Ballots like this didn't have any business being counted
Fla. County's Recount Criticized
By DARA KAM, Associated Press Writer
QUINCY, Fla. (AP) - A top prosecutor said a rural north Florida county should not have recounted by hand more than 2,000 presidential ballots that had been rejected by voting machines.
The day after the Nov. 7 election, Gadsden County's mostly Democratic canvassing board went into a back room and recounted all the votes machines had rejected. Members of the public watched through a window.
When they were finished, Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites) had 170 more votes than before the recount. Gadsden County is heavily Democratic, with 22,340 registered Democrats compared to only 2,633 Republicans.
``Nobody has done anything wrong, except probably the press,'' said lame duck Gadsden County Supervisor of Elections Denny Hutchinson, who stepped down from the canvassing board before last week's recount. ``You all want to keep things stirred up and feast on it.''
Hutchinson, 63, who was knocked out of his job in the September primary, said he resigned from the board because of a health concern.
Judge Richard L. Hood and Gadsden County Commissioners Ed Dixon and Sterling Watson, who replaced Hutchinson, are the present canvassing board members. All are Democrats.
Republicans say the county officials had no right to examine rejected ballots and add many of them to Gore's column in the tight presidential race between Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush (news - web sites).
State Attorney Willie Meggs, the region's top prosecutor and a Democrat, said he had never heard of ballots being counted that way and told The New York Times the recounted ballots were invalid.
``You don't give a vote to someone whose ballot was not counted,'' Meggs said.
Gadsden County's canvassing board agreed to let both parties inspect the disputed ballots Wednesday.
Earlier, Hood, the Republican chairman of the canvassing board, defended the examination and counting of the rejected ballots.
``As far as I was concerned, the election was fair,'' Hood told the Times.
Hutchinson, a Democrat, said he was opposed to counting the rejected ballots because so many of them were in bad shape.
Many were marked up with pencil marks, crossed-out selections and multiple selections.
``Ballots like this didn't have any business being counted,'' Hutchinson told the newspaper. |
