Access to polling places tightened

Judges in Florida and Colorado yesterday tightened access to polling places in their states, a blow to Democrats who had argued that legal restrictions there disenfranchised voters — especially new ones, mostly Democratic-leaning minorities.

The decisions came as residents in both states began early voting. Early voting was instituted in Florida after the 2000 election in hopes of preventing the electoral mayhem of four years ago that held the presidency in abeyance for weeks after Election Day.

“If you vote early now,” Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry told a crowd of Democrats here yesterday, “We don’t have to stay up late Tuesday night.”

In a unanimous ruling in Florida, the seven justices of the state Supreme Court said the votes of residents who cast ballots at the wrong precincts do not have to be counted, upholding a state law that labor unions argued unconstitutionally deprived residents of the right to vote if they did not know their polling place.

In Colorado, a Denver district judge yesterday upheld a new state law requiring voters to show identification before they cast their ballots and also said residents’ can vote only at their predetermined precinct.

Republican Gov. Bill Owens hailed Judge Morris B. Hoffman’s decision, saying that the ruling would help Colorado “ensure the integrity of next month’s elections.”

“With Democrats and Republicans raising concerns about potential voter fraud, it is essential that we have a common-sense mechanism to make sure that voters who come to vote are indeed who they say they are — and that they vote only once,” Mr. Owens said.

By midmorning yesterday, minor problems had surfaced in early voting. Florida voters faced faulty ballots, crashed voting computers and other problems as they joined voters from battleground states, including Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and New Mexico, that already had begun voting.

The Florida justices, two of whom were appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush — the president’s brother — after 2000, disagreed with a group of labor unions that argued that many people might not know their polling place because it might have been moved, displaced by a hurricane or eliminated in redistricting.

They said the Constitution gives the legislature the authority to dictate voting rules.

Under Florida law, if voters show up at a polling place but officials there have no record that they are registered, they are given provisional ballots. Those ballots are then held until officials determine whether the persons were entitled to vote at that precinct and had not already voted.

If they should have been allowed to vote at that precinct, the ballots count; if not, they are thrown out.

The court said requiring that provisional voters vote at the correct precinct is no more unreasonable than requiring that everyone else vote at the correct polling place.

“This is like saying you can only do your banking in this building downtown,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, which supported the plaintiffs in the Florida case. “What we’re seeing here is the difficulty of trying to drag Florida kicking and screaming out of the horse-and-buggy era.”

The Florida court’s ruling contradicted a ruling last week by a federal judge in Ohio. U.S. District Judge James Carr blocked a directive requiring poll workers to send voters to their correct precinct, ruling that Ohio voters can cast provisional ballots as long as they are in the county in which they are registered. Ohio’s secretary of state is appealing.

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