Dead Man Voted In Florida

A partial inspection of presidential ballots in Miami-Dade County found that at least one dead man voted and more than 100 ballots were illegal, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Poll workers allowed out-of-state residents to vote on Nov. 7th, and someone cast a vote in the name of a man who died in 1997, according to an examination of the ballots by The Miami Herald.

The Herald examined ballots cast at 138 of Miami-Dade's 617 precincts and found that 144 ineligible voters were allowed to vote in the election last month. If those numbers were to remain consistent throughout the county, hundreds of illegal votes may have been cast, the newspaper concluded.

Poll workers said they were overwhelmed by the huge voter turnout on election day and frustrated by busy signals from the state's Elections Department hot line when trying to verify voter records.

CBS News Correspondent Bobbi Harley reports that 60,000 of the six million ballots cast here will get another look by a handful of news organizations, including The Herald, trying to figure out why vote-counting machines didn't register any votes on them for president.

"We like to refer to it as a review and not a count and the reason for that is all we want to do is look at the documents, the ballots in this case, and see if there is information there that will illuminate the whole debate," said Mark Seibel, managing editor of The Herald.

A private accounting firm will sort every single ballot according to dimples, hanging chads, even pinpricks, and then calculate the totals — leaving several different outcomes depending on who wants to count what as a vote.

An examination by the Orlando Sentinel of 6,000 discarded ballots in Lake County found another 130 votes for Al Gore — and there are still weeks of counting left to go.

Republicans have registered suspicion with the enterprise.

"What benefit to America is there to try to undermine a presidency? We all now know because of the ballots, the paper ballots especially, that we'll never have an accurate count of Nov. 7," said Al Cardenas, chairman of the Florida Republican Party.

Scholars, however, are anxious to learn how the race might have tuned out.

"It may confirm the presidency. It may to some degree undermine the presidency, but the facts should not be ignored even if they are uncomfortable facts," said Terrance Anderson of the University of Miami Law School.