Postal Experts Hunt for Missing Ballots in Florida
By Michael Christie
Reuters
Wednesday 27 October 2004
MIAMI - U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying to find thousands of absentee
ballots that should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous counties, officials
said.
The issue evoked memories of the polling problems that bedeviled the Florida election in 2000 and
which the state has been trying to address before next Tuesday's presidential election, which is again
expected to be a very tight race.
Broward deputy supervisor of elections Gisela Salas said 60,000 absentee ballots, accounting for
just over 5 percent of the electorate in the county north of Miami, were sent out between Oct. 7 and
Oct. 8 to voters who would not be in town on election day.
While some had begun to be delivered, her office had been inundated with calls from anxious voters
who still had not received their ballots.
"It's really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement,"
Salas told Reuters.
"It was basically our first major drop of the absentee ballots," Salas said. She said postal service
officials had assured Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes that the ballots had moved out of the
post office to which they had been taken by the elections office.
U.S. Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez, whose federal agency is independent from the U.S. Postal
Service, said it had yet to be determined if the ballots reached the post office.
"It's highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared," he said. "We're looking for it, we're
trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service."
In 2000 the race in Florida, on which the national presidential contest ultimately depended, was so
close it prompted five weeks of lawsuits and recounts.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually halted the recounts, handing President Bush a 537-vote victory in
Florida and the White House, and infuriating Democrats who insist their candidate Al Gore won the
popular vote in the state.
The punch card ballots that were at the heart of the disputed 2000 election have been replaced by
touchscreen voting machines in 15 of Florida's 67 counties, and just over half the state electorate will
use them. The other counties will use optical scanning machines to read paper ballots.
But poll watchers still fear another legal maelstrom if the race in Florida, or any other critical swing
state, is close and there are suspicions that some voters were denied a ballot.
Salas said the missing absentee ballot forms did not yet represent a major election problem because
people had the option of voting early before next Tuesday, when Bush is being challenged by
Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
Poll workers will be able to cross-check through lap top computers hooked up to a central database
whether voters had already sent in absentee ballots. On election day itself, those who requested
absentee ballots will only be able to vote in person if they bring the blank absentee forms with them.
"A lot of people are very concerned because they think that just because they requested an
absentee ballot, now they're stuck in a limbo situation where they don't have their ballot and they can't
vote," Salas said.
"So most definitely we want to get the message out that yes they can go to an early voting site and
cast their ballot and that's what we would encourage them to do," she said. |
