November 8, 2002	Friday	Ramazan 2,1423

FORT LAUDERDALE (USA), Nov 7: Just when Florida finally seemed to have carried out a flub-free election, supervisors in one county discovered they had failed to count more than 103,000 ballots in some tallies.

Authorities said the blunder in Broward County did not change the outcome of any races in Tuesday’s election, which had been hailed as a procedural triumph for a state where voting problems two years earlier forced a five-week delay in George W. Bush’s election as president.

The error did trim by 13,815 votes the margin of victory that Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s younger brother, scored over Democratic challenger Bill McBride.

The error was discovered on Wednesday and corrected in time to certify accurate tallies to the state by Thursday’s deadline, elections officials said.

They blamed a programming error in tabulating absentee votes and votes cast before Election Day.

Supervisors discovered the error when they saw the number of votes recorded in the governor’s race exceeded the reported total for ballots cast.—Reuters