MIAMI - Election officials will not be forced to count absentee ballots returned after 7 p.m. on Election Day, regardless of problems caused by late mailings, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union had asked for an emergency order requiring Miami-Dade and Broward officials to count ballots received after last week's Election Night cutoff.
The plaintiffs, three voters named in the lawsuit, "failed to show the defendants arbitrarily or deliberately delayed in sending" the absentee ballots, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold wrote in a 48-page order. He noted the voters could have requested ballots earlier than "just days before the election."
Gold also wrote that granting the request covering only two of Florida's 67 counties would "result in the ... granting of greater voting strength to one group over another," violating the one person-one vote principle. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida ACLU, said he was disappointed.
"We're disappointed when anybody's right to vote is denied, whether or not the vote has any impact on the election whatsoever," he said. "Basically, the county supervisors have gotten away with some negligence here."
The uncounted ballots could not have changed the outcome of the presidential race in Florida, where President Bush defeated Sen. John Kerry by about 375,000 votes.
After receiving complaints about undelivered ballots, Broward County dropped off 9,000 absentee ballots at a U.S. Postal Service distribution center on the Saturday before Election Day, which meant they would not be delivered until the eve of the election. Voters were told they could return ballots by overnight mail at county expense.
Seth Kaplan, spokesman for Miami-Dade's elections office, said he did not have an estimate of how many ballots were delivered late, though he did not believe it was nearly as many as in Broward.
State law requires domestic absentee ballots to be returned to election offices by the time polls close Election Day. Absentee ballots sent to foreign addresses are granted an extra 10 days.
Although the judge rejected emergency relief, the lawsuit stays alive for trial on a request to apply the late counting rule used for foreign absentees to domestic ballots.
