Florida in election crosshairs again

By JAMES ROSEN, McClatchy Washington Bureau 08 October 2004

MIAMI (SMW) - For Floridians battered by a record spate of hurricanes, the political forecast is no less stormy: Expect a tumultuous, unpredictable finish to the presidential race with the Sunshine State again playing a decisive role in determining the winner.

Four years after a historic recount battle over hanging chads and butterfly ballots, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are targeting Florida as its voters belatedly begin to focus on the White House campaign.

"The ultimate election outcome in Florida is even more uncertain now than it was three months ago," said Justin Sayfie, editor of a popular Web site on Florida politics and a Bush campaign operative in Broward County.

"It's hard to get a good feel for where the state is politically because politics have been pushed aside by the four natural disasters we've had in the last eight weeks," Sayfie said. "What that has done is to condense a 90-day presidential campaign into a 30-day sprint."

Beyond the hurricanes' impact, a slew of complex issues entangles the election in Florida. They range from doubts about new electronic voting machines and fights over revised registration provisions to the effect of liberalized voting rules that could see 2 million people cast absentee ballots or go to the polls early, beginning Oct. 18.

Adding to the confusion is a crazy-quilt of eight state constitutional amendments on the ballot - on issues from curbing medical malpractice lawsuits to raising the minimum wage - that appeal to different groups of voters in a state with a complex demographic mix.

"Everything's up in the air in Florida," said Matt Towery, a pollster whose firm released a survey Wednesday showing Bush leading Kerry by 2 percentage points. "In the end, all we can do is guess about the result."

Thanks to its booming population, Florida has gained 2 Electoral College votes since 2000, making its 27 total votes a crucial election prize. Only California, New York and Texas have more, and none of those states are considered competitive.

The Bush and Kerry campaigns have blanketed Florida's six major media markets with TV ads, organized tens of thousands of volunteers and sent some 300 aides to work in dozens of offices around the state.

All signs indicate that Florida's 6 million-plus voters remain just as polarized as they were in 2000, when Bush carried the state by 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Count stopped a recount that had delayed the outcome for five weeks.

Many Democrats are still furious. West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel, who was in the thick of the recount fight four years ago as a Democratic leader of the state legislature, said the war in Iraq and the sluggish economy have only stoked their anger.

"We see what's happened to the country, which just adds insult to injury," Frankel said. "A lot of us just feel so responsible for the world being the way it is. But for the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, the world would be a different place today."

That ballot caused thousands of Palm Beach voters who supported Al Gore, many of them elderly Jews, to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan. County elections supervisor Teresa Lepore, who designed the ballot, was voted out of office last month.

Elizabeth Smith, an African American homemaker in Miami, said thousands of black voters had their ballots tossed out in 2000 by Republican poll workers under the thumb of Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, and his controversial secretary of state, Katherine Harris.

"They cheated last time," she said. "All of our people are getting killed in Iraq, and Bush isn't doing anything about it."

In its investigation of alleged voting abuses in 2000, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that more than half of the nearly 180,000 invalidated ballots in Florida were cast by African Americans.

The view is different over on the Gold Coast in western Florida, home to affluent and heavily Republican beachfront resort towns. As he teed up a golf ball at the gated Shadow Wood community in Bonita Springs, Gary Zimmerman said he didn't see anything wrong with the 2000 election.

"It's funny - they all can play five bingo cards at once, but they can't figure out how to punch a ballot," Zimmerman said.

A Republican who owned a wholesale food company before retiring, Zimmerman said the economy is beginning to boom, and Iraq is a war that needs to be fought.

"Iraq's a mess, but I agree with the president that it's a mess we've got to be in," he said.

Some Democrats admit grudging admiration for Bush's response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Michael Mella, an educator who lives in Weston near Fort Lauderdale, said he voted for Gore in 2000 but will likely cast his ballot for Bush on Nov. 2.

"I'm a Democrat, but I think we're better off with Bush on the offensive than Kerry on the defensive," Mella said. "He went after Iraq, and after the election he'll probably go after Iran and North Korea. I like that in a president."

Democratic and Republican activists agree with outside analysts' view that the hurricanes have probably helped Bush. Jeb Bush is getting rave reviews for his hands-on response, and the president has visited Florida after each storm.

After surveying hurricane damage at a citrus grove on Sept. 29, the day before his first debate with Kerry in Coral Gables outside Miami, Bush noted that he had asked Congress to provide $12.2 billion in disaster relief for the state.

"People of Florida have met historic challenges with extraordinary strength and generosity," Bush said.

In a speech to Cuban American voters in August, Bush displayed his facility with their native language, vowing to win in Spanish and referring teasingly to the governor as "mi hermanito" - my little brother.

More than three-quarters of the state's large Cuban American community, based in Miami and surrounding Dade County, voted for Bush in 2000. But travel restrictions he imposed in May, limiting Americans to one visit to the island every three years, have angered some Cuban Americans with relatives there.

A July poll put Bush's support among Cuban Americans at 66 percent, down from the 82 percent level he reached in 2000.

And some areas hardest hit by hurricanes are Republican strongholds in the Panhandle, central-eastern Florida and the Gulf Coast to the west. It remains to be seen how the damage and disruption will affect election turnout in those regions.

Thom Rumberger, a Republican lawyer in Tallahassee and a major fundraiser for Bush, said the storms have made it hard for him to help organize campaigns and get out the vote for five GOP candidates for the state House in southwest Florida.

"It's very difficult to know how many people are going to vote and how they will vote," he said. "These hurricanes have made the whole thing terribly complicated. There's no doubt they have made an impact, but nobody can figure out what the impact will be on November 2nd."

At the same time, polls indicate that many black voters in Florida have yet to become ardent backers of Kerry, and some analysts worry that a lackluster turnout could hurt his chances.

Daryl Jones, an African American lawyer who was a state senator before running for governor in 2002, predicted a repeat of 2000. Then, he said, polls showed little enthusiasm for Gore until three weeks before the election, but there ended up being large turnout, and Gore got 90 percent of the vote.

"Let me tell you something - the African-American community does not want George Bush to be re-elected," Jones said.

Recent post-debate polls show Kerry erasing a small lead Bush had opened in the state, and the Massachusetts senator planned to travel there Saturday after the two candidates' second debate.

"There's no more important place for us in the country than Florida, and we feel very comfortable that we're going to win the state," said Michael Donilon, a senior Kerry adviser.

With an unusual number of Floridians describing themselves as independents - as many as one in five - the outcome in Florida could be decided by the swing voters clustered along the Interstate 5 corridor that runs from Orlando down to Daytona Beach.

Since 2000, nearly 1 million new voters have registered in Florida, prompting analysts to predict that turnout Nov. 2 could reach 6.5 million. About 278,000 people have registered as Republicans and 264,000 as Democrats.

Both those figures are outstripped by the 464,000 new voters who claim either no affiliation or say they belong to other parties.

After the recount fiasco brought worldwide scorn to Florida, the legislature passed a sweeping election-reform law that banned punch-card ballots, set new recount provisions and enacted a host of other new rules.

The state has spent millions of dollars on electronic, touch-screen voting machines and voter-education programs.

"Florida has led the nation in election reform since 2000," said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

But some Democrats remain highly skeptical. They note that the governor is chairman of his brother's re-election effort in Florida, and that the state's election apparatus is controlled by Republicans.

Democratic critics also point to the voiding of thousands of new registration applications because citizenship boxes weren't checked, and they criticize state election officials' decision to forego paper audits of the electronic voting machines.

Most controversial of all, a court order in July forced Hood to release a list of 47,763 convicted felons who Florida law forbids from voting without clemency. The list contained very few Hispanics, who tend to vote for Republicans, and large numbers of blacks, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Bowing to the subsequent public outcry, Hood ascribed the discrepancy to a computer glitch that left off Hispanic names, and she abandoned a statewide purge of felons, leaving it to country election supervisors to enforce the ban.

Former President Jimmy Carter waded into the Florida controversies, claiming in a recent column that the state has yet to overcome its failed legacy of 2000.

"The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely," Carter wrote in the Washington Post. "With reforms unlikely at this late stage of the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious process in Florida."

Al Cardenas, former chairman of the state Republican Party and a Bush-Cheney fundraiser, accused Carter of playing politics.

"There is no merit whatsoever in these charges," he said. "President Carter is supposed to be a statesman, not a politician. A man of his stature should be ashamed of himself."