03 November 2004	Wednesday	19 Ramazan 1425

RIVIERA BEACH, Nov 2: Anger over the lost votes of 2000 is still simmering in this mainly black town of south Florida, where voters turned out massively Tuesday, many vowing they would not be disenfranchized again.

Residents, standing in long lines to cast their ballots, said renewed irregularities are only strengthening their resolve to make their votes count. And many said that vote is against President George W. Bush.

The feeling that Bush stole the last presidential was strong in this city of 30,000, where as many of 16 percent of the ballots were discarded in the 2000 election, twice as many as the already high statewide average.

"We are not going to let this happen again," said John Goldwise, 57. "This time we have too many people watching," he said after casting his ballot at an elementary school, where partisan poll watchers monitored the proceedings.

Outside Riviera Beach's Lindsey Davis community center, a dozen members of the non-partisan Election Protection group, among the thousands of lawyers and other volunteers deployed to Florida, noted down complaints and helped voters who had questions.

A lawyer with the John Kerry campaign also offered assistance, but his Republican counterpart stood at a distance, and declined to make any comments on his role at the site.

Civil rights groups have accused Republicans of targeting black and Hispanic communities for challenges of their voter eligibility.

Several voters complained they had received phone calls or flyers directing them to the wrong precincts, and have strong suspicions the calls were part of a concerted effort to keep Kerry supporters away from the polls.

Michelle Hargrett, 37, pointed to a brightly-colored flyer she said she found on her door, urging her to vote for Kerry but sending her to the wrong precinct, kilometres away from the one where she is registered.

"This is a dirty trick," she said. She did not fall for it, but used it to teach her 18-year-old daughter a lesson in democracy, and reported it to electoral lawyers.

"I told my daughter that even if we had stood for hours in the wrong line, we'd have still have made sure we eventually voted."

She said she's voted in every election since she turned 18. But what happened in the last presidential bid made her even more determined.

"I was bitter after the last time, they disenfranchized people who look like me," said Hargrett, who is black.

Bush won the White House in 2000 after the US Supreme Court halted five weeks of recounts in Florida, leading many Democrats to cry foul.

In that election thousands of votes, many from black voters, were discarded for reasons ranging from voter eligibility to badly perforated ballots.

Confusing ballots had caused elderly Jewish voters to mistakenly support a far-right wing candidate widely considered anti-semitic.

"My friends in New York still give me of hard time, saying I voted for Pat Buchanan," said Esther Kinterman, who sat on a bench with two elderly friends, after voting at a synagogue in West Palm Beach.

Many people in south Florida agree the new touch-screen machine is much easier to use than the punch-card system it replaced, though some are concerned that the fact it doesn't print out ballots would make it impossible to recount votes manually in case of disputes over the outcome of Tuesday's election.

"Those old machines, I was happy to get rid of them," said Sheryll Miller, who said she had no trouble casting her ballot at the synagogue, located inside a retirement community. -AFP