Jay Patel

Jay Patel, an engineer who has been an activist in the local Democratic Party for the last 15 years, believes the citizens in his county are more confident this time that their votes will count.

In 2000, Broward County threw up one of the most controversial challenges to then presidential candidates Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush, with accusations that many voters’ ballots were not counted.

“This is a very controversial county and we are working very hard to go through the election process. This time it is not hanging chads or anything like last time. Now it is an electronic machine. Nothing should go wrong unless the margin is so small that it will end up in court,” surmises Patel, in a scenario where Broward citizens said just days before Nov. 2 that thousands of absentee ballots had not reached them.

“Some people in my county feel there is some hanky-panky going on and they don’t trust the system. The latest is so many absentee ballots that don’t seem to have got to the people they were mailed to,” said Patel, but meanwhile, he continued his grassroots outreach to the voters. “My job was to get as many people to come out and vote and then be at the phone booth. I make sure that everybody who wants to vote can vote. We see how many people have not voted and then we pass the names to the phone banking volunteers.”

Born in Chhodvadi in Gujarat, Patel has been on the Broward County Democratic Party Executive Committee since 1989.

“I joined the party because I felt that if one is in an Indian-American organization then we are always infighting,” he said.

Patel is also a member of the Democratic National Committee and for a year in 1999, held the post of a trustee of the statewide Democratic Party. At the end of his term, President Clinton had appointed him on the National Science Foundation’s National Medal of Science committee.