Dear JDN,
I too live in Palm Beach County and voted here. It is not only I that believe there is a problem with the ballot. Here is what the local paper had to say about it:
Ballot's listings baffling to voters
By George Bennett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 8, 2000
Al Gore's campaign once fretted about losing votes to liberal Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
But on Tuesday in Palm Beach County, Democrats instead worried that Gore votes were mistakenly going to conservative Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan because of a ballot layout they called confusing.
Tempers flared all day at the county elections office as Gore supporters complained about the two-page listing of presidential candidates in the county's ballot booklet. Many Democrats said they weren't sure whether they were punching their ballot for Gore or Buchanan.
Gore's campaign was watching the Buchanan vote from Palm Beach County early this morning to see whether it made any difference in statewide results.
"We're continuing to look at the issue and our options," said Gore's Florida campaign spokeswoman, Liz Lubow.
With 71.2 percent of county precincts reporting, Buchanan had only about 0.8 percent of the total. His 1,829 votes included 54 from the Democratic retiree stronghold of Century Village in West Palm Beach and 37 from Kings Point in Delray Beach, another haven of older Democrats.
Tuesday also saw scattered complaints from some of the county's 535 precincts that ballots did not include all the races up for election Tuesday. Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore confirmed that some voters in the 48th Precinct in North Palm Beach received ballots that didn't include the U.S. Senate race or the U.S. House contest between Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach, and Jean Elliott Brown. The problem was limited to four of the precinct's 22 voting machines and was fixed by 7:30 a.m., LePore said.
A similar problem was spotted and corrected before the polls opened in a south county precinct, LePore said. She said she was unaware of other similar complaints.
Tuesday's large turnout also produced widespread gripes about long lines at polling places and jammed phone lines at the Elections Office.
But the largest hue and cry was over the presidential ballot.
"This is ridiculous, this ballot. We have senior citizens going crazy," said state Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, who came to the county elections office about 3 p.m. to register her displeasure. She was soon joined by state Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, and U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton.
"It's sick," Wexler said of the possibility of Buchanan getting Gore votes.
"This has national implications," Frankel said at the time.
Because of a 1998 state law making it easier for minor-party candidates to get on the ballot, there were 10 presidential candidates and space for a write-in on Tuesday's ballot.
The candidates were listed on two facing pages of the ballot booklet that is attached to each voting machine. The punch holes for each candidate were in a single column that ran between the facing pages.
The Democratic ticket of Gore and Joe Lieberman was the second one listed on the left-hand page of the ballot. But the punch hole for Gore-Lieberman was the third one down in the column. A thick arrow pointed from the Democratic ticket to the corresponding punch hole. But many voters said they were still bewildered.
"You can't tell, really, which number you're punching, which hole you're punching," said John Lazet, who came to the elections office from his Greenacres precinct to complain and ended up in a heated argument with LePore.
Palm Beach County was apparently the only county in Florida to list the candidates on two pages. State law dictates the order in which candidates are to be listed, but allows each county to determine the layout for its ballot.
LePore said she was trying to help older voters by putting the presidential candidates on two facing pages. Fitting them on a single page, LePore said, would have required a smaller type that would have been difficult to read.
Lubow called the ballot "potentially very confusing for folks."
But Clay Roberts, the head of the state's Division of Elections, defended LePore's ballot.
"The arrow clearly points to the right hole to punch," he said. "If the voter punches the hole next to the arrow, they'll vote for the right person. But if they punch holes willy-nilly, who knows who they've voted for."
Staff writer Shirish Date contributed to this story.
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