The article below comes from The Orlando Sentinel.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2008/12/orange-republic.html Be sure and add a comment at the Sentinel site.
Deon Long ramped up his fight to win control of the Orange County Republican Party this week, sending a legal request to state Attorney General Bill McCollum to intervene in a local GOP vote dispute and install him as party chairman.
In a five-page appeal, Long essentially said he was denied the chairmanship in a 122-121 inner-party vote against incumbent chairman Lew Oliver because more than a dozen of his supporters were refused a ballot by Oliver due to the sitting chairman's insistence that they didn't file proper loyalty oaths.
Oliver says he followed state rules on loyalty oaths. And a traffic accident on the East-West Expressway and other scheduling hiccups that election night kept plenty of his backers from attending the vote, too. Without those glitches, Oliver said he would have handily won the party leadership vote.
Long is asking McCollum to intervene quickly because a recent South Florida judge ruled the loyalty oaths were out of order. And if this internal-vote squabble isn't settled soon, Long wrote, he could be denied a chance to vote in the Florida party's state chairman elections on Jan. 9.
McCollum's office was closed Friday and he could not be reached for immediate comment. Oliver said he welcomes any inter-party appeals surrounding the recent chairman's vote, but he's confident McCollum would not intervene.
"There's courts for that purpose," Oliver said Friday.
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