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  Mortham, Sandra "Sandy" Barringer
CANDIDATE DETAILS
AffiliationRepublican  
 
NameSandra "Sandy" Barringer Mortham
Address
Largo, Florida , United States
EmailNone
WebsiteNone
Born 00, 1951 (73 years)
ContributorBen
Last Modifededdy 9_99
Apr 10, 2005 03:43pm
Tags
InfoShe had been Secretary of State for less than two years when the Tampa Bay Business Journal chronicled a string embarrassments by December 1997.

Mortham and the agencies she supervises have been criticized for a lengthy list of transgressions, including:

* Spending thousands of taxpayer dollars to promote herself by putting her name or photograph on government buildings, brochures, calendars and official copies of the state constitution, as well as an amazing range of knicknacks, from paperweights to golf balls to Christmas ornaments.
* Soliciting a $60,000 donation from cigarette maker Philip Morris Cos. for a nonprofit historical organization Mortham supervises, and then spending the money on more trinkets and for parties for her staff.
* Allowing department funds to be used to pay for her husband to accompany her on trips to Russia, Africa, Asia and South America, and using tax money herself to pay for travel to political events.

As a result of these and other perceived indiscretions, Governor Jeb Bush had to stop campaigning with Mortham during their 1998 re-election efforts. In August, the Secretary of State announced that Florida's list of 18.2 million voters contained more than 50,000 felons and 18,000 dead people. She declared: "We plan to make every effort possible to make sure that those individuals will not be able to vote during the September primary." That primary was less than a month away. According to an article in the August 19, 1998 issue of the Panama City News Herald, the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. had instructed Florida's Secretary of State that her plan to scrub felons from its voter rolls was illegal under federal law:

The Justice Department notified the state last week that the new rules couldn't be enforced because they would prevent more blacks and Hispanics than whites from voting.

Mortham said Tuesday she didn't believe the new law discriminated against minority voters. "I'm skeptical that the arguments or the statistics cited by the Justice Department are legitimate or accurate," she said.

But she said the state Division of Elections would do its own research on the new law to decide if the Justice Department was right. "At this point, we plan to ask for reconsideration once we're armed with the facts and the hard statistics," she said.

Those facts and statistics were never gathered, apparently. At the time Mortham made those comments, the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections expressed concern in an internal email about her having made efforts "to capriciously take names off the rolls." In November 1998, the Secretary of State's office hired private company Database Technologies (now a subsidiary of ChoicePoint Inc.) to generate a list of Florida felons ineligible to vote, so that they could be stricken from the voter rolls. Which ultimately delivered Al Gore's misfortune in 2000.

After losing her re-election to Katherine Harris, Mortham became a high-powered political lobbyist in Tallahassee, representing the Florida Medical Association, the Florida Association of Counties, and electronic voting machine manufacturer Election Systems and Software (ES&S).


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RACES
  09/01/1998 FL Secretary of State - R Primary Lost 38.56% (-22.88%)
  11/08/1994 FL Secretary of State Won 52.37% (+4.73%)
  11/17/1992 FL State House Speaker Lost 40.34% (-19.33%)
  11/03/1992 FL State House 49 Won 61.02% (+22.05%)
  11/06/1990 FL State House 52 Won 100.00% (+100.00%)
  11/08/1988 FL State House 52 Won 77.08% (+54.16%)
  11/04/1986 FL State House 52 Won 70.08% (+40.16%)
ENDORSEMENTS
FL US President - R Primary - Mar 15, 2016 R Marco A. Rubio
FL District 19 - Special R Primary - Apr 22, 2014 R Lizbeth Benacquisto
FL Attorney General - R Primary - Aug 24, 2010 R Anna Holliday "Holly" Benson