Enforce ballot integrity

Never mind.

So Buddy Dyer is back in as mayor of Orlando. In dropping all charges from the absentee-ballot case against him and three others, embarrassed special prosecutor Brad King said last week: "There was no evil intent on these people's part. They did not believe they violated the law." His lame excuse for Florida's latest debacle leaves legislators no excuse for not fixing the absentee-ballot law.

Mayor Dyer was indicted last month on the third-degree felony charges along with longtime Orlando political operative Ezzie Thomas. Exonerated along with them are Mayor Dyer's campaign manager, Patti Sharp, and Orange County Circuit Judge Alan Apte, another Thomas client. Mr. Thomas was accused of taking payment, and the others of paying to collect absentee ballots in African-American neighborhoods such as those that helped Mayor Dyer win a close election last year. But prosecutors produced no parallel to the Miami mayoral election scandal that prompted the 1998 absentee-ballot law, which was aimed at people who paid or were paid for each absentee ballot they delivered for a particular candidate.

Politics was an issue in this case, but in a way that showed why absentee votes remain a problem. The Republican opponent of Mayor Dyer, a Democrat, sued after the election. Gov. Bush, a Republican, assigned a Republican as special prosecutor and suspended Mayor Dyer after the indictments. The mayor's supporters, though, were looking forward to the testimony of Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, and other Republicans for whom Mr. Thomas also had been a campaign worker in local elections.

The fact that politicians from both parties long have paid Mr. Thomas to get out the vote also makes it harder to explain away FDLE investigators' alleged intimidation of elderly African-American residents in the runup to last year's election. For those residents, the governor's dismissal of complaints that his administration was trying to suppress the key city's black vote before the presidential election probably rings hollow.

The collection of absentee ballots clearly can be abused. So the Legislature should clarify what is criminal. More important, the Legislature should undo what it did last year, when lawmakers dropped the requirement that absentee ballots have a witness signature. That change had been bipartisan reform seven years ago. Taxpayers spent $45,000 to investigate Mayor Dyer for a year. They should get something for their money.