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Republicans Blames Democrats For Rejected Overseas Ballots
WASHINGTON (IslamOnline) - Republicans have blamed the Democrats for discarding ballots from Americans overseas, many of who are serving in the U.S. military. Democrats, however, say it was Florida officials who decided whether or not to accept those ballots.
Nearly 1,420 absentee ballots were rejected for lack of proper postmarks, signatures or envelopes, while another 2,206 were accepted.
“It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces who are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis ... yet because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States who will be their commander in chief,” said retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, a Bush supporter, in a statement released by the Bush campaign.
Senator John Warner (R-VA), a veteran and former secretary of the Navy, now chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, also criticized the rejection of some 1,500 ballots during county-by-county tallies, writing to Defense Secretary William S. Cohen concerning the absentee military ballots rejected for being posted too late.
Warner wrote that the missing postmarks were the "duty, not of the voter, but of the military postal clerk," adding that "human error, as well as time and operational constraints, results in some mail not being postmarked," properly.
A spokesperson for the Gore campaign rejected Republican allegations of a Democratic effort to target absentee military ballots that Bush believed would mainly go in his favor, and said that both camps had representatives in the bipartisan process of accepting and counting ballots.
Despite the rejected ballots, Bush led in overseas votes by 1, 380 to Gore’s 750, pushing Bush’s lead in Florida from 300 to 930 votes.
Thomas Spencer, a Miami attorney for Bush, said the Republican legal team was discussing whether to sue for the discarded votes, allowing them to be counted in the final tally.
According to MSNBC, Orange County rejected 117 of its 147 international ballots. In Hillsborough County, 74 of the 135 ballots were rejected after Democrats raised concerns about postmark or signature problems; Alachua County rejected half of the 56 ballots it received; St. Lucie County rejected 13 of 14 ballots and in Lake County, all five were rejected.
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