Presidential votes were still being counted on Thursday in Florida, a chaotic process reminiscent of the acrimonious 2000 election that was resolved more than a month later by the US Supreme Court.
This year the southern state did not play a pivotal role, as President Barack Obama was declared the victor on Tuesday night after winning enough other states to pass the 270 electoral vote threshold needed for re-election.
Romney’s campaign appeared to concede that the Republican challenger had also lost Florida in a statement Thursday quoted by the Miami Herald, but no official result has been forthcoming two full days after the vote.
Florida was arguably the most coveted prize on election day, with some 29 electoral college votes up for grabs — more than any of the other states that swing between Republican and Democratic control.
In 2000 Democrat Al Gore, who won the US popular vote, lost the election to Republican George W. Bush, who won the electoral college vote when a divided US Supreme Court stopped a ballot recount in Florida.
Republicans have control of both houses in Florida’s state legislature and the governor’s mansion, but demographic trends towards a more Hispanic and more liberal population are pushing the electorate more Democratic.
Florida Deputy Elections Supervisor Christina White blamed the vote count delay on an unusually long ballot and a high voter turnout.
“It’s not that there were any problems or glitches. It’s about volume and paper left to be processed,” said White.
As of Thursday, votes were still being counted in three of Florida’s 67 counties — including the cities of Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. Vote counting in the Miami area was completed Thursday morning.
But at least two Florida vote experts saw the chaos as the result of a raw, bare-knuckled Republican attempt to suppress voter turnout.
“Election officials in Florida said the same thing in 2000 — the turnout caught them by surprise,” said Lance deHaven-Smith at Florida State University. “But the truth is that turnout in presidential elections in Florida is usually between 70 and 75 percent of registered voters.”
For him the chaos is because “an entrenched Republican political class is trying to fend off a rising tide of Democratic voting.”
Republican state officials have been “intentionally under-supplying voting places and equipment” to create bottlenecks in traditionally Democratic strongholds, “thereby reducing Democratic voting and manipulating the election outcome,” he said.
Charles Zelden, a history and law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, said Florida’s Republican legislature wanted to slow down voting for partisan purposes.
He points to a law signed last year by Republican Governor Rick Scott reducing the number of early voting days from 14 to eight and eliminating early voting on the Sunday before Election Day.
Democrats tend do better in early voting, so limiting the number of people voting ahead of election day would presumably have favored Romney.
“The blame,” Zelden said, “lays with the fact we allow the partisans to run our elections.”
Voting in the United States is “controlled by the states which are run by politicians with partisan objectives. Hence the problems,” Zelden said.
Florida vote count delay brings to mind 2000 debacle
