Florida begins casting votes for president

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AFP) - All eyes were on Florida where residents were eligible to begin casting ballots under an early voting law passed in the wake of the 2000 election fiasco.
George W. Bush and John Kerry were both due to hit the campaign trail in Florida Monday, stumping to get out the vote in the state that decided the last presidential election.
Bush owes his presidency to the 537-vote margin he eked out in Florida over Democrat Al Gore four years ago, when the US Supreme Court halted recounts in the state after a bitter five-week constitutional battle.
Bush blitzed Florida on Saturday before returning to the US capital, but was due to fly in for a campaign dinner late Monday after a stop in New Jersey, before a day of intense campaigning planned for Tuesday.
Kerry jetted in from another battleground state, Ohio, on Sunday, before crisscrossing the state Monday.
"You have got to get out and vote tomorrow," Kerry told several thousand supporters here soon after he arrived, and pounced on a quote attributed to Bush in The New York Times magazine which suggested he would privatize social security.
"We are fighting for the character of our country," Kerry said.
Bush asked for the votes of supporters in a string of Florida rallies on Saturday, in which he depicted the veteran Massachusetts senator as unfit to lead.
Sunday was "the one-year anniversary of Senator Kerry's vote against funding our troops" in Iraq, the president told a crowd in the town of Sunrise.
"He abandoned our troops in combat by voting against the funding," Bush added.
Kerry -- who voted in favor of the 87 billion dollars in a procedural vote, but opposed its final passage -- has defended the move by saying he wanted some of the reconstruction aid to oil-rich Iraq to be in the form of loans.
Three new opinion polls out on Sunday showed Bush and Kerry still locked in a statistical tie.
The Washington Post put the president up 50 percent to 47 percent, Newsweek's poll of registered voters put Bush on 48 percent and Kerry on 46 percent, while a Zogby International tracking poll had Bush up 46 to 44 percent.
The gap in all three polls was within the margin of error.
Both sides were gearing up meanwhile for a potential repeat of the problems that plagued the 2000 election, when Florida's outcome was embroiled in controversy over ambiguously marked punch-card ballots.
"If it is a close election in any one state, it may be days or weeks before we know who the actual winner is," said Tom Josefiak, general counsel for the Bush campaign.
Lawsuits contesting ballots, voter registration and voting machines have already been filed, and both Democratic and Republican parties have hired an army of attorneys.
Kerry told congregants at an African American Baptist church in Ohio Sunday that he had put together a "voter protection dream team" of top lawyers to forestall vote fraud and disenfranchisement.
"Let me just make clear to you, we are not going to let this be a repeat of 2000, we are not going to see a million African Americans deprived of their votes in America," he said.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, fought back against charges from some quarters that he has done little to improve voting conditions in his state.
"I mean, we have done everything we can to make sure that people have access to register to vote and that we've made it easy for people to vote," Bush told ABC News. "We learned from the lessons of 2000."
The string of hurricanes that ravaged the state in August and September could effect voter turnout, the Florida governor said.
"The hurricanes hit some places that are bedrock Republican areas, and these folks are really hurting," Jeb Bush said Saturday. "And a lot of people don't consider politics their first priority right now."
Kerry on Sunday picked up endorsements from The New York Times and dailies in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Boston, while papers in Dallas and Chicago backed Bush.
Editors of the Tampa Tribune, a small Florida newspaper that strongly endorsed Bush in 2000, said they had made an "achingly difficult decision" to endorse neither candidate this year.
"We are unable to endorse President Bush for re-election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a 'uniter not a divider' within the United States and the world," the paper said.
Early voting begins in several US states Monday including Texas, Colorado, Arkansas and North Dakota.