Theresa LePore
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : Theresa LePore
Theresa LePore is the former Supervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Florida. She designed the infamous "butterfly ballot", used in the 2000 presidential election. Because of voter outrage, she lost reelection in September 2004 to Dr. Arthur Anderson and left office in January 2005.
LePore was a registered Republican, but then switched her party to Democratic because, according to her, "when I ran [for the supervisor position], I chose Democrat because the incumbent was Democrat and the county registration is predominantly Democrat." After the 2000 election, she switched her party registration to No Party Affiliation.
LePore is (or was) a member of the following organizations:
- American Society of Public Adminisrators
- The Election Center
- Kiwanis of Flagler Sunrise
- League of Women Voters
- International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers
- Women's Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches
- Florida State Association of Supervisors of Election. Theresa served terms as Secretary, Vice-President, and President of FSASE.
Election Controversies
2000 was not the only time that LePore faced unfriendly public scrutiny of her work.To accommodate the large number of Presidential candidates eligible in Florida, LePore designed a staggered two-page format with candidate names on alternating sides of a central punch button column. In the 1996 election, the butterfly ballot caused an estimated 14,000 votes for the second candidate on the left (Bob Dole) to be miscast, but this did not affect the election outcome and went unnoticed at the time. In the 2000 election, the miscast votes would have been a decisive reversal and consequently achieved notoriety.
Responding to public anger at the punch card systems, LePore bought DRE voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems in 2002. This choice came under fire from voting experts, notably Rebecca Mercuri.
In November 2004, during her last election as a lame-duck supervisor, LePore faced one final round of criticism when the new touch screen machines apparently recorded 88,048 more votes than there were voters. This was later attributed to accidental double entry of data from some precincts.
After her final term as Supervisor of Elections, she was employed by the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office for a short period, enabling her to receive her full pension from Palm Beach County.
She is currently employed at Cardinal Newman High School in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Bibliography
- [Ballot nightmare lingers for Palm Beach elections chief (CNN, January 5, 2001)]
- [The Butterfly Ballot: Anatomy of a Disaster (AskTog, January, 2001)]
- [Maybe Theresa LePore is right (Palm Beach Post, April 20, 2004)]
- [Rival accuses LePore of breaking law (Palm Beach Post, April 28, 2004)]
- [Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Biography: Official Website]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.