Voters in the battleground state of Florida have called in the most complaints over missing absentee ballots, long voting lines and other problems, a group running a hotline said Sunday.
Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy organization, reported that of 53,252 calls received nationwide, 8,658 have been from Florida, the state that delayed the 2000 election result for five weeks,
Florida’s total was followed by 6,622 in the Democratic bastion of New York, which has not been a focus of either President Bush or Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts in the neck-and-neck presidential race.
Common Cause, which is operating the voter alert line with a consortium of groups, said thousands of calls also were reported in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, 5,409, Michigan, 3,831, and Ohio, 1,639. Complaints also were received from California, South Carolina, New Jersey and Bush’s home state of Texas.
In Florida, the highest number of calls came from Broward County, where thousands of absentee ballots, mailed to voters unable to vote in person on Election Day, appeared to have gone astray in the mail or on the way to the post office.
While the flood of complaints from Florida could partly be attributed to voter anxiety after the fiasco of 2000, in which thousands of votes may not have been counted, the level of public concern across the nation was alarming, said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree.
“I don’t think we expected 53,000 before November 2nd. We were expecting 100,000 calls on Election Day,” she said.
Broward, a Democrat-leaning county around Fort Lauderdale in the state run by Bush’s brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, said this week that up to 58,000 absentee ballots — accounting for more than 5 percent of the electorate — were missing.
It later said some had begun to turn up and only up to 15,000 would have to be resent.
A late mailing Saturday gave the Postal Service little opportunity to get them to voters and back by the close of voting Tuesday.
Florida is anxious to avoid a repeat of 2000, when the presidential race in the state was so close it triggered recounts and lawsuits, eventually going to Bush by 537 votes and winning his election in the Electoral College.
With the election this year so close in a handful of swing states, Democratic and Republican Party officials are bracing for a flurry of similar challenges after Tuesday’s voting should they become necessary.