US election begins with voting in Florida dogged by controversy over faulty machines and disenfranchised voters
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, northern Florida.
An automated voice had some surprising news: did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Mr Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote - presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one - was far from unique.
James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.
Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: she wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot.
But the elections office makes no such calls. "It's Alice in Wonderland here now," sighed Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, Florida's capital. "Up is down, and down is up ... My feeling is that someone has essentially conned her into believing that she's going to be voting."
[/font]Mr Sancho is a longstanding thorn in the side of Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, who presides from a building across the street. But even he seems astonished by the reports reaching his office these days.
"I've been an elections supervisor for 16 years now, and nobody has ever called me with this kind of activity occurring," he said.
The mysterious calls are only the most vivid symptoms of broader problems in Florida which critics fear could leave thousands of citizens disenfranchised on November 2.
New electronic voting machines have proven error-prone, and may not be capable of accurate recounts. State authorities are threatening to withhold votes from people who forget to tick a box confirming that they are US citizens, even though they signed a statement to the same effect on the same form. And among several legal feuds, Florida Democrats are accusing the state of failing properly to implement measures designed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, when thousands of African-Americans were wrongly prevented from voting.
The US election officially began in Florida yesterday, as early voting sites opened across the state - though in Duval County, a Republican-run area with a large African-American population, that too is a subject of dispute. Only one early voting site, far from densely populated neighbourhoods, has been made available for the entire county. "One location for a county of 831 acres - that's the most asinine thing I've ever heard," said the Rev William Bolden, a Jacksonville pastor who is among many to detect a pattern in the controversies.
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, northern Florida.
An automated voice had some surprising news: did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Mr Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote - presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one - was far from unique.
James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.
Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: she wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot.
But the elections office makes no such calls. "It's Alice in Wonderland here now," sighed Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, Florida's capital. "Up is down, and down is up ... My feeling is that someone has essentially conned her into believing that she's going to be voting."
[/font]Mr Sancho is a longstanding thorn in the side of Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, who presides from a building across the street. But even he seems astonished by the reports reaching his office these days.
"I've been an elections supervisor for 16 years now, and nobody has ever called me with this kind of activity occurring," he said.
The mysterious calls are only the most vivid symptoms of broader problems in Florida which critics fear could leave thousands of citizens disenfranchised on November 2.
New electronic voting machines have proven error-prone, and may not be capable of accurate recounts. State authorities are threatening to withhold votes from people who forget to tick a box confirming that they are US citizens, even though they signed a statement to the same effect on the same form. And among several legal feuds, Florida Democrats are accusing the state of failing properly to implement measures designed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, when thousands of African-Americans were wrongly prevented from voting.
The US election officially began in Florida yesterday, as early voting sites opened across the state - though in Duval County, a Republican-run area with a large African-American population, that too is a subject of dispute. Only one early voting site, far from densely populated neighbourhoods, has been made available for the entire county. "One location for a county of 831 acres - that's the most asinine thing I've ever heard," said the Rev William Bolden, a Jacksonville pastor who is among many to detect a pattern in the controversies.
