nytimes.com 28, 2004
Review Finds Fla. Counties Voted for Bush
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:19 p.m. ET
MIAMI (AP) -- A newspaper's review of ballots cast in three north Florida counties where registered Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans showed just what officials reported: The counties' voters did on Election Day as they often do, voting for a Republican for president.
The Miami Herald review goes against Internet-fed rumors questioning whether there was a conspiracy against Sen. John Kerry in those counties.
Kerry won in much of South Florida, where voters vote on touch-screen machines that can't be checked.
Reporters for the newspaper went over more than 17,000 optical scan ballots cast in three rural counties mentioned by doubters: Suwannee, Lafayette and Union. All three are overwhelmingly Democratic in registration, but chose President Bush.
The Herald said they found minor differences with the official results in each county, most involving a few ballots that had been discarded as unreadable by optical scan machines but which reporters felt made the voters' intent clear. Since there was no official recount, those ballots weren't counted for either candidate.
In Union County, where more than 75 percent of voters register as Democrats, The Herald counted 3,393 votes for Bush, 1,272 for Kerry and 15 that couldn't clearly be counted. The official Union County total: 3,396 for Bush, 1,251 for Kerry and a few dozen that couldn't be counted.
``People here are mostly fundamentalist Christians who work in the prisons,'' said Union County Election Supervisor Babs Montpetit. ``Do you think they're going to vote for the liberal senator from Massachusetts?''
The Herald counted just under 60 percent of the votes in Suwannee County, where nearly 64 percent of the voters are registered Democrats. The newspaper's total from those precincts essentially matched the county's official total: 6,140 votes for Bush and 2,984 for Kerry.
In Lafayette County, 83 percent of voters are registered Democrats. But it too, is heavily conservative and deeply religious. There, the paper found 2,452 votes for Bush and 848 for Kerry, with 20 that couldn't be clearly counted. |
