In Florida, counting votes has been controversial for some time; particularly since the 2000 election. And with early voting underway as of Saturday, there are already questions being raised about the vote count in Broward County.
Broward is a Democratic stronghold that Barack Obama is expected to carry by a large margin. But initial early vote totals reported by the office of the Broward Supervisor of Elections changed on Sunday, in some cases dramatically, causing some to question the numbers.
An analysis of the unofficial totals by early voting location on the Broward Supervisor of Elections website from Saturday, compared to the tallies posted on Sunday, shows that in one location, the E. Pat Larkins Community Center, located on Martin Luther King Blvd. in Pompano Beach, the revised totals showed 1,003 fewer votes. The initial tally reported from the polling place in the heavily black neighborhood showed 2,945 votes, but the revised tally was 1,401. Across the 17 Broward polling locations, 15 saw their vote totals revised, mostly by minute amounts of between 1 and 7 votes. But the three more significant changes, including the addition of 398 votes in Tamarac (a racially mixed community) and adding 99 votes to the totals from Pompano Beach City Hall, whose demographic is majority white.
The revisions mean that 536 fewer total votes were reported in Broward — a reduction from 28,330 votes to 27,794 votes. That could be significant in a close election in a state where the presidential contest was decided by just 538 votes in 2000.
