords from Goard, the fact remains that these men brought their own laptops. A laptop can hold hacking programs just as easily as it can data. Any fool with a modem can download dozens of free programs that can crack most passwords within minutes. Furthermore, the defense conceded that these men worked in the room for 2 or 3 weeks with no supervision at all. With that much time to work, they could have hacked the NSA. Did the GOP operatives hack Florida's voting mainframe? We'll probably never know, but five will get you ten....