ALLAHASSEE - The overseas absentee ballots that the Bush campaign is counting on to put the Texas governor unambiguously over the top are votes that Florida Republicans worked hard to get and think will trend heavily in their favor.
An estimated 3,000 ballots have been trickling back to Florida from foreign countries since Election Day, with all of them due into local county election offices by midnight Friday.
They will be counted Saturday morning, and the totals will be added to the existing presidential vote counts for Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
With the closeness of those existing totals, the overseas ballots may end up determining which candidate wins the state's popular vote, who gets the state's accompanying 25 electoral votes, and, thus, whether Gore or Bush becomes the next president.
The overseas ballots are some of the tens of thousands of absentee votes state Republicans sought with an aggressive drive that included a personal appeal from Governor Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican presidential nominee, and tactics that included party workers assisting in filling out absentee-ballot request forms for out-of-state registered voters.
''Vote from the comfort of your own home,'' read a letter imprinted over the image of the state seal mailed out under Jeb Bush's name. It encouraged voters to complete an enclosed absentee request form and return it in a postage-paid envelope.
Some Democrats and election officials question the tactics, saying they brush up against strict new state laws regarding absentee ballots. The measures, which include requiring a state-issued voter registration number on all applications, arose after reports of widespread fraud in Miami's 1997 mayoral election. In the aftermath of that voting, Mayor Xavier Suarez was removed from office.
Cynthia McCauley, a special education teacher from Panama City who voted for Gore, filed a complaint challenging some of Bay County's absentee votes. She argued that the appeals for absentee ballot applications did not tell voters there was a state law declaring they could vote by that method only if they were ''unable to attend the polls on Election Day.''
The election canvassing board in Bay County is scheduled to hear the complaint today.
In Seminole County, a Republican area north of Orlando, elections supervisor Sandra Goard initially refused to accept the party-written applications for absentee ballots received from voters in her area because they lacked the voter ID number. She later relented and allowed Republican workers equipped with laptop computers to sit in her office and add the numbers.
Because all but the overseas ballots have been counted and incorporated in the existing vote totals, it is the votes coming from foreigners that have commanded the most attention from the Bush and Gore teams since their deadlock on Election Day.
Yesterday, Bush's representative in the dispute, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, repeated his offer to make the election hinge on the tally of existing votes and this weekend's count of the overseas ballots.
Democrats, however, maintained that not only should the overseas ballots be counted, but the state should allow continuing hand recounts of ballots in several counties with close returns.
In recent Florida elections, the overseas ballots have broken in favor of the Republican candidate.
In 1992, when Bush's father lost to Bill Clinton, he received 48 percent of the total. Clinton received 33 percent. Statewide, Bush narrowly defeated Clinton in the popular vote, but Clinton went on to win the presidency.
In 1996, when Clinton won re-election, he still lost Florida's overseas vote to Republican nominee Bob Dole. Dole received 54 percent of the total mailed in, while Clinton received 41 percent. Clinton, however, won the statewide popular vote.
While it is unclear how this year's vote will go, both sides are optimistic. Republicans are banking on support from expatriate business executives and members of the armed forces. Democrats believe they will gain a boost from Floridians living in Israel, who they expect will support Gore because his running mate is Joseph I. Lieberman, the first Jewish-American on a major-party presidential ticket.
Republicans Abroad, with chapters in Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, urged its members to vote via absentee ballots. There are also 238,000 members of the armed forces stationed abroad, about 24,000 of whom have declared Florida as their voting address.
Democrats ran five ads in the Jerusalem Post, an English-language daily, as well as voter registration drives at Israeli universities. The Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel estimates that about 4,000 of its members registered to vote in Florida.
Democrats did express some alarm at a paragraph in a statement issued Monday by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican and Bush supporter. ''With regard to the status of overseas absentee ballots, they must have been executed as of last Tuesday,'' Harris wrote. ''They must bear a foreign postmark as provided in [Florida election law], and they must be received by the supervisor of elections by midnight Friday. They are not required, however, to be postmarked on or prior to last Tuesday.''
The distinction between simply carrying a foreign postmark, versus a foreign postmark with a date stamped on or before Tuesday, may make it impossible to exclude ballots that may have been filed after the closeness of the race became apparent on election night. Harris's office says her policy on the postmark question is designed to allow for the broadest counting of overseas ballots.
