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Election 2000: Strange Events Plague Florida Polls

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DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: One of the many issues that still needs to be settled in the state of Florida is this issue of a missing ballot box. For the latest on that, let's bring in John Zarrella, who is in the Broward County voting equipment center with the latest on that.

John, good morning.

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn. Well, in about an hour and 10 minutes the action will begin here at 1:00. Election officials in Broward County will come in here, come to the room behind me, and you can see those blue boxes back there with the tags on them. Those are the 587,928 votes that were cast in Broward County yesterday; and voting officials will come in here and use the machines -- the counting machines in front of us here and they will begin to recount those 587,000; and, of course, that's going to happen at about 1:00. It could take two, three, four hours to get that vote counted depending on how many of those counting machines are working. They've got a dozen of them, one of them wasn't working very well yesterday so we're not quite sure how long it will take here in Broward County.

There are 67 counties in Florida. The same process will have to be conducted in all of those 67 counties and, of course, Broward County was hugely in favor of Vice President Al Gore. Some 66 percent of the Broward County folks went to the polls. Gore got 67 percent of those votes. He got over 386,000 votes to 177,000 for Governor Bush. So it was hugely in favor.

KAGAN: John, if I could just interrupt you here for a second, because we're short on time...

ZARRELLA: Yes.

KAGAN: ... and there's an issue that's been coming up here -- the issue of some people in Palm Beach who thought, perhaps -- we've been reporting earlier and we talked to Congressman Wexler of that area -- concern that people thought they were voting for Al Gore but, indeed, they think that maybe they voted for Pat Buchanan. Now we have Congressman Mark Foley of Florida calling and saying there wasn't that problem at all, that people were very clear about who they were voting for.

Can you, maybe, comment on that situation in Florida a little bit?

ZARRELLA: Yes, Daryn, the issue that come up was that, when they looked at the ballot, folks said that the way that the names were positioned on the ballot -- that some folks thought that they might have been voting for Gore, but actually, when they punched the ballot, that they actually voted for Buchanan. That was what had come up. Certainly, no indication that there was any wrongdoing there, it just may have been that a few people didn't exactly get it right when they went into the voting booth.

But, apparently, it may have been overblown. It may not be exactly what everybody thought it was. But there's another issue, now, in Miami where, at a Presbyterian church, at a daycare center, when some workers went in there this morning, they found a locked ballot box that had not been turned in. They had to collect that box and then send it over to the elections office in Dade County. So there are other issues that are still coming up that are going to continue to make this an awfully, awfully interesting nail-biter here.

KAGAN: Real quickly, any idea how many ballots were in that locked box?

ZARRELLA: No idea. That was a question we were asking. Could be a couple hundred could be -- no idea -- Daryn.

KAGAN: All right, thank you very much for that update John Zarrella in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale.

And we will take a break, we'll wrap things up after this.

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