Same-sex marriage ban may not make ballot - 01/14/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

Same-sex marriage ban may not make ballot - 01/14/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

BY GARY FINEOUT
gfineout@MiamiHerald.com
TALLAHASSEE -- A proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Florida may not make it to voters this year, after organizers -- who proclaimed a month ago they had gotten it on the November ballot -- found out Monday they haven't collected enough signatures after all.
A counting glitch -- which has the state pointing fingers at Miami-Dade County -- has resulted in Florida4Marriage.org falling 22,000 voter signatures short of the 611,000 needed to place the amendment on the ballot.
The group has a tight deadline -- Feb. 1 -- to get the signatures to state election officials.
A month ago, backers of the amendment declared they had met their goal and began attacking groups that had formed to fight the amendment. On Monday, the leader of the effort said he had little time to figure out what happened, but said he would push volunteers to start gathering petitions again.
''There's a real temptation in pointing fingers, but we're interested in getting the job done,'' said John Stemberger, an Orlando attorney and chairman of Florida4Marriage.org. ``We will immediately jump into action. I'm confident if every petition is counted that is submitted prior to Feb. 1 then we should have no problem.''
While Florida4Marriage.org has relied on volunteers, it may face tough going, because campaign finance records show that the group is broke. The organization had received financial help from the Republican Party of Florida, but since Gov. Charlie Crist came into office, the party has stopped giving the group money.
State law already bans same-sex marriage, but Stemberger and other supporters contend a constitutional amendment is needed to keep the law protected from a legal challenge. Opposition groups have organized and raised money to try to defeat the amendment, which would need approval from 60 percent of voters.
To get on the ballot, organizers must get 611,000 signatures, including a certain amount in half of Florida's 25 congressional districts. State officials ordered a new count of all petition signatures last week after acknowledging a glitch in the state's $23 million database system that is supposed to tally the information electronically.
Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Secretary of State Kurt Browning, said the new count showed that Miami-Dade had somehow ''double-counted'' 27,000 petition signatures for the amendment that had been turned in before Jan. 1, 2007, when the new system went online.
But Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Lester Sola said the error happened on the state's end, saying that for months his office had warned the state the numbers its system was showing were in error. Sola even sent a letter on Dec. 21 to Browning saying the number of signatures from Miami-Dade were being ``recounted.''
''The bottom line is that their system doubled the number of petitions that some counties were submitting,'' Sola said.
Ivey, however, insisted that the problem happened because the Miami-Dade system ''uploaded'' an incorrect number into the state computer.
''The numbers in the system were incorrect because their vendor uploaded more signatures than they verified,'' Ivey said.