Florida is living up to its reputation as the most electorally challenged swing state. Fla. vote problems start early

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — With lawsuits, long lines and a final burst of chaos during early voting, Florida is once again living up to its reputation as the most electorally challenged swing state.

Even as Mitt Romney made a final visit to the state Monday, Floridians waited in hours-long lines for one final chance to cast ballots ahead of Election Day — providing even more unflattering images for a state that’s already got a secure spot in dark electoral history.


Voting proceeded in several counties, even though Republican Gov. Rick Scott had refused to extend the state’s early-voting hours, which legally ended Saturday.

Election supervisors in a handful of counties — including Palm Beach, home of the “butterfly ballot” from Bush v. Gore fame — found a way around the restrictions by allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in person on Sunday and Monday. But that process was especially slow and cumbersome: In sprawling Palm Beach County, population 1.3 million, Monday’s in-person voting was available only at a single county elections office, where each six-page absentee ballot had to be printed individually, according to The Palm Beach Post.

The elections supervisors in South Florida’s three urban counties — Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade — had been targets of a federal lawsuit by the state Democratic Party demanding that early voting be extended. On Monday, the counties agreed to continue offering in-person absentee voting until at least 5 p.m. Monday and then again through 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Election supervisors in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, around Tampa Bay, also allowed in-person absentee voting Monday despite not facing any lawsuits, and a judge ordered Orlando’s Orange County to reopen early voting Sunday at a site that had been closed the day before by a bomb scare.

Miami-Dade was the scene of an instantly notorious meltdown Sunday, where — as shown in a Miami Herald video — overwhelmed election workers locked their doors for an hour while nearly 200 people outside chanted “Let us vote!” The newspaper said the county’s Republican mayor, Carlos Gimenez, had ordered the voting shut down after learning about the additional hours.

Eventually, voting in Miami-Dade resumed Sunday. But by then, the Herald said, some people’s cars had begun to be towed from a parking lot nearby.

“This is America, not a third-world country,” one woman in line with her grandson told The Herald.

Former Gov. Charlie Crist — once a Republican, now an independent who’s campaigning for Obama — called it “unconscionable” that Scott wouldn’t extend the hours after it became apparent that the long lines would prevent some people from voting early.

“This is a precious, sacred right that we have in our country,” Crist told reporters for the Tampa Bay Times and other outlets. “We’re fortunate we get to choose our leaders. It seems to me that if you value that precious right you’d do everything to encourage people to vote.”

Hours-long waits had also plagued the state’s early voting in 2004 and 2008. Crist extended the hours four years ago, an action that no doubt helped Obama win the state.

Since then, Scott and the GOP-led legislature cut the early voting period from 14 days to eight days, though keeping the same number of hours. On Monday, Scott told a West Palm Beach television station that the change expanded people’s opportunity to vote early by making more hours available per day, and that the early-vote period had been a success.

“4.4 million people have already voted before Election Day,” Scott said.

But calm appeared to prevail Monday when people lined up to vote again in Miami-Dade.

Meanwhile, one expert in election law told The Palm Beach Post that the county supervisors were potentially laying the ground for post-election challenges by having differing periods for pre-Tuesday voting.

“All 67 counties aren’t offering voters the same opportunities,” said University of Kentucky Law School Professor Josh Douglas, according to the Post. “You can’t have a handful of counties doing their own thing without any state authorization.”

But the newspaper also quoted Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner — a Scott appointee — as saying that the county supervisors are free to run their elections as they deem proper. And state GOP spokesman Brian Burgess told the Post, “As long as they’re following the law, everyone wins.”

The calm words belie a fact of life: Neither party is leaving much to chance in the state that gave the nation a 36-day recount after the 2000 election.

While Obama can win without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, securing the state would give him a huge leg up toward a second term. For Romney, the Sunshine State is almost a must-win. The most recent polls diverge: The most recent Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times poll gives Romney a 51-45 edge over Obama, while a Public Policy Polling survey has the president ahead 50-49.

For either party, the past 12 years of Florida electoral history are enough to give anyone pause.

The 2000 recount fiasco rested largely on the punch-card ballots that were then used in Palm Beach and several other large, urban counties, creating endless drama about whether chads were “hanging,” “pregnant” or “dimpled” — in other words, had the voters meant to punch those holes straight through? After the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, George W. Bush won the White House by 527 Florida votes.

The state swiftly banned any future use of punch cards, but the new electronic touchscreen machines that several counties adopted drew criticism from groups that called them hackable and lamented the lack of a paper trail. That prompted Crist to sign a law that essentially banned them in favor of optically scanned paper ballots.

But this year, Palm Beach County found itself in the spotlight event before early voting started: Last month, workers had to begin hand-copying the votes from 27,000 absentee ballots that had already been filled out by voters before the elections office discovered that the ballot contained printing errors.

Josh Gerstein contributed from Arlington Va. to this report, which includes material from The Associated Press.