Ready or Not, Floridians Gird for Another Close One
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Published: November 2, 2004

Palm Beach County officials reviewed the eligibility of abs entee ballots on Monday as Florida braced for Election Day.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Nov. 1 - The machines are in place, thousands of lawyers poised, and absentee ballot counts under way. The presidential candidates are finally finished campaigning here, and up to two million of the state's 10.3 million voters have made their choices through early voting.

So is Florida ready?

Accusations and disclosures continued to surface even on Monday, suggesting that absent a landslide winner, Election Day and its aftermath will be messy here, just as it was in 2000.

Republican lawyers said they had identified 1,700 felons who had not received clemency yet were illegally registered to vote. Republican poll watchers have each felon's photograph and criminal record, the lawyers said, so they can mount legal challenges should any try to vote.

Gov. Jeb Bush said in Jacksonville, "I don't think you're going to see a lot of challenges at the polls."

He also predicted that President Bush, his brother, would carry Florida by four percentage points.

In Palm Beach County, voting rights groups sued the elections supervisor, Theresa LePore, after learning that she had banned reporters and others from talking to voters outside polling places. A freelance journalist was arrested on Sunday and charged with disorderly conduct after photographing people waiting to vote outside Ms. LePore's office.

"Subverting the Constitution in order to bully and arrest journalists or poll monitors whose purpose is to ensure a fair and democratic electoral process should not be tolerated," said Elliot M. Mincberg, general counsel for the People for the American Way Foundation, which says it fights for "legal and social justice progress."

Ms. LePore said she issued the rule last week because people felt harassed by reporters and others who approached them in long early voting lines. Mr. Mincberg said state law let people talk to voters at least 50 feet from a polling place.

If nothing else, Floridians are more than ready to put the anticipatory stage behind them and face whatever comes next. Those who waited through days of grim prediction for recent hurricanes are experiencing déjà vu and looking forward to the recovery stage.

But given the apparent closeness of the race, the partisan rancor and the complex procedures and machinery that will be used for the first time in a presidential election, no one has a clue how Florida will fare.

"There are so many imponderables," said Donald Jaffin, a Republican and retired lawyer who was watching the Palm Beach County Elections Canvassing Commission inspect boxloads of absentee ballots on Monday. "I think the state is doing their very best, and I have confidence in the governor. But we've never faced anything like this."

Voting rights groups are especially nervous about potential eligibility challenges, which they said could delay and wrongly disenfranchise voters. An obscure state law enacted more than a century ago allows such challenges, but has rarely been used.

Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood issued guidelines for challenges last week, but voting rights groups said they were too vague.

Challenged voters can be made to cast provisional ballots, which are not counted until eligibility is confirmed. Provisional ballots are cast on optical-scan machines with central tallying, and such machines had a high error rate in 2000.

"You may as well be handing them a punch-card ballot," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a watchdog group.

Like so many other disputed practices, provisional balloting did not exist here in 2000, when the problems leading to the protracted recount involved punch-card ballots and other methods that have been banned.

Governor Bush has pointed to the overhaul of electoral practices as proof that things will go smoothly.

But now, Ion Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor, said, "We have different kinds of problems."

Mr. Sancho said the biggest challenge would be the enormous turnout, which some experts say could exceed 75 percent or even 80 percent of the registered voters.

Early voters in Florida had to wait up to four hours to cast ballots, partly because counties did not provide enough polling places or machines to meet the demand.

Mr. Sancho said he suspected that the lines were especially long in counties with touch-screen machines because the machines were expensive and the counties had bought too few.

Ms. LePore of Palm Beach County said she expected much shorter lines on Tuesday, because far more polling places would be open. Her county had eight early voting sites and 692 regular places.

Many fears focused on touch-screen machines, which studies show sometimes fail to record votes. Elections officials say that occurs only when a voter intentionally does not make a selection.

Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff, a critic of the machines, said she had not heard of serious malfunctions in the early voting. There have been scattered, unconfirmed reports of machines that switched a voter's selection for president. Republicans sued in Broward County Circuit Court, saying the elections supervisor, Brenda L. Snipes, a Democrat whom Mr. Bush appointed, had not updated voting lists Monday night to include people who had voted early during the day. A senior Republican adviser, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, said the lack of updating left open a possibility that a person could vote again on Tuesday. Late Monday, Judge David Krathen denied the motion. Ms. Snipes agreed to update the list by 7 a.m.

Broward County has more registered Democrats than any other Florida county. Asked whether Republicans had checked the other 66 counties, Ms. Fletcher said: "We haven't had this problem in any other county. I assume if that happened anywhere else, we'd have a problem there, too."

Broward County rushed out thousands of replacement absentee ballots last week after the originals never got to mailboxes. Elections supervisors begged voters to return them in person. Broward and Palm Beach Counties mailed thousands of absentee ballots on Saturday, but postal officials said they might be too late.

In Duval County, a spokeswoman for the Elections Office said the Republicans had sent an overnight list of felons who might try to vote and their criminal records. She said the office would not refer to the list, because names cannot be purged from the rolls within 90 days of an election.

Christopher Drew contributed reporting from Leon County, Maria Herrera from Broward County and William Yardley from Duval County.

(Frankspeak)