Glitches, but no chaos, as Florida votes

5.00pm - By MICHAEL CHRISTIE

MIAMI - Monitors and lawyers subjected the US election in Florida to unprecedented scrutiny today amid reported glitches but no widespread problems as the state tried to avoid a repeat of the 2000 ballot fiasco.

There were dirty tricks and lawsuits, but most voters confronted no more than long lines across the key battleground state that sent Republican George W Bush to the White House in 2000 after five messy weeks of courtroom battles and recounts.

"This really has been a referendum on our process," said Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

"We knew that the eyes of the world would be on us during this election cycle. We welcome that. We were prepared."

More than 10 million Floridians were eligible to vote and all the signs pointed to a high turnout, election officials said. In Miami-Dade County, the state's most populous, a third of the million-strong electorate had voted before Election Day by casting early ballots or sending in absentee ballots.

Hood said she expected all counties to have finished counting absentee ballots by a Thursday deadline.

Determined to avoid becoming a laughing stock again, the state led by the president's younger brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, overhauled its creaky punch-card ballot system in favour of computer voting technology and reformed its election laws.

Nonetheless there were pre-election problems over missing absentee ballots, fraudulent registrations and voter lists, and lawsuits have challenged the ATM-like touch-screen machines used by more than 5.5 million voters in the state.

Foreign observers monitoring a US presidential vote for the first time said the main problem they saw was long lines.

"But people are not taking it badly, they are not complaining," said Manuel Antonio Garreton Merino, director of Chile's Institute of Public Affairs and one of six observers brought to Florida by human rights group Global Exchange. "It's like people are saying we won't let (2000) happen again."

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a lawsuit on behalf of people who requested absentee ballots weeks ago but received them only on Tuesday, too late to send them back.

It has also criticized the state over difficulties in performing manual recounts on paperless touchscreen machines.

"I hesitate to pass judgment on this thing," Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said when asked for a synopsis of the election shortly after polls closed.

"If the election should be so close as to face a recount, then we're going to be confronting an electoral meltdown."

Clouding the issue of electronic voting, Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said many voters had reported that machines recorded votes for Republican candidates while they had been trying to select a Democrat. It was possible to fix the problem in most cases.

The state is a key prize for Bush and Democrat Sen. John Kerry.

In 2000, Florida kept the country waiting for five weeks amid legal disputes over recounts of punch-card ballots. Finally, the US Supreme Court halted the recounts, giving Bush a 537-vote victory in the state over Democrat Al Gore.

This year, the state has 1.5 million new voters and 27 electoral votes, making it one of three top swing states -- along with Pennsylvania and Ohio -- that analysts believe hold the key to the White House.

Palm Beach County elections chief Theresa LePore said voters were complaining about getting fake calls directing them to incorrect precincts, or telling them they were not registered and could not vote.

In Daytona Beach, 13,244 early votes were lost when poll workers cut the power to a vote-counting machine, said Deannie Lowe, the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections.

The ballots will have to be re-fed into a machine.

"It will take some time, but we have the ballots. Every vote will be counted," said Lowe.

Activists for anti-Bush group MoveOnPAC complained that someone called BellSouth, the local phone company, and cancelled most of the group's phone lines in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

- REUTERS