Casting Votes, Claims of Fraud, Come Early in Florida

With nearly 2 million people casting votes before Tuesday’s election in Florida, Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of preparing to cheat their way to victory on Tuesday.

Democrats charged that President Bush’s campaign was preparing to target heavily black precincts across the state for challenges by posting an inordinate number of lawyers in each location. Republicans worried aloud that thousands of absentee ballots, which tend to favor the GOP, have been lost.

And high-powered lawyers on both sides were busy looking for potential fraud in early voting precincts and on absentee ballots.

“It’s like guerrilla tactics out here,” said Ira Kurzban, a Democratic lawyer monitoring his GOP counterparts at a voting site in Miami’s Little Haiti.

Democratic lawyers, working in support of John F. Kerry, claim that the GOP is planting Creole speakers to present themselves as impartial helpers but who intend to encourage Haitian voters to back Bush. Republicans deny the allegation, and say Democrats are the ones planting the Creole speakers, to encourage votes for Kerry.

The accusations reached a more fevered pitch Saturday when U.S. Rep. Kendrick B. Meek and Sen. Bill Nelson, both Florida Democrats, accused the Bush campaign of planning to target black precincts.

Speaking to reporters in Miami, the two listed five Florida counties where they claimed the GOP was preparing to post one or more lawyers in the black precincts while choosing to monitor only a select few white areas.

“There is a strategy to try to reduce the turnout, and if that succeeds it could throw us into the chaos that we’ve experienced in the past,” Nelson said.

With polls showing Ohio, another treasure trove of electoral college votes, up for grabs, Nelson said Saturday that the race could well be decided by Florida’s 27 electoral votes, the most of any battleground state. Bush won the state four years ago by 537 votes after a recount battle and charges of voter disenfranchisement.

Polling places were packed Saturday as people continued to vote early, with some communities reporting lines several hundred deep and waits of as long as 2 1/2 hours.

Asked Saturday whether they were accusing the Republicans of racially motivated targeting, Meek said: “They are. We don’t have to say it.”

At the same time, Miami-Dade County officials said Republicans had requested that police officers be dispatched to precincts Tuesday to ensure the voting process remained peaceful. But the request was denied amid fears that a police presence might intimidate some voters.

Mindy Tucker Fletcher, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida, said Saturday that the Democrats were fabricating their accusations. She said the GOP was placing its 5,000 poll watchers at any precinct that went either heavily for Bush or heavily for Democrat Al Gore in 2000.

“Those are the places where the Democrats are most likely to cheat,” she said.

The tension and seeming inevitable legal battles in Florida underscore the tightness of the race nationally, and come as similar skirmishes are breaking out in other battlegrounds.

In Miami-Dade and other Florida counties where hundreds of thousands of people have voted early, the challenging has already begun. Lawyers for each side spent Saturday morning in a tiny, second-floor meeting room in the headquarters of Miami-Dade’s elections office in a suburb west of downtown Miami to watch the county canvassing board review about 1,600 absentee ballots that had been identified as problematic.

In most cases, voters’ signatures did not match signatures on file, and the lawyers were on hand to raise objections if need be. It was a seemingly mundane task but attracted some of the state’s most important legal minds -- including Gov. Jeb Bush’s former general counsel and the state GOP’s former chief counsel, who wrote in a notepad affixed with the presidential seal.

Meanwhile, in a warehouse downstairs, county election workers donned blue gloves in the so-called absentee cage, a secure, fenced-off area, to process absentee ballots that were streaming in.

The county distributed 125,000 such ballots, but GOP officials said Saturday they were worried that only about 57,000 had been returned -- far less than the typical rate, they said.

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections office, said there was no evidence of any widespread problems.

Absentee ballots have arisen as a concern for Republicans in Broward County, where officials rushed thousands of extra ballots to voters through overnight mail after many went missing.

At the Little Haiti precinct where Kurzban, the Democratic lawyer, was monitoring events Friday, the tension played out when Democratic observers witnessed a woman they suspected of working for the GOP assisting a voter at the voting booth. The woman was asked to leave, Democrats said.

Later, Democratic lawyers pointed to another woman, Rose Pagne, milling around the public library where the polling place was located and where hundreds of voters waited as long as two hours to cast their ballots. They said Pagne, a Haitian immigrant, was hired by the GOP.

But Pagne, questioned by a reporter, denied it. She said she was there to help Creole speakers understand the ballot.

“I’m not working for any party,” said the 28-year-old, who added that she moved to the U.S. six months ago and did not have a job. “I’m just trying to help my community.”