Bush projectedto win Florida

President Bush has won Florida and its 27 electoral votes four years after the battleground state narrowly put him in the White House.

With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Bush had 3,596,069 votes, or 52 percent, and Kerry, the Democratic nominee, had 3,270,250 votes, or 47 percent. Independent candidate Ralph Nader had 29,545 votes, or about 0.4 percent.

There were only scattered reports of mostly minor problems with a voting system that was revised after the 2000 election.

Bush and Kerry’s campaigns were concerned about the possibility of deja vu in Florida. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore thanks to a 537-vote margin in Florida after more than a month of legal wrangling.

Central Florida counties that backed Gore in 2000 switched to Bush this time around, according to the Associated Press.

Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of early voting which started 15 days ago under the state’s election reform. More than 2 million voters had cast ballots by the time the polls opened, either by voting early or through absentee ballots.

Voting took place under unprecedented scrutiny and there were some hitches in the new system.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Florida Legal Services filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of three voters who said they ran into ”foul-ups and delays” by Broward and Miami-Dade elections officials in mailing absentee ballots, according to UPI.

Thousands of voters in Broward County complained they didn’t get their absentee ballots and new ballots were mailed over the weekend.

The suit filed in U.S. District Court said the supervisors failed to give voters enough time to mail in absentee ballots. It seeks to extend the deadline from Tuesday until Nov. 12, the same deadline for the receipt of overseas absentee ballots.

Provisional ballots were also expected to delay the counting process in many counties.