The New York Times-20080127-Early Balloting Surges- Altering Races in Florida

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127

Early Balloting Surges, Altering Races in Florida

Full Text (1600  words)

A surge of early voting by Florida Democrats and Republicans has startled officials here and injected additional complexity into the state's presidential primaries on Tuesday.

Democratic candidates are not overtly campaigning here because of the Democratic National Committee's decision to penalize the state for moving its primary to an earlier date than authorized by the national party, but the number of early votes cast suggests intense interest in the race.

The activity appears fueled in part by unofficial efforts by Florida supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

By Friday night, nearly 350,000 Democrats had cast early votes, either in person or by mail, and party officials predicted that about 400,000 will have voted by Election Day. By contrast, just 97,000 Democrats voted early in the 2004 presidential primary, which was not as intensely contested. There are 4.14 million Democrats registered to vote in Florida.

The level of interest, if it is matched by turnout at the polls on Tuesday, could make the results in Florida more important for Democrats than they had assumed, given both the absence of candidates here and the fact that no delegates are at stake. The Democratic National Committee penalized Florida for holding its primary too early, saying it would not seat its delegates.

Along with the Democratic contest in South Carolina on Saturday, the Florida results could help set the stage for the almost nationwide primary battle on Feb. 5. Three days before Floridians line up at the polls here, the number of Democrats who have voted here has already exceeded the turnout in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

There is a race going on, said Karen Thurman, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, who has been urging Floridians to defy the national party and vote. And there will still be a headline: 'So-and-so has won Florida.'

There has also been a flood of early ballots from Republican voters, which has, again, already exceeded the turnout in the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. As of Friday night, nearly 400,000 party Republicans had cast early votes, either in person or by mail, party officials reported. By contrast, just under 200,000 Republicans had voted in person or by mail at this point in 2006, when there was a heavily contested Republican primary for governor. There were 3.8 million Republicans qualified to vote on Tuesday.

That development offers at least a glimmer of hope to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. He has made a calculated effort to get his supporters to vote early over the past month, hoping to bank a substantial number of votes before losses in other early states raised questions about his viability and his competitors arrived in the state, driving down his numbers in the polls.

As late as Thursday, Mr. Giuliani, at an appearance here, was still reminding supporters to vote for him early, as he has done at almost every stop here this month. We are already voting, right? he asked the crowd.

Florida is one of 37 states that permit residents to vote early, either with early voting or wide-open absentee voting, according to Electionline.org, a Pew Center Web site that tracks election law. This is the first big test of the practice in 2008, preceding the Feb. 5 primaries, when seven more states will count early votes as part of their final tallies.

Advocates of early voting argue that it makes it easier for people to vote -- in some states, 50 percent of the votes are cast in advance -- while taking pressure off voting machines and making Election Day easier to manage.

But the practice has been questioned by some academics, who note that voters often make their decisions before they have a chance to hear all the arguments that lead to a final voting decision. Mr. Giuliani's supporters and some rivals said his effort to bank early votes could save him from a devastating defeat, even though it may not be enough to bring him victory, and thus serve as a case study of one of the objections to the system.

This is a case where some of the flaws in early voting are exposed, said Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who is a consultant to Electionline.org.

The rush of Democrats to vote before Tuesday's primary has come despite Democratic candidates having stayed out of the state in deference to the Democratic National Committee and a pledge they signed to the four states with authorized early contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Still, unlike in Michigan, the other state that defied the Democratic National Committee and went ahead with an early primary, the names of Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and a third candidate, John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, are on the ballots that Floridians saw when early voting started 15 days before the primary and on absentee ballots that were distributed as early as Dec. 15.

The Democratic surge here is hardly taking place in a vacuum. Mrs. Clinton has a network of supporters, including elected officials, who have organized get-out-the-vote efforts and are planning statewide victory parties. One prominent Clinton supporter, Gerald W. McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was headed here this weekend to urge union members to turn out for Mrs. Clinton.

We have 26,000 members and we probably have a like amount of retirees there, Mr. McEntee said by telephone. We are going to have three or four meetings and give our pitch in terms of Hillary Clinton and ask them to be active in the remaining days of the campaign with the specific focus of trying to bring out three our four neighbors next Tuesday.

Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to fly here on Sunday for two fund-raisers. Although the events are not open to the press or public -- her aides said she would attend no public event that would result in her breaking her word -- her arrival here the day after the South Carolina vote seems likely to produce coverage on Florida television stations and newspapers on the day before the vote. On Friday, her campaign issued a statement saying that she would urge her delegates at the Democratic convention this summer to seat the Florida delegation.

Even as Mr. Obama's advisers have sought to play down the results, his campaign has bought television time on national networks that has been hard to miss on Florida television stations. Grass-roots groups who say they are operating independently of Mr. Obama's headquarters in Chicago have also been organizing across the state, trying to encourage support for him.

Terry Watson, who heads one of the grass-roots groups, said his organization handed out thousands of leaflets promoting Mr. Obama and asked Floridians to vote for him at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in St. Petersburg last Monday. Mr. Watson said his group was the largest grass-roots organization in the state and was preparing to help Mr. Obama should he win the presidential nomination.

Mrs. Clinton's aides are hoping that, delegates or not, the attention paid to a potential big victory in Florida, the nation's fourth-largest state, if not as prominent as a victory in other states to date, will at least give her a public relations boost heading into Feb. 5, and will mitigate their defeat Saturday in South Carolina.

Here's the bottom line: Hundreds of thousands of Floridians are going to vote, said Howard Wolfson, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton's campaign. They have been watching this campaign, and their votes and their preferences matter.

That has stirred concern in Mr. Obama's campaign; a front-page poll in The Miami Herald on Thursday showed Mrs. Clinton with a sizable lead.

Mr. Obama's campaign argued that the Florida vote is a meaningless beauty contest, given the absence of candidates in the state and the fact that no candidate will win delegates in a contest that both sides have increasingly viewed as a race for delegates, rather than states.

Although Senator Obama did not remove his name from the Florida primary ballot because Florida law did not allow him to do so, Senator Obama is firm in his commitment to neither participate nor campaign in the Florida primary and its outcome has no bearing on the nomination contest, Mr. Obama's campaign said in a memorandum sent to interested parties.

On the Republican side, party officials said Mr. Giuliani had made the most concerted effort to get his vote early. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, decided not to move early on, calculating that it would not make sense to do so until he scored some victories and appeared to look politically viable, which has now happened. Financial problems led Senator John McCain of Arizona to close down his operation in the state last fall and he did not have the organization here to do a significant early voter turnout program.

Rudy's people have aggressively worked the absentees, particularly in South Florida, said Sally Bradshaw, a longtime Florida Republican operative who is running Mr. Romney's campaign here. It makes sense for them to do so. They knew Rudy was not strong in the early primary states and they needed people to vote for Rudy before the results from that state came on.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Maria Puebla, left, and Josiane Simon unload absentee ballots at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department in Doral, Fla. Jude Charles, left, watched workers feed thousands of ballots into tabulators. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHIP LITHERLAND FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)