TRUE:
Katherine Harris steps down to concentrate on congressional run
Associated Press, August 01, 2002 – 02:53 PMTALLAHASSEE, Fla.
Katherine Harris resigned Thursday as Secretary of State, retroactive to July 15. Harris, the state’s chief elections official, said she had misunderstood the rules about when she had to quit to run for Congress.
Harris, a Republican who was thrust into the international spotlight during the 2000 presidential election recount, said she intended to quit later this month to focus on the congressional race, saying she can’t effectively do both.
But the state’s resign-to-run law required her to file a letter stating her intent to resign the day she qualified to run for Congress. If candidates don’t do so, state law says they must resign immediately.
“I made a mistake in not filing the letter,” Harris said at a hastily called news conference after which she was whisked away by aides as reporters shouted questions.
For those keeping track at home, this is the third time Florida’s upcoming elections have been in the news recently, after it was revealed last week that the Secretary of State’s office had given legislative candidates the wrong amount to send as a filing fee, so candidates had to send an additional $43.20 by noon last Friday in order to be on the ballot. Unfortunately, many of those checks and qualifying papers were aboard a FedEx jet that crashed and burned in Tallahassee before dawn on Friday.
The Florida Division of Elections claimed it was legally powerless to extend the noon deadline for candidates whose qualifying papers might have been destroyed or who were unable to get into the capital, whose main airport remain closed all that morning. Ms. Harris pressed Governor Jeb Bush to declare a state of emergency that afternoon and extended the qualifying deadline to 5 p.m. on Saturday for candidates who could prove the crash impaired their ability to qualify on time.
SEMITRUE: Said a spokesperson for Ms. Harris, Florida’s top elections official who became famous during the recount debacle for stating that Palm Beach County missed a deadline and therefore its recount of votes had to be thrown out: “Deadlines, schmedlines … the important thing is, the people get to vote for whom they want!”