Bush, Kerry deploy lawyers

2004-10-31 22:21

Miami - The presidential candidates launched a last-minute blitz over the weekend in Florida, where their campaigns deployed thousands of lawyers who pounced on claims of irregularities ahead of Tuesday's voting.

President George W Bush and his Democratic rival John Kerry sought to energise their supporters at rallies in Florida, a battleground state that has once again taken the spotlight because of its likely pivotal role and claims of illegal voting, intimidation and missing ballots.

As poll watchers poured into the southeastern state, the Republican and Democratic campaigns blitzed the airwaves with advertising spots and deployed canvassers to pound the pavement and knock on doors.

In Miami, the Bush campaign was most active among the Cuban-American community, a long-time Republican power base courted by the Democrats.

Kerry's supporters for their part focused largely on non-Cuban Hispanics and African-American neighborhoods.

The two candidates have actively wooed the state's 500 000 Jewish voters, amid speculation that Bush's strong pro-Israel policies could erode some of that community's traditionally Democratic support.

They are particularly focused on central Florida, which is believed to have has the swing state's highest proportion of undecided voters.

Both campaigns have deployed their heavyweights to Florida in recent days.

Heavyweights

In addition to the presidential candidates, their running mates, wives and children, the Democrats have sent in the likes of former president Bill Clinton and rock idol Bruce Springsteen, while the Republicans have called in New York's wildly popular ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the president's own brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Closely watched by electoral monitors and encouraged by the campaigns, many Floridians already voted, either taking advantage of early voting that started on October 18 or casting absentee ballots.

Local media estimated that about 20% of Florida's 10 million registered voters will have cast their ballots by the time polls open on Tuesday morning.

This has raised expectations of a massive overall turnout.

"People are passionate and Florida has been saturated with ads and candidates," said Susan McManus, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida.

Because Republicans are more consistent about showing up at the polls but Democrats are more numerous in Florida, a strong turnout is generally seen as likely to favour Kerry.

"Make every vote count and count every vote" has become a rallying cry of the Kerry supporters who hope to capitalise on simmering discontent among Democrats over the last election, which Bush won after the US Supreme Court halted five weeks of recounts, leaving him with a 537-vote lead in Florida that secured him the presidency.

Florida fiasco

Claims of irregularities have again raised the spectre of the "Florida fiasco," though early voting has proceeded smoothly on the whole, with the main problem being long lines that has voters waiting up to five hours to cast their ballots.

One of the main concerns at this stage is that several thousand voters outside the state would not receive their absentee ballots in time.

Authorities in Broward, Florida's most populous county have sent out duplicate ballots after tens of thousands of those that had been requested apparently were not received by voters.

Democrats have expressed concern over the fact that new touch-screen voting machines do not produce a printout, which would make a manual recount impossible in case of a very tight election.

Republicans for their part claim thousands of voters registered in Florida even though they are not eligible, either because they are already on voter rolls in another state or because they are convicted felons.

- SAPA