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 So many voters showed up at the Miami-Dade elections headquarters in Doral to cast absentee ballots in person Sunday afternoon that the department shut down the operation less than two hours in, saying it did not have enough resources to help everyone. 
 
 What began Sunday morning as an attempt by the Miami-Dade elections department to let more people early vote devolved into chaos and confusion only days before the nation decides its next president. 
 
 Call it the debacle in Doral. 
 
 Elections officials, overwhelmed with voters, locked the doors to their Doral headquarters and temporarily shut down the operation, angering nearly 200 voters standing in line outside — only to resume the proceedings an hour later. 
 
 On the surface, officials blamed technical equipment and a lack of staff for the shutdown. But behind the scenes, there was another issue: Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. 
 
 The Republican had never signed off on the additional in-person absentee voting hours in the first place. 
 
 “That was counter to what I said on Friday, which was we were not going to change the game mid-stream,” he said. “I said, ‘No, there’s no way we did this.’” 
 
 But Gimenez, who is in a nonpartisan post, quickly realized it was better to let the voting go on, and the voting resumed. 
 
 The mayor said he found out early Sunday afternoon — from his daughter-in-law — about the extra voting hours. 
 
 The move had been approved by Deputy Mayor Alina Hudak at the request of Elections Supervisor Penelope Townsley. The plan was simple: Allow voters to request, fill out and return absentee ballots in person for four hours Sunday afternoon. 
 
 Early voting the Sunday before Election Day used to be allowed. But it was eliminated by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott last year after Barack Obama used early voting to help him win Florida in 2008 — and therefore the presidency. 
 
 Gimenez said his initial reaction was to stop the last-minute Sunday voting. 
 
 But by then, around 180 people stood in line outside the elections office at 2700 NW 87th Ave. They shouted “Let us vote!” and banged on the locked glass doors. 
 
 “This is America, not a third-world country,” said Myrna Peralta, who waited in line with her 4-year-old grandson for nearly two hours before the doors closed. “They should have been prepared.” 
 
 “My beautiful Sunshine State,” she lamented. “They’re not letting people vote.” 
 
 Minutes earlier, a department spokeswoman had said the office did not have enough resources — only one ballot printer, five voting booths and two staffers — to handle the throng of voters and would begin turning new voters away. 
 
 “We had the best of intentions to provide this service today,” spokeswoman Christina White had said. “We just can’t accommodate it to the degree that we would like to.” 
 
 Calvin Sweeting, a 59-year-old from Opa-locka, was told he would be the last person to vote. 
 
 “They said I was the lucky one,” he said, shrugging. “It didn’t seem fair to me.” 
 
 Or to Jean Marcellus, 52, who stood behind him. 
 
 “This is ridiculous,” Marcellus shouted, holding up the ticket he was given to secure his place in the queue. “I’m the next one!” 
 
 Nearly all the voters stayed in line until a campaign worker reported her car had been towed from a private parking lot across the street. Scores of people ducked out of the line to check on their own cars. A second car had been towed. 
 
 Behind closed doors were back-and-forth phone calls among the department, the county attorney’s office and the mayor, who eventually decided to let the people outside the elections department vote. Democrats also unleashed a torrent of phone calls to reporters and the county. 
 
 “I’m upset at this change, but at the end, when you have 200, 300 voters out there ready to go, you really can’t disenfranchise them,” Gimenez said. Of the whole situation, he added: “I’m certainly embarrassed.” 
 
 The elections office reopened its doors at 3 p.m., after being closed for about an hour, apologizing and announcing that it had added a ballot-printing machine and more poll workers and would remain open until all voters in line at 5 p.m. had cast their in-person absentee ballots. 
 
 The crowd cheered. Around 400 people stood in line at 5 p.m. Campaign workers passed out bottled water and granola bars. 
 
 Despite lines up to seven hours long at times during eight days of early voting, Gimenez had decided late last week not to ask Gov. Scott to extend early-voting hours in Miami-Dade. The last early-voting polls officially closed at 7 p.m. Saturday, but they remained open until the last voter in line checked in with a poll worker — about 1 a.m. Sunday. 
 
 Gimenez defended his decision Sunday to refrain from asking the governor for more early-voting hours. 
 
 “We all knew what the rules were. When you start doing things like that, you’re opening to criticism of favoring one side or the other,” he said. “All of us knew it was going to be eight days of early voting. It was going to end on Saturday. There is going to be hundred of polling places [open] on Tuesday.” 
 
 The county did add poll workers, machines and voting booths to early-voting sites to alleviate some wait times. 
 
 On Sunday, Gimenez said he was angrier at Hudak, his deputy, than at Townsley, the elections supervisor. 
 
 “I’m going to have to deal with this internally,” he said. “I’m not saying somebody’s going to be lose their job, but somebody made a poor error in judgment that’s not really helping the community.” 
 
 Hudak told Miami Herald news partner WFOR-CBS 4 that she approved the decision, which at the time she did not see as a major policy shift. 
 
 “I apologized to the mayor,” she said. “I should have told him. I made a bad call.” 
 
 Gimenez said the elections department wanted to offer more hours of in-person absentee voting in part because some voters had yet to receive ballots the county had mailed them due to a post-office glitch. 
 
 Opening the elections office from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. was a work-around to a provision in the state law that eliminated early voting the Sunday before Election Day. The Florida Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in the wee hours of Sunday morning seeking to somehow extend voting in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties before Tuesday. 
 
 The law allows elections supervisors to accept in-person absentee ballots through 7 p.m. Tuesday — including Sunday, at the elections supervisor’s discretion. As of Friday, Miami-Dade and Broward had planned to open Sunday only for voters to drop off absentee ballots. 
 
 Miami-Dade switched gears to also let voters ask for a ballot and fill it out on the spot. Palm Beach and two Tampa Bay-area counties, Hillsborough and Pinellas, did the same. 
 
 Broward did not initially follow suit but then a spokeswoman said it would try to accommodate voters — after assisting people who had made appointments to cast their ballots Sunday. 
 
 But there were no lines Sunday afternoon at the Lauderhill satellite office located at 1501 NW 40th Ave. Poll workers said they had assisted voters who had appointments as well as voters who had dropped by without an appointment to fill out a ballot. 
 
 Voters across the state can request and cast absentee ballots in person Monday. They can also drop them off at elections supervisor’s offices — but not at their precincts — on Election Day. 
 
 The Democrats’ lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court, argued that an emergency judge’s order was necessary to “extend voting opportunities” before Tuesday in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, including allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in person. 
 
 It’s unclear exactly what more a court could have done, two days before Election Day. The lawsuit did not ask U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz to reopen all early-voting sites. 
 
 “The extraordinarily long lines deterred or prevented voters from waiting to vote. Some voters left the polling sites upon learning of the expected wait, and others refused to line up altogether,” the lawsuit said. “These long lines and extreme delays unduly and unjustifiably burdened the right to vote.” 
 
 An attorney for the Miami-Dade elections supervisor filed a motion Sunday morning saying the lawsuit was moot because the county would allow for in-person absentee voting Sunday afternoon. 
 
 Democrats and Democratic-leaning groups had asked the governor late last week to extend early-voting hours by executive authority. Scott declined Thursday night. 
 
 On Friday, Monroe County Elections Supervisor Harry Sawyer Jr., a Republican, sent the governor a letter asking for more hours. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner responded that the early-voting reports he was receiving from elections supervisors across the state were positive. 
 
 Scott signed a law last year reducing the number of early-voting days to eight from 14 and eliminating voting on the Sunday before Election Day, which Democrats used to turn out supporters in 2008. The new law guarantees one Sunday of early voting. 
 
 The number of maximum hours offered stayed the same on the books, but four years ago, then-Gov. Charlie Crist effectively extended early voting by another 24 hours. 
 
 Separately, the party sued in Orlando circuit court asking to extend early-voting hours in Orange County after a bomb scare temporarily closed a polling place. On Sunday morning, a judge ruled that the Winter Park early-voting site should open for four hours. 
 
 Excluding that site and the counties that allowed in-person absentee voting, more than 4.4 million Floridians had voted early or absentee by Sunday morning. More than 2.4 million people had voted early — most of them Democrats. More than 2 million had voted absentee — most of them Republicans. 
 
 In 2008, more people voted early, and fewer voted absentee. 
 
 Miami Herald staff writers Marc Caputo, Diana Moskovitz and Charles Rabin contributed to this report. ||||| The final minutes of turning absentee ballots at Miami-Dade election headquarters. Staffers scrambled to check in as many outstanding ballots as they could before the 7 pm deadline. 
 
 The Miami-Dade Elections Department is counting absentee ballots a day after the election. They hope to finish today. 
 
 Dont expect election results from Miami-Dade County anytime soon. 
 
 The countys beleaguered elections supervisor told reporters Wednesday night that her employees, still processing thousands of absentee ballots, wont finish until Thursday. 
 
 Supervisor Penelope Townsley acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the elections process, according to Miami Herald news partner WFOR-CBS4. She spoke after another day during which elections workers fed thousands of pages of ballots into scanning machines. 
 
 With the presidential race settled  but Florida still too close to call  Miami-Dades lack of final results have left a much-mocked blank spot on the long-decided electoral map. 
 
 Earlier Wednesday, the county had said 20,000 absentee ballots still needed to be counted. The office of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez issued a news release insisting that the unprecedented length of the ballot represents over 100,000 pages that need to be reviewed and verified, one by one. 
 
 This in no way is representative of any issues or delays, but a matter of unprecedented volume, the release said, noting that the countys canvassing board is continuing to examine suspect absentee ballots. 
 
 Overall, President Barack Obama had more than 61 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade, or 521,329 votes, while Mitt Romney had 317,382, or 37.6 percent, according to the election departments website. The county was plagued Tuesday by embarrassing delays and long lines preventing the state to be called for Obama or Romney. 
 
 Deputy Elections Supervisor Christina White insisted Wednesday morning that an unusually long ballot and high voter turnout, which was 64 percent, was to blame, not a lack of resources. 
 
 Its not that there were any problems or glitches, White told reporters. Its about volume and paper left to be processed. 
 
 Miami-Dade elections staffers worked overnight Tuesday and through Wednesday to count some 30,000 absentee ballots that had been dropped off or mailed to the Doral headquarters and county government center in downtown Miami at the last minute. The ballots had to be turned in by 7 p.m. Tuesday to be eligible for counting. 
 
 Teams of staffers counted 10,000 overnight, but still had another 20,000 to review Wednesday afternoon at the Doral headquarters. 
 
 The process is slow and tedious. To start, a dozen elections staffers must electronically compare images of voters signatures on absentee ballots with the signatures on the voters registration cards. Then the workers must determine whether the ballots have been properly filled out before counting them in scanning machines. 
 
 If staffers reject any ballots, they set them aside for the Miami-Dade canvassing board to make the final call. The board, sitting in an adjacent room, consists of the chair, County Judge Shelley Kravitz, County Judge Andrew Hague, and the county supervisor of elections, Penelope Townsley. 
 
 The elections office must also count all provisional ballots by 5 p.m. Thursday. White said she did not know the total number of provisional ballots. 
 
 Obama wont lose the lead in Miami-Dade, where his campaign had a massive grass-roots operation. But how the final batch of ballots affects the overall number in Florida remains to be seen  Obama leads by just over 46,000, according to the state election departments most recent numbers. 
 
 The race could still be close enough to trigger a recount in Florida, unless it is waived by Romney, who lost the overall election to the president. 
 
 On Wednesday afternoon, the total difference between the candidates hovered just above the .5 percentage point needed to trigger a recount as the final absentee and early voting numbers trickled in across the state. With such a razor-thin margin, no media outlets had called Florida for Obama or Romney. 
 
 Overall in Florida, at least 8,307,749 voters cast ballots for president, just under the number cast in 2008, when Obama won handily. 
 
 In Miami-Dade, so far, it appears the number of voters who cast ballots for president will be just shy of the 864,636 who did so four years ago. 
 
 Lines were so long in some polling places here that the last voter did not leave the West Kendall Regional Library until a few minutes after 1 a.m. 
 
 When polls officially closed at 7 p.m. hundreds of people were still waiting to cast ballots in precincts around South Florida, in an election that was marked by long lines and the occasional problem. Even after the networks called the race for President Obama, people in South Florida remained in line. 
 
 Voters complained that many stations lacked enough poll workers, scanning machines and privacy booths to address the crowds. Dozens of workers were diverted from closed polling places to others that faced daunting queues, and 150 extra optical scanners were distributed throughout the day. 
 
 This article will be updated as more information becomes available.
– There were chaotic scenes outside Miami-Dade County election headquarters yesterday after voting was abruptly shut down as hundreds of people waited in line. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, a Republican, ordered a halt to voting after discovering that his deputy mayor had agreed to the election supervisor's request to allow voters to request and return absentee ballots for four hours, Miami Herald reports. The state's GOP-controlled legislature has eliminated early voting the Sunday before Election Day, but the law allows elections supervisors to accept in-person absentee ballots at their discretion. Voters outside the headquarters banged on the glass and chanted "Let us vote" after the shutdown. After about an hour, Gimenez relented and allowed the angry crowd to vote. "I'm upset at this change, but at the end, when you have 200, 300 voters out there ready to go, you really can’t disenfranchise them," he said. Before the Miami-Dade debacle, Florida's Democratic Party filed a lawsuit seeking to extend early voting after long lines Saturday prevented many people from casting their ballots, the New York Times reports.