"I live in North Miami, but 99 percent of the time I'm there at my parents' house, " he said. "I've always voted in Miami, ever since I was 18."

CONVENIENCE A FACTOR
For some outsiders, it's easier to vote in Miami

Rene and Georgina Espinosa kept their Little Havana registration even after they moved to a Flagler Street trailer park in West Dade, just east of Sweetwater. Carollo fans, they said they wanted to make sure they could be counted in his corner.

"I think he was doing a good job, " Georgina Espinosa said.

For some of the non-Miami members of the Miami electorate, the big lure of voting in Miami wasn't politics. It was convenience:

* Eduardo Diaz, 64, moved out of Miami to a trailer park in Homestead more than a year ago. But he kept his old voting address at Southwest Eighth Street and 32nd Avenue because the polling place is much closer to his job. He's a window washer at Miami International Airport.

"I work at the airport, so that's why I vote there, " said Diaz, who said he was a Carollo supporter. Diaz said he's voted only twice since becoming a citizen.

* Elida Morffi-Ricard is registered to vote at St. Michael's Catholic Church at 2987 W. Flagler St., where she works as a receptionist. It's convenient -- there's also a precinct at the church. But she says she really lives on Genoa Street in Coral Gables.

* Emie Cook, who lives in Carol City in far northwest Dade, said she's going to keep her mother's Liberty City home as her voting address -- whether it's legal or not.

"I am not going to change my address, " she said. "Too much rigamarole."

ILLEGAL? YOU DON'T SAY!
'I thought I was a Miami resident, ' one voter said

Some pleaded ignorance.

"I thought I was a Miami resident, " said Maria Emma Castro de Garzon of unincorporated West Dade, who says she voted for Suarez. "When I write down my address, I write down 'Miami, Fla.' "

Her home is 3.1 miles west of the Miami border.

Former Miami City Manager Howard Gary violated the rules, too. Gary voted in District 3, where he lived for 27 years, even though he now lives in a condo in District 2. "It was just an oversight on my part, " said Gary, an investment banker and potential government witness in the unrelated Operation Greenpalm corruption probe. "I failed to change from one city district to another after I moved. That's all."

Andre Whittle, basketball coach at the Academy for Community Education alternative school, has lived in Carol City, part of unincorporated Northwest Dade, for five years. He voted from his mother's Miami home last November.

"I live in Carol City, but I never knew that you have to vote in the city where you live, " Whittle said.

Moreno, the FIU political scientist, believes many voters are in fact innocently confused about the county's two-tier system of government. For instance, every Miami-Dade voter can vote for the office of county executive mayor, while only people who live within a city's borders can vote in city elections.

"The boundaries here are sometimes anti-commonsensical, " he said. "Some of the irregularities are just people who are ignorant and are uninformed of just what they're supposed to be voting on."

TELLTALE SIGNATURES
Voters sign at the polls, next to official address

Yet Leahy, the elections supervisor, points out a contradiction in the stories of blissful ignorance: When voters show up at the polls, the precinct worker asks them if they still live at the address on their voter registration.

They sign the voter book right next to that address -- though Leahy says that doesn't count as a legal oath.

Still others offer no reason at all:

Locksmith Peter Pick, with his wife Eldy, voted out of an apartment building they own in Little Havana. The Picks are longtime activists who work to protect the neighborhood where they really live: Snapper Creek in Kendall.

Corporate records list Peter Pick as president of the Snapper Creek Park Lake Association, a homeowners group. Eldy Pick played a leadership role in a 1991 neighborhood effort to chase away an adult video store.

They would not speak to a reporter who visited their Kendall Drive home and who asked for an explanation of the residency issue.

"It's none of your business. Get off my property, " Peter Pick said.

Records show that a ballot was cast in the name of Marjorie Share, who now lives in Surfside -- not the address where her vote came from, an apartment house in Miami's commission District 3.

She phoned a reporter after a letter was left at her Surfside apartment.

"I haven't voted in five years, " she said. "I don't know where you're getting your information from." She says someone must have stolen her vote. "Somebody took my name. They could do that, you know. I used to live in that area."

She and her husband offered differing explanations of why she could not have voted on Nov. 4. Her husband, Jorge Enriquez, said she didn't vote because she was in bed with asthma that day. In the background, Share said no, she was working.

"She was in bed and working, " Enriquez said.

Elections department records show that she did vote.

And several out-of-Miami voters said they thought they were doing their civic duty.

Julian Manduley, 43, says he's just another harried commuter, driving from his house in Kendall to his job as a purchasing executive at a Knight Ridder office in Coral Gables. Knight Ridder owns The Herald.

"The traffic going west is awful, " he said. "By the time I pick up the kids and get home, it's too late to vote."

His solution: He registers on Southwest 10th Avenue, home of his in-laws, Isabel and Eugene Tuero.

"No, I didn't know it was illegal, " he said. "I mean, in the paper and everywhere, they were saying, 'Vote. Vote.' So I voted."

This article is based on reporting by these Herald staff writers: Karen Branch, Tyler Bridges, Alfonso Chardy, Manny Garcia, Lisa Getter, Rick Jervis, John Lantigua, Marika Lynch, Sandra Marquez Garcia, Patricia Maldonado, Connie Prater, Ken Rodriguez, Joe Tanfani and Andres Viglucci. It was written by Viglucci, Tanfani and Getter. Herald research editor Dan Keating and Getter handled computer analysis and researcher Elisabeth Donovan and Annabelle Degale provided research assistance.