Miami-Dade's election supervisor says 'sheer volume' to blame for long delay with state's winner still to be announced

Anger and frustration was growing in Florida on Thursday after beleaguered officials announced that the state's winner from Tuesday's presidential election would probably still not be confirmed until Friday, more than 60 hours after the last polling station closed.

Miami-Dade's mayor Carlos Gimenez said it was "inexcusable" that ballot papers were still being counted in his county, leaving the state the only one left to declare. Other observers branded the county's handling of the election, in which some voters waited in line for more than six hours, as "worse than a third-world country".

Despite the outcry, which prompted memories of the 2000 debacle in which Florida kept the nation waiting for a victor for more than a month, Miami-Dade's supervisor of elections, Penelope Townsley, insisted that the county had "generally a very good election."

She blamed the delay on a late surge of 54,000 absentee ballots that had to be included in the final count and said that being able to announce an accurate result took priority over everything else. That count has now been completed. The county's total results, including a count of provisional ballots that is yet to be finished, would be ready by Friday.

"Am I embarrassed or disappointed by some of the things that happened? Absolutely," she told reporters at a lunchtime press conference. "But I have to focus on simply getting it right.

"This is simply a matter of sheer volume. We're dealing with a tremendous amount of paper. We will continue this process, it will be completed, but it will be done so with integrity and accuracy. And every vote will be counted."

Every other state in the union declared its winner before daybreak on Wednesday, handing a comfortable electoral college victory to Barack Obama and rendering the Florida result and its 29 college votes irrelevant.

By Thursday afternoon, Florida could only say that 97% of ballots had been tabulated. Obama, with almost 4.2 million votes, remained 0.6 percentage points ahead of his Republican challenger Mitt Romney and appeared likely to retain or extend that lead, given that the outstanding votes are in strongly Democratic counties.

But that could not be confirmed until Miami-Dade officials had finished verifying the provisional ballots, a process that would probably take until Friday afternoon, Townsley said.

Even so, Republicans accept that the state is probably lost. "We thought, based on our polling and range of organisation that we had done what we needed to win," Brett Doster, Romney's adviser in Florida, told the Miami Herald in a statement.

"Obviously we didn't, and for that I and every other operative in Florida has a sick feeling that we left something on the table. I can assure you this won't happen again."

Mayor Gimenez has promised an inquiry into the conduct of the election and said he would be protesting to Florida's Governor Rick Scott. "We need to talk to the governor and legislature to extend early-voting hours," he said.

Some of the fiercest criticism came from the League of Women Voters of Florida, who were already furious at Scott's refusal to keep polling stations open late last week, something they claim would have eased Tuesday's lengthy queues.

"There are many Third World countries that would never ask their citizens to stand in line for six to seven hours to cast their ballots," Deirdre Macnab, the group's president, told the Herald.

Joining the assault was Al Gore, the losing Democratic candidate in the flawed 2000 election in Florida in which his rival George W Bush was leading the state by just 537 votes when the US supreme court stepped in after five weeks to halt all recounts and award him the White House.

Speaking on the Current TV cable network channel he co-founded, Gore accused Republicans of deliberately causing delays at the polls to manipulate the vote.

"At some point after this election, I hope there will be a reckoning for these governors and state legislatures that have intentionally tried to prevent people from voting," he said.

"It is a strategy that is a direct descendent of the racist Jim Crow tactics that were used in the wake of the civil war to prevent black people from voting. It is more sophisticated now. It is dressed up in different kinds of language, but it is un-American, it is wrong, it is a disgrace to this country and there ought to be a bipartisan movement to say enough of this."