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New voting glitches raise concerns in Florida
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Or take the new ballots, which are read by optical scanners. The rules are simple but precise: Voters must blacken in the space between the head of an arrow and a rectangular base beside their preferred candidate’s name, creating a whole arrow by connecting them.
But some voters didn’t understand the directions. So far, election officials say, many ballots have been rendered unreadable by voters who wrote in X’s, checks, boxes, stars or dots.
One voter kissed the ballot and made her mark with lipstick.
U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has had enough. He called on Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning to try again.
“As the November election approaches, it is absolutely critical that voters in South Florida, and for that matter across the entire state, can participate in this historic election with the utmost confidence that their votes will be counted,” he said.
Florida could decide things again
As in 2000, Florida could be pivotal in a too-close-to-call presidential campaign. And again, as in 2000, the race in Florida is a dead heat.
After comfortably leading in the state for several months, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona has fallen into a statistical tie with Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Obama now leads by 2 percentage points, a difference that falls within the poll’s margin of error.
Other polls — by The Miami Herald, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and CNN — all agree. The race is a toss-up.
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Having learned its lesson in 2000, the Democratic Party is taking no chances. Obama’s campaign has an unprecedentedly large staff in Florida — 350 paid workers in 50 offices running the length and breadth of the state, more than four times the size of McCain’s operation.
Obama said that given the difficulties in Palm Beach County, he planned to station a team of election lawyers in the state.
“I’m not going to anticipate a problem,” Obama said Saturday at a rally in Jacksonville. “I’m just going to prepare for a problem by making sure that we’ve got lawyers in precincts all across the state."
“We are going to make sure the election is run the way it’s supposed to be run,” he said. “The state Democratic Party has registered 300,000 new voters this year alone, but will their votes be counted?”
Jennifer Davis, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, sought to reassure anxious voters — and candidates.
“Sixty-six counties did perfectly well” during the Aug. 26 primary, she said. “We had an administrative error, or some administrative gaps in procedures, in Palm Beach (County), but they are preparing and they will be prepared for November’s elections, as well.”
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But the players aren’t so sure.
“It could, unfortunately, be tragic in terms of electing a president of the United States,” said Gerald Richman, the attorney for Wennet and a veteran of Al Gore’s legal team in 2000.
“If it’s a close election, it’ll be 2000 all over again,” he said. “I think we’ll have major problems in Palm Beach County. They’ve got to do their work now.”
For his part, Browning said he was working hard to ensure that Florida did not again become the punchline of painful jokes.
“My mission in life is to keep the late-night comics from having any new material,” he said.
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