Deja Vu as Florida Struggles to Hold Pristine Election
Thu Oct 28, 2004 11:25 AM ET
By Michael Christie   Reuters

MIAMI (Reuters) - Lawsuits, missing absentee ballots and accusations of bias from afar Tuesday's presidential election in Florida already looks like the Third World-style fiasco of 2000 that everyone wanted to avoid.

But election officials in the state run by President Bush's brother insist a massive turnout for early, pre-Election Day voting and a growing capacity to deal with lengthy queues show that Florida will get it right.

That view is partly shared by the Florida Democratic Party, even as it pursues five lawsuits against the Republican state government.

"(Gov.) Jeb Bush and his administration had four years to fix the problems and there's still problems out there," said Florida Democratic Party spokeswoman Allie Merzer.

Yet she added, "We are cautiously optimistic ... We're really hoping to just turn out the vote in such a large number, with such a large margin, that it's not an issue."

In fact, opinion polls show Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry locked in a dead heat in a state that could again be crucial to clinching the presidency.

Four years ago, Florida became a laughing stock when the race was so close it generated an avalanche of lawsuits and five weeks of recounts. The U.S. Supreme Court finally halted the recounts and Bush took the White House after winning Florida by 537 votes.

The discredited punch card ballots that lay at the heart of the disputed 2000 election have been replaced in 15 counties by touchscreen voting machines and just over half the state's 10.3 million voters will cast ballots that way. The other 52 counties will use optical scanners to read paper ballots.

But critics say the system is still not foolproof.

NO PAPER RECOUNT

In particular, the state's decision not to ensure there would be a paper trail through which to recount votes cast on touchscreen systems has alarmed democracy advocates.

A court struck down a state law banning manual recounts in touchscreen counties, and Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood had to produce an emergency order to settle the issue.

Unfortunately, said the American Civil Liberties Union, nothing in Hood's order actually allows for a recount.

"If there are malfunctions, or tampering, in this election, we may never know," the ACLU's attorneys wrote to Hood.

The machines are the least of some peoples' worries.

Civic groups have launched lawsuits against a range of policies they say disenfranchise thousands of Floridians.

Complaints cover issues from voters being disqualified because they forgot to tick a citizenship box on their registration cards, even though they signed an oath that they are U.S. citizens, to a controversial list of felons banned from voting, which the state ended up abandoning.

In Democrat-leaning Broward County, by the coastal city of Fort Lauderdale, 60,000 absentee ballots never reached voters either lost in the mail or on their way to the post office.

Florida's interpretation of a new federal law designed to improve voter access by creating provisional ballots for voters whose status is questioned has also come under fire. Like many states, Florida allows voters to use provisional ballots only if they are in the correct precinct, but many voters may resort to a provisional vote precisely because they do not know which precinct they should be in.

In addition, state police are investigating scores of allegations of fraudulent voter registrations.

"I wouldn't be surprised frankly if we even wind up with the registration of dead people," said Tom Berlinger, spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Pressure groups shied away from commenting on whether lawsuits could again delay the election result, a prospect financial analysts say they find increasingly unsettling.

"We've been trying to clear the path for some time, trying to remove barriers before the election so we would not be involved in post-litigation," said Edward Hailes, senior attorney of racial advocacy group the Advancement Project.

Gov. Bush has accused Democrats of using lawsuits to lay a basis for disputing the result if Kerry loses.

And election officials including those from Democrat strongholds point to high turnouts for early voting, and a growing ability to cope, as proof the doomsayers are wrong.

In Miami-Dade County and neighboring Broward, officials expect 20 percent of the electorate to have cast votes through absentee ballots or early voting before Election Day.

That enthusiasm in turn has raised fears of endless queues that could deter voters. But officials shrug off concerns.

"People wait in line for an hour at Disney World to go on a roller coaster, you know," said Miami-Dade elections spokesman Seth Kaplan.