Postal Experts Hunt for 60,000 Missing Ballots in Florida

U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying to find thousands of absentee ballots that should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous counties, officials said.  The issue evoked memories of the polling problems that bedeviled the Florida election in 2000 and which the state has been trying to address before next Tuesday's presidential election, which is again expected to be a very tight race. Broward deputy supervisor of elections Gisela Salas said 60,000 absentee ballots, accounting for just over 5 percent of the electorate in the county north of Miami, were sent out between Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 to voters who would not be in town on election day. While some had begun to be delivered, her office had been inundated with calls from anxious voters who still had not received their ballots. "It's really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement," Salas told Reuters. "It was basically our first major drop of the absentee ballots," Salas said. She said postal service officials had assured Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes that the ballots had moved out of the post office to which they had been taken by the elections office. U.S. Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez, whose federal agency is independent from the U.S. Postal Service, said it had yet to be determined if the ballots reached the post office. "It's highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared," he said. "We're looking for it, we're trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service." [more]