McGrath, the issue in Florida wasn't that people didn't register or couldn't register properly. They did their part just fine. It's that voter registration lists were tampered with AFTER they registered.

Some tampering is normal and necessary; they periodically purge people that are supposed to be deceased, or are convicted felons and can't vote, etc. With each cleaning there are bound to be some errors, but in the case of Florida, the number of errors was huge. A lot of folks showed up who were legitimately registered and very much legally entitled to vote that had been erroneously purged. Then the workers at the polls couldn't get the errors straightened out while they were there, so they didn't get to vote.

The fact that most of those errors impacted minorities and were in heavily Democratic districts falls somewhere between "suspicious" and "deliberate tampering." When you add the reports of road blocks and the long lines outside the polling places of the poorer districts because they didn't have enough equipment or poll workers... well, Florida 2000 was an object lesson is how NOT to have an election.

I'm sure other places were even worse, but they got caught in Florida ONLY because the vote was so close.