Politics--The Post: "Absentee Edge for Bush"
washingtonpost.com
>>>Absentee Edge for Bush
By Dan Keating and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday , November 16, 2000 ; Page A26
A county-by-county examination of the overseas absentee ballots to be tallied late Friday in Florida suggests Vice President Gore could face an uphill battle in capturing enough of those votes to overtake Texas Gov. George W. Bush's current lead.
A Washington Post survey of 61 of Florida's 67 counties shows that as of late yesterday afternoon, approximately 1,780 overseas absentee votes have arrived in those county election offices since Election Day. Political activists have speculated that these late foreign votes could help Gore overcome Bush's 300-vote advantage if they include many Democratic voters living in Israel, or help Bush if they are primarily from military families.
The presidential election apparently hangs on these late-arriving ballots, as well as ongoing manual vote recounts in two counties.
But by looking at absentee ballots remaining to be counted in each county – and examining the breakdown of absentees already counted there – it appears Bush may take the majority of these late overseas votes. According to this calculation, Gore would get about 650 votes and Bush about 960 – a net gain of about 300 for Bush.
There are a number of complicating factors in trying to project the overseas votes. Two days remain for foreign ballots sent by Nov. 7 to arrive in the county election offices. And these late arrivers may vote differently from the ones who sent absentee ballots by Election Day.
There's a legal complication, too. County officials say many of the envelopes containing these late overseas absentee ballots lack a postmark. The law requires a postmark or other documentation to prove a ballot was mailed no later than Election Day.
"It's really up to the canvassing board to decide whether we can accept them without a postmark," said Trish Stamm, absentee ballot clerk in Alachua County, where she said there are 56 late-arriving overseas absentee ballots waiting for Friday's count.
The other problem is that overseas voters were mailed two ballots each. Under state law, each county sends out an "advance" ballot 45 days before the election to make sure it gets there soon enough. But that ballot is created before all primary run-off elections are completed, so it may list multiple candidates for various races. Once those have been resolved, a "regular" ballot is sent.
Many overseas voters complete both ballots, thinking the first one had been lost or fearful that the first one didn't count. Before the absentees are counted, the voter's name is checked off to make sure that a ballot hasn't already been counted from that voter.
Some election offices will not check for those duplicates until Friday, so the number of overseas ballots counted might be less than officials have in hand.
The Post contacted officials in 59 counties for the survey, and used data collected by the St. Petersburg Times for two others. While a Post article on Wednesday quoted federal officials saying only 447 absentee military votes had been received by a U.S. Postal Service center in Miami since the election, it turns out that two other centers in New York and Austin also are receiving such ballots, meaning there are many more than that number.
Gore's problem is that the counties he won most heavily have few outstanding absentee ballots. Broward County, where Jewish voters helped give Gore a lead of more than 200,000 on Nov. 7, has only 80 pending absentees. By contrast, heavily military and pro-Bush upstate counties such as those around Jacksonville and Pensacola have 163 and 203 pending absentee votes, respectively.
Democratic activists have estimated about 45,000 Americans living in Israel and territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority voted in the U.S. election, and the vast majority of them are Democrats. The best guess is that about 2,500 of them are from Florida, and The Post's analysis, as well as some interviews in Israel, suggests the great bulk of those who voted did so well before Nov. 7.
Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who has surveyed military officers about their political leanings, guessed that Bush will win the armed forces' vote by a 60 to 40 ratio.
"There's a strong Republican leaning in the officer corps," he said, estimating it's about 8-to-1 among people ranked captain to brigadier general. "Enlisted people are more Republican than their counterparts in the civilian world, age for age and race for race." But even so, the approximately 30 percent of the active-duty members of the armed forces who are black or Latino partly offset the conservatism of the officers, he said.
Staff writers Susan Schmidt and Ben White and staff researchers Lynn Davis, Madonna Lebling, Bob Lyford and Nancy Shiner contributed to this report.
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