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By BRYAN GILMER, STEPHEN HEGARTY and ANITA KUMAR
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 15, 2000
Even if Al Gore inches ahead of George W. Bush in a hand recount, it is unlikely he will be able to overcome Bush's expected advantage in uncounted overseas ballots.
According to a St. Petersburg Times analysis of absentee voting and a survey of ballots still uncounted, Bush can expect a boost when at least 1,865 of those absentee ballots are tallied Friday.
As of Tuesday, that's how many overseas ballots had been received in the week since the election, according to a Times survey of each of Florida's 67 county elections offices.
Assuming they were filled out properly and postmarked by Nov. 7, those ballots will be counted Friday, the deadline for them to arrive. In the meantime, they are being kept in vaults and behind double-locked doors.
In addition to those already locked away for counting on Friday, there are 7,599 overseas ballots that could still arrive in the mail. The Escambia County elections office got 60 more ballots Tuesday. Bay County got 40 more. Those are likely to be bad news for the vice president, who already trails Bush in the Florida popular vote, with manual recounts under way or planned in several counties.
In most elections, the overseas ballots are overlooked, especially for national races in which margins of victory tend to be quite large. But this year, with Gore and Bush in a near dead heat, and with the nation's top lawyers arguing over a few hundred votes, the thousands of ballots coming from Florida's military personnel and civilians overseas could decide the election.
"I would think that those who are supporters of Mr. Gore would not count on that as a source for an electoral edge," said Michael Dawson, chairman of the political science department of the University of Chicago.
A few factors work against Gore. First of all, more Republicans than Democrats requested overseas absentee ballots -- 3,834 to 2,531 -- according to the Times survey of the 25 counties that kept tallies on the party affiliation of overseas requestors. Also, the domestic and overseas absentee ballots that were counted on Election Day were heavily in Bush's favor -- 59 percent to 37 percent by the analysis of 57 counties that were able to break down the absentee vote.
Counties that could not provide information this week include some large counties that favored Gore, such as Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.
"The political science wisdom has been for years that absentee voters tend to fit the demographic profile of Republicans instead of Democrats," Dawson said.
If that weren't enough, Republicans made a special effort to solicit absentee and overseas voters this year.
"I think the Bush campaign has been aware for quite some time, as I assume the Gore campaign has as well, that the Florida campaign was incredibly close," Dawson said.
Indeed, Democrats say they invested more effort this year to encourage absentee voting overseas.
They are counting on a big boost from Israel, where thousands of South Florida voters live and visit, partly because of the popularity of Joseph Lieberman -- the first Jewish candidate for vice president. More than 80 percent of American voters living in Israel traditionally root for the Democratic candidate.
"We're past excited. We're stunned. We've been working so hard for the past 20 years and we feel we've just hit the jackpot," says Bryna Franklin, a volunteer in the Israel chapter of Democrats Abroad. "The votes coming out of here could determine the gap between Bush and Gore."
"We feel pretty good about the numbers and the efforts abroad," said state Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe. "They were working really hard. They were fired up."
But areas for potential Democratic gains from Israel are hard to find among Florida's counties.
Gore may look to Broward County, where he took 67 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 7. That county sent out 1,623 overseas ballots. Some 522 already have been counted. How many more will be counted Friday?
Broward has at least 37 more ballots stored in a vault, but elections officials are not keeping a running tally.
But any gains in Broward could be offset by absentees still to be counted in Escambia County, where Bush took 63 percent of the vote. That county, with a large military population, sent 1,802 ballots overseas and 626 have been counted. Escambia has 195 ballots on hand to count Friday.
In Duval County, where Bush took 57 percent of the vote, more than half the ballots sent out have been counted, and 161 ballots are on hand ready to count.
"Traditionally, that's going to be a heavily Republican vote," said Bert Ralston of the Republican Party of Duval County. "Even if you just look at the absentee trends, Duval's ballots on Friday go to Bush."
At least two counties have not yet counted any of their overseas absentee ballots, even those that arrived by Election Day.
Monroe County in South Florida -- it split almost equally on Election Day between the two candidates -- has 181. Seminole, a central county that Bush carried, is holding 164.
The close vote has military personnel and civilians around the world watching and hoping their vote arrives in time.
"I know a lot of us really wanted to vote in this election; it definitely was important to me," said U.S. Army Capt. John C. Mostellar of St. Petersburg, now stationed in Kosovo.
"We're all on pins and needles here, wondering what's going on," Mostellar said.
Mostellar, who voted for Bush, mailed off his ballot on Oct. 23. Chances are, Pinellas County received Mostellar's ballot long ago and counted it Nov. 7.
Due to the importance of the overseas ballots, the U.S. Postal Service has put delivery of ballots on the fast track. All U.S. military mail is routed through Miami, and the military ballots are specially marked and flown to their destination in the states.
"We're seeing to it that the ballots are received by the elections offices the same day we get it," said Postal Service spokeswoman Enola Rice. "In some counties, they have more than one pickup. These ballots could decide who is the next president."
Since the day after the election, the Postal Service has been keeping track of the number of military overseas ballots received in Florida. Excluding Tuesday, 447 ballots from military personnel around the world have arrived.
Many overseas votes already have been counted. Of the more than 22,000 overseas ballots requested from Florida elections offices, at least 12,590 were received in time to be counted on Election Day.
Tom Fina, executive director of Democrats Abroad, said he believes the majority of remaining overseas ballots will be for Gore because he said most military ballots probably arrived before Election Day. That's because those in the armed services tend to get their ballots in earlier and because military mail is faster.
"We think those numbers (of outstanding absentee ballots) represent civilians and those civilians are Democrats," Fina said.
Kenneth Janda, a political science professor at Northwestern University who studies party politics, said he is not surprised to hear the Gore campaign insisting that the overseas ballots must be counted before a winner can be determined -- it's a stalling tactic to buy time for manual recounts of Election Day returns in heavily Democratic counties, he says.
" "As long as we have to wait until the oversees ballots come in, why don't we count these now,' " Janda says Democrats will claim.
- Times correspondent Flore de Preneuf contributed to this report from Israel.