Broward officials blame U.S. Postal Service over missing ballots

Associated Press    26 October 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Broward County officials blamed the U.S. Postal Service Tuesday for misplacing nearly half of the absentee ballots requested in the county, as frustrated voters trying to find out what happened overwhelmed phone lines at the elections office.

The Postal Service denied responsibility for the missing ballots, but Broward officials said they sent about 58,000 ballots more than two weeks ago, on Oct. 7-8. As of Tuesday, 126,220 absentee ballots had been requested.

"That is something beyond our control," Deputy Supervisor of Elections Gisela Salas told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "We really have no idea what's going on. It's just taken an extraordinary amount of time. I would really encourage people to use early voting."

"We have employees that we assign to handle the absentee ballots that come in," said Enola C. Rice, spokeswoman for the Postal Service's South Florida District. "So all the absentee ballots that are received by the postal service are processed and delivered immediately."

Rice said most local mail is delivered in one day.

Broward County commissioners were eager to avoid another faulty election like the one in 2000 and offered to send county workers to answer phones or speed up lines at early voting sites. Those living out of town can call and request another ballot, which officials said would be sent through overnight mail.

But just six days away from the general election, elections supervisor Brenda Snipes' office has fielded hundreds of complaints from people about missing absentee ballots. Other residents only got busy signals.

Salas said the elections office had 158 phone lines for a county with about 1 million registered voters, compared to Miami-Dade County's 400 lines for a similar number of voters. She said it was probably too late to add more before Nov. 2.

"My phone mail is constantly full. I clear my voice mails twice a day and I have 30 each time," she said.

Long lines have still been a problem at many early voting sites in Broward, with some voters waiting about 2 1/2 hours to cast their ballots. As of Tuesday, 67,249 people had voted early, Salas said.

Pete Corwin, assistant to County Administrator Roger Desjarlais, said the problem was not caused by a lack of voting machines, but rather a lack of laptop computers and poll workers to process the voters.

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