IAMI - Elderly Jewish voters to the north attracted the Democrats' notice. They also attracted jokes on late-night TV. But Al Gore's ultimate loss or win in Florida may depend in large part on another, less-talked-about constituency that may have had trouble with their ballots, too.
Analyses and anecdotes statewide point to unusual Election Day patterns in some county precincts with significant black populations. From Miami-Dade County in South Florida to Duval County in northeast Florida, those precincts often had far more of their presidential ballots nullified or disputed than majority white precincts.
Black areas tend to be Democratic strongholds, and Gore stands to gain the most in them - a trend that came through in both initial counts and several court-ordered recounts.
For example, almost half of Duval County's 27,000 bad ballots came from just four districts. All four are in predominantly black areas in Jacksonville, where Gore received a majority of the votes. An analysis by the Orlando Sentinel and Florida Sun-Sentinel newspapers showed that almost 60 percent of Miami-Dade's disputed ballots came from precincts Gore won on Election Day. Many of those votes were cast in precincts with large elderly or minority populations.
The Gore campaign, still scratching for every possible vote, has hinted at the disparity but has declined to highlight it in the three weeks since the election - even as the ''undervoted'' or ''overvoted'' ballots are the foundation of his court case requesting new recounts.
Until this week, few black or Democratic officials made a cause of the voting pattern. Even now, concerned about contributing to false stereotypes, many are reluctant to try to make an issue of it in a year when blacks in Florida turned out to vote in record numbers. Turnout surged 50 percent from four years ago.
''Why did this occur? That's the $1 million question,'' said state Senator Kendrick Meek, a black South Florida Democrat. ''This is not just an issue of undervoting or first-time voters having problems. Many constituents feel there was some hanky-panky with these ballots.''
Luis Rosero, spokesman for the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, attributed the disproportionate number of black ballots thrown out to the antiquated voting machines he said were typically sent to poorer precincts. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who led a march on the state Capitol in Tallahassee yesterday, went so far as to say that the disparity may have been as high as 75 percent in some counties and was ''too widepread to be a coincidence.''
Tony Welch, a spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party, gave a more nuanced explanation: Massive voter turnout efforts were not accompanied by adequate voter-education efforts.
''We don't want to talk about this, but voting might be a difficult exercise for some people,'' said Welch, who is based in Tallahassee. ''A lot of people don't talk about voters not reading instructions, folks who see the name Al Gore and just circle it instead of filling it in or punching it out, depending on the system. And this is America. Not everyone is literate.''
The problem isn't new, party officials and election observers agreed. But it had gone undetected or ignored until the 2000 presidential race turned into the tightest, most closely monitored contest this century.
''Sure there have been isolated instances of small towns or cities having recounts, but nothing on this magnitude,'' said Jim Kane, executive director of Florida Voter, which does polls statewide. ''It just hasn't been an issue here.''
Republicans contend that the percentage of ballots in Florida with no presidential candidate clearly marked was no worse than the rate recorded in other states - an indication that those voters simply declined to vote for one.
An e-mail distributed by the GOP yesterday showed that 5 percent of Idaho voters did not select Gore, George W. Bush, or any of the minor party candidates. In Ohio, nearly 2.9 percent did not make a choice. In Florida, the figure was 2.86 percent, compared to 1.6 percent in Massachusetts.
''It's not an unusual phenomnenon,'' Bush lawyer Daryl Bristow said on CNN yesterday.
The US Justice Department has declined to investigate voters' complaints of fraud and intimidation - from claims of being turned away from polling places to being berated by precinct workers when they requested assistance. Most of those complaints were anecdotal, and some have already been disproved. But the Florida chapter of the NAACP continues to gather evidence.
For instance, in Palm Beach County, whose late recount was refused by the Florida secretary of state, 16 percent of the ballots in majority black areas were voided - double the percentage in overwhelmingly white precincts, according to the Palm Beach Post. In Riviera Beach, which is 97 percent black, 9,000, or 27 percent, of the ballots cast were nullified.
Saying that many Florida minorities had been disenfranchised and their civil rights violated, a South Florida group led by the Rev. Al Sharpton filed a lawsuit Monday intended to force a new recount in Miami-Dade.
The local newspapers' analyses indicated a recount would likely give Gore far fewer than the 600 votes his campaign has said it would. Gore's own projections, included in his lawsuit in a Florida Circuit Court, rely on the precincts that were not recounted resembling those that were. But their makeup appears to be different.
''Politically it's a good spin for Gore to put on [his call for a recount], but it also happens to be true, so it's fair spin,'' said Terrence Anderson, a University of Miami law professor, said of the argument of disenfranchisement. ''But legally, it doesn't make any difference.''
Still, as Welch, the party spokesman put it, the entire country could gain from Gore's loss of votes in Florida, where calls for unified voting standards and renewed voter education efforts are already being made.
''Florida can lead the nation on this,'' he said, ''because it's a reasonable assumption that undervoting or overvoting is happening in the rest of the country, too.''
