In early returns, absentee votes big winner

By Nirvi Shah

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Saturday, October 30, 2004

With Election Day still three days away, thousands more Floridians have already voted by mail than in the 2000 election, the result of relaxed rules governing absentee ballots.

Already, voters have turned in more than 800,000 absentee ballots to elections supervisors across Florida, according to a survey of 50 counties by The Palm Beach Post. That's about 100,000 more than were cast statewide in the 2000 Bush vs. Gore battle. On top of that, more than 800,000 Floridians have voted early.
 That means at least 1.6 million Floridians — more than 15 percent of the 10.3 million registered voters in the state — have already cast their ballots in a too-close-to-call presidential election. To handle the crush of mail, the Palm Beach County elections office has set up a long green tent outside its suburban West Palm Beach headquarters to handle 50 to 60 buckets of mail — mostly absentee ballots — received each day. It's checked briefly before being taken inside to make sure nothing unusual is hidden among the ballots, Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said.

The state changed rules that required voters to attest that they will be out of town or unable to get to the polls to be allowed to vote absentee. Now, anyone may vote absentee. Also, voters are hoping to ensure their votes are counted, or included in a recount. While touch-screen votes don't provide a paper trail, absentee ballots in counties that use touch screens do. And voters who want more time to vote, or who are befuddled by voting machines, would rather vote absentee.

The error rate on absentees, which are scanned by a machine, is higher than the error rate on touch-screen machines. That's because voters can more than one candidate for president on absentee ballots, a mistake known as an overvote, but can't on touch-screen ballots.

Voters don't have a chance to machine-check their absentee ballots as they do at polling places in the 52 counties that use optical-scan ballots. If they vote in person using a fill-in-the-bubble or -arrow ballot and a tabulator rejects a ballot because of an error, the voter may correct it.

Absentee ballots can have other problems, too. Some voters have found their absentee ballots are missing pages. And the Palm Beach County canvassing board rejected more than 150 absentee ballots Friday for missing signatures or signatures that didn't match those on file. But absentee ballots no longer require the signature of a witness. Missing witness signatures led to the rejection of thousands of ballots in the past.

Still, requests for ballots were rolling in through Friday, via fax and phone, including many voters who said they requested absentee ballots but hadn't yet received them. Many voters told stories of waiting in line to pick up absentee ballots for relatives — which isn't allowed until four days before the election — so they could Express Mail the undelivered ballots themselves.

The ballots must arrive at election offices by 7 p.m. Election Day. With the mystery of 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Broward County still being unraveled, however, Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, suggested this week that because of delays, the ballots should merely have to be postmarked by that time Tuesday.

Boxes of absentee ballots have been returned to LePore because voters' addresses on file were incorrect, she said Friday. Absentee ballots cannot be forwarded by law. With no time to find those voters, the issue could be challenged in court.

Longtime GOP strategy

This should be Alan Davis' first chance to vote for president. Davis, a Florida State University sophomore, said he was excited about his first election, and that he requested a ballot to be mailed to him a few months ago. He said he hasn't received it.

On Friday, he faxed his father a note, granting permission to collect the ballot for him. His father picked up the ballot, which he will send via overnight mail from Jupiter to Tallahassee. Davis will vote, then return it, again paying overnight postage. Then his father will drive it to West Palm Beach.

Now he wishes he'd registered to vote in Leon County so he could vote in person.

"I figured since I had already registered in Palm Beach County..." he said.

Despite the demand, some voters think absentees aren't counted unless the election is close. That's not the case. They are always counted, in every race, LePore said.

In 2000, with Republicans pushing absentee ballots, the effort paid off handsomely in Florida: That year absentee voters chose Texas Gov. George W. Bush nearly 2-to-1 over Vice President Al Gore.

The longtime Republican strategy has proved itself over the years, even when Republican candidates lost the presidency.

Consider the 1976 presidential election: Until the ballots were counted, Democrat Jimmy Carter had won Palm Beach County. By the time the 11,114 absentee ballots were tallied, the county tipped in Republican Gerald Ford's favor: 97,578 votes to Carter's 96,705. More than 6,000 absentee voters cast ballots for Ford.

This year, Democrats joined the absentee bandwagon, said Richard Giorgio, a West Palm Beach political consultant.

"I do believe that the number of absentees are a direct result of a very focused get-out-the-vote effort by both parties, but more so by the Democratic Party," Giorgio said. Through the August primary, it was a way of getting voters to lock in votes in advance, he said. The Democrat strategy shifted to voting early in the November election.

But absentee ballots have gotten a boost in the past two weeks, as would-be voters who have seen long lines at early voting sites are requesting absentee ballots instead.

Despite the queues curling around government buildings, the campaign antics and the heat, just as many Floridians have voted early as have voted absentee.

Already, counties said more than 800,000 voters have suffered the lines to vote before Election Day. Combined with absentee ballots turned in, more than 1.6 million Floridians have voted — a million shy of voter turnout in the August primary, with four voting days left.

By Friday evening, more than 9,200 Martin County residents had voted at the county courthouse since early voting began Oct. 18.

Most voters chatted or reviewed sample ballots while waiting in lines of about 100 and said they didn't mind the 30-minute wait.

"It seems to be moving," voter Pat McGhee said of the line that extended Friday afternoon to the back parking lot of the courthouse. She said she expected long lines even if she waited to vote at her precinct.

"Hopefully there will be long lines regardless," she said. "It's important."