SUN Editorial: Did Bucher 'Win' This for Clemens?

As I wrote right before the August 14 primary election, Susan Bucher is way too political to be the Supervisor of Elections. My concern was heightened by the events of this past weekend, when Bucher organized and supervised the State Senate District 27 recount that resulted in Jeff Clemens squeaking out a 17-point win only because many ballots were tossed due to poll worker error. The poll workers, of course, work for Bucher.

Bucher is a former Democrat State Representative who was elected Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections four years ago and was just re-elected on August 14. This spring, she refused the state's request to send notices asking people on the voter roll in Palm Beach County who once self-identified as non-citizens to confirm that they are now citizens and therefor eligible to vote.

Susan Bucher, Supervisor of Elections

She wants non-citizens to remain on the voter roll, clearly. But that's for general elections, when most non-citizens will happily vote Democrat.

In the Clemens-Bernard race, there's something even more interesting going on, however.

The race seems to have all boiled down to the issue of education, with one candidate, Clemens, siding with the teachers -- doing whatever is necessary at all times to put more money in the pockets of teachers and their union organizers and expensive lawyers....and the other candidate, Mack Bernard, supporting prayer in schools and vouchers so that people stuck in horrible school districts can still arrange for their children to have a decent education.

In the legislature, Bucher was a staunch opponent of vouchers. Maybe the staunchest. Here she is in March of 2003 railing against a bill that would have given educational vouchers to children of military veterans (as quoted in the Brevard County newspaper Florida Today):

"A voucher is a voucher is a voucher, whether it's wrapped in a flag or in a corporate scholarship. This is pure and simple, stealing from our public school dollars."

And now here is Susan Bucher, managing a very tight recount that has many probable Bernard votes discarded to keep Clemens on top. So it's all very suspicious and very disturbing considering the state of schools in Florida, and in Palm Beach County in particular, where kids who can't do basic math or write decent sentences are given high school diplomas and sent on their way.

Did Susan Bucher rig the Clemens-Bernard race? I don't know. She was spending quite a lot of time at the recount last Saturday conferring off to the side with the Clemens lawyer, Ron Meyer, who is also the attorney for the Florida teacher's union, which will go to war to make sure teachers are assured of keeping their jobs no matter what.

And I see that Susan Bucher has a history of manipulating facts (see link below) to achieve a desired result: It seems she lied about her place of residence every year she was a member of the Florida House in order to qualify as a candidate. Yes. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated. Yet voters chose her to be the one to count the votes. This just proves we need a different sort of press around here.

Meanwhile, if I were Bernard, I'd challenge this election result in court.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/elections/sfl-officialresidence,0,3403791.flash


                                                                                              -- Margaret Menge, Editor