Word: beachings
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...Reported by Tim Padgett and Kathie Klarreich/Palm Beach, Cathy Booth Thomas and Timothy Roche/Tallahassee, Brad Liston/Volusia, Jeanne Dequine and Mary Sutter/Miami and Viveca Novak/Washington
...closeness of the vote became apparent, Democratic officials were also concerned about the absentee vote, which they knew could be decisive in an election as close as this one, but which had also been at issue in some famously disputed Florida elections of recent years. In the Miami Beach mayoral race three years ago, incumbent Joe Carollo, a Republican, won 51% of the votes cast at polling places. His challenger, ex-mayor Xavier Suarez, who ran as an independent, won 61% of the absentees, forcing the contest into a runoff that Suarez won with a large number of absentee ballots...
...Wednesday morning resentment over the Palm Beach screwup was high. The state Democratic Party set up a toll-free number to allow people to call in reports of voting irregularities. If the election was turning into a mystery, then all of Florida would be vacuumed for clues. Questions mounted: When poll workers turned away people with the explanation that there were not enough ballots, when they illegally asked seniors for a Social Security number, was it an innocent mistake or deliberate obstruction? Meanwhile, a statewide recount of the Florida vote was already assured, triggered by a law that requires...
...votes affected were sufficient to change the statewide outcome, since the central issue is which candidate will be awarded Florida's electoral votes. One of those methods is a statistical analysis of the kind that has shown that Buchanan's total of 3,407 votes in heavily Democratic Palm Beach was far higher than his tally elsewhere in the state. If a court decides that the election is invalid, it would still be necessary to rule on whether a new vote is the only remedy. Florida courts, like courts in most other states, have been reluctant to order new elections...
Republicans also complained that samples of the ballot, which had been used before in Palm Beach without incident, had been published in the local paper and mailed to voters before the election. But Lillian Gaines, 67, a retired schoolteacher in West Palm Beach who is a plaintiff in one of the ballot lawsuits, says the sample did not show that the punch holes would not be aligned with the names. "This is what made it so confusing for people when they finally went into the booth," says her attorney, Harold Weiss...