Florida struggles to replace ballots

By Daniel Lak
BBC News correspondent in Fort Lauderdale

Officials hope replacement ballots will reach voters in time

For once there was cross-party unity in this fractious election campaign.

But neither party was happy about it.

The Democrats and the Republicans were working together at the elections warehouse here in Broward County, frantically stuffing envelopes, sending absentee ballots to their supporters.

"It's a little unusual," admitted a frazzled election official, "but we need the help."

Broward County's elections supervisor, Brenda Snipes, admitted earlier this week that tens of thousands of absentee ballots had not reached the people who had requested them.

And the county had to enlist partisan political activists in a last-minute mailing campaign.

Emergency measures

It was not all sweetness and light, though.

"The whole world is watching," chanted a crowd outside the elections office, led by the filmmaker, Michael Moore.

Nearby, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle, a Republican, called Mr Moore "a moron" and accused him of being "in bed with terrorists".

The director of Fahrenheit 9/11 dismissed the mayor and his supporters as "the four more wars crowd" - a reference to the "four more years" chant heard at Bush rallies.

KEY SWING STATES 1. Florida - 27 electoral votes 2. Pennsylvania - 21 3. Ohio - 20 4. Minnesota - 10 5. Wisconsin - 10 6. Iowa - 7 7. Nevada - 5 8. New Mexico - 5 9. New Hampshire - 4 Q&A: Swing states State profile: Florida

No-one is really yet aware of why so many Broward absentee ballots went missing.

Ms Snipe says the problem has been exaggerated by the press and pledged that no-one would lose their vote.

"We're getting thousands of ballots in the mail every day," she said, while conceding that emergency measures were necessary.

On Thursday, county officials agreed to foot the bill for overnight courier delivery of thousands of ballots to people living too far away for two-day delivery by post.

Azeezaly S Jaffer, a spokesman for the US Postal Service, has denied losing any ballots, describing any suggestion of that as insulting.

But local television stations are quoting an e-mail from a post office supervisor warning that absentee ballots were still stuck in the system and should not be treated as regular post, even if there were insufficient postage on the envelope.

Hard-working volunteers

Back at the elections warehouse, envelope stuffing went on almost all of Thursday night and well into Friday morning.

Republican Party spokesman Joseph Angostini said his party volunteers used in-house mailing lists to address nearly 600 absentee ballots and were finished early.

The Democrats had far more names and no single mailing list.

Volunteers waited impatiently for elections officials to print address labels from computers that kept freezing up or running out of printer ink.

"We have 3,000 more to send and it's getting late," said on volunteer, sporting a Kerry-Edwards badge.

Dr Snipes said all absentee ballots received by 1900 on election day would be counted.

"They can be hand-delivered, couriered, even faxed," a county spokesman said.

In the end, this was a setback for the voters of Broward County, but as a local columnist pointed out, at least the political parties were not blaming each other for stealing the ballots.

"Not yet, anyway."