Florida county to resend 76,000 absentee ballots

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD, GARY FINEOUT AND AMY SHERMAN

Knight Ridder Newspapers   27 October 2004

 

MIAMI - (KRT) - Broward County's election office is resending about 76,000 absentee ballots to voters who say they asked but still haven't received them, an ominous sign of looming voting problems just days before the nation again sets its eyes on Florida.

The elections office is still trying to discover why so many people haven't received the absentee ballots. But with so little time before Tuesday's election, officials will mail out replacements - thousands of them - Thursday. The ballots will be shipped via overnight mail to people outside the county, said Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes.

Broward's mix-up is the most profound, but not the only, glitch in the absentee voter process across Florida. From teenagers away at school to homeowners away on travel, complaints are mounting that absentee ballots have somehow been lost between here and there. Voters in Palm Beach County have reported similar problems.

In Broward, the ballots will go to every voter who requested one but who has not yet returned the original ballot, Snipes said. More than 50,800 of the 127,320 people who asked for absentee ballots have returned them. The rest will get new ballots.

"We're going to give voters the benefit of the doubt," Snipes said. "This isn't a blame game. What we're concentrating on is getting the ballots to the voter."

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement - at Snipes' request - launched an investigation Tuesday, but found no evidence of criminal intent, said Paige Patterson-Hughes, spokeswoman for the agency's South Florida region.

But the office still hasn't solved why people have yet to receive ballots they requested weeks, or months, ago.

"What went wrong?" asked Reggie Mitchell, a spokesman for the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition. "Obviously, we want to do everything we can to make sure the voters who are supposed to actually get to vote."

For months, both political parties and critics of the touch-screen machines used in Broward, Miami-Dade and 13 other counties have urged voters to use absentee ballots, which are on paper. That led to a surge of absentee requests, topping more than 300,000 in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.

The absentee process in Broward begins when requests are processed at the county's voting equipment center in Fort Lauderdale. Then a courier, who is a full-time elections employee, drives the ballots to the Oakland Park Boulevard post office.

Postal investigators are concentrating their inquiry on 58,000 ballots that the elections office said were ped off on Oct. 7 and 8, said Del Alvarez, an inspector for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. The ballots are isolated from other mail and sorted on a designated machine. Ballots that are for local delivery are normally delivered in one day.

Postal inspectors haven't found a stockpile of absentee ballots, Alvarez said.

"There's no absentee ballots in any post office," Alvarez said. "We tried to look for them. There's no delayed mail, everything has been delivered. We don't know what the problem is."

The issue has reached a level of urgency among local and national Democratic and Republican leaders, who rely heavily on absentee ballots from their party faithful.

"Our legal team has been looking at it to make sure no one is being denied their right to vote," said Kevin Tynan, chairman of the Broward Republican Party.

Now, Tynan said, some party officials are concerned that sending duplicate ballots opens the door to fraud. When voters return a ballot to the elections office, workers enter the voter's name in a computer and they're not allowed to vote at the polls on Election Day. Also, if a voter has received an absentee ballot and has not sent it back, they must hand it over to election officials before they can vote on Election Day.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida fears that some voters may have problems if they requested an absentee ballot and show up on Election Day.

"Given how late a lot of these were mailed out, it's going to be a challenge for a lot of folks to get them back in by the deadline," said Courtenay Strickland, voting rights project director for the ACLU of Florida.

Selma Zwicker, 75, of Pembroke Pines said she hasn't received a ballot despite calling the elections office at least 12 times. One time, when she did get through, she was told that records showed her ballot was mailed on Oct. 7.

Wednesday, Zwicker said an elections worker told her she could come into the office to get an absentee ballot because it probably couldn't be mailed in time. "I really don't have anybody to take me there," Zwicker said. "None of my friends drive that far. I'm in limbo."

So far, Miami-Dade County has not experienced the same level of complaints about missing absentee ballots, said spokesman Seth Kaplan. But that doesn't mean there haven't been problems in that county as well.

Beau Paulk of Miami Shores, a 30-year-old graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said he asked for his ballot in August. A week ago, he finally called the Miami-Dade elections office, only to be told that they were surprised he hadn't gotten one. Paulk said the ballot arrived late Wednesday.