Math made easy as 1 2 3
Bush's lead narrrows as recount continues; absentee ballots could determine president
By LINDA KLEINDIENST Sun-Sentinel
Web-posted: 1:13 a.m. Nov. 9, 2000
TALLAHASSEE -- Florida election officials launched a statewide presidential recount on Wednesday, hoping to end the nation's election limbo today, while both presidential candidates sent delegations to monitor the counting.
As close to half of the state's 67 counties quickly retallied their ballots, Republican George W. Bush maintained a slim lead over Democrat Al Gore, although it shrank. Mathematics and Florida voting history tend to favor a Bush win when the remaining ballots are recounted today, but nothing is certain.
Palm Beach County had other problems that may have changed the outcome. Election officials there said that in their original count they had invalidated 19,120 ballots from people who voted for more than one presidential candidate -- lending credence to claims that thousands of people trying to vote for Gore were confused by the layout of the ballot.
"I'm not a doddering old fool. I'm a senior citizen with a college degree, a former school teacher and I just retired from a job within the last year. I just don't understand how they could have given anyone a ballot like this and in a short time make them figure out what in the hell is going on," said Ellen Richman, who lives in Kings Point in Delray Beach.
In every election, ballots are invalidated because voters punched too many holes or messed up the ballot some other way. But Palm Beach County's number was exceptionally high. The county invalidated only 3,780 ballots in the Senate race. In Broward County, which had far more voters, 7,900 ballots were tossed for similar reasons.
The statewide recount was a different matter. State law mandates a recount when the winner ekes out a victory by less than one-half of 1 percent of all votes cast. Bush had a winning margin of only 1,784 votes over Gore out of the more than 5.8 million votes cast on Election Day.
It was the closeness of the race in his home state that led Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to urge his older brother to stall on claiming victory.
"We thought it would be close, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be this close," said Jeb Bush, who ran his brother's Florida campaign.
By close of business Wednesday, 29 of 67 counties had completed their recounts. The rest are expected to finish today.
In those counties, George W. Bush's lead had dropped by 994 votes. Gore had a net gain of 1,356 votes from the election night count while Bush picked up 362.
In Broward, where Gore won by more than 209,000 votes, a recount subtracted one vote from that lead. The vice president gained 43 votes, but Bush picked up 44.
The recount in Miami-Dade County gave Bush 36 more votes while Gore picked up another 62.
In Palm Beach County, Gore picked up 751 more votes and Bush got 108 more.
Still left to be counted after today will be an unknown number of overseas ballots. The overseas ballots must be postmarked on Election Day but have until Nov. 17 to arrive back in the state. When those ballots are counted, the state will release an updated official vote count.
Traditionally the overseas ballots, used mostly by military personnel, favor Republican candidates.
In the 1996 presidential election, of the 2,114 overseas ballots counted after Election Day, 54.4 percent went to Republican Bob Dole and 40.5 percent to President Clinton, the Democrat.
In 1992, former President George Bush won 48.2 percent of the 2,576 overseas ballots that were returned compared to 33 percent for Clinton.
With so many questions about the ballots and the presidency riding on the results, Gore and Bush each sent monitoring teams to Florida on Wednesday. Two former secretaries of state -- Warren Christopher for Gore and James A. Baker III for Bush -- head the teams.
Jeb Bush held a joint appearance late Wednesday with Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat who chaired Gore's Florida campaign, to assure the public that state officials are working on a recount and are prepared to investigate any complaints of elections irregularities.
"The state of Florida is in the national spotlight now, in the world spotlight," Butterworth said. "The integrity of our state is at stake."
To eliminate any appearance of conflict, Bush even removed himself from the state's official canvassing commission that must certify the final election results. Another Cabinet member will be appointed to take his place by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who oversees state elections.
As counties finish their recounts, they will be reported to the state elections division in Tallahassee. When all counties have reported, the canvassing board -- which includes Harris and state Elections Director Clay Roberts -- will make sure the numbers add up and announce the results to the state.
"The board's role is to make sure the numbers add up right," Roberts said. "They have no discretion to order another recount or question the results."
The pressure on the recount was intense because Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, will decide the winner of the presidential election.
In each county, a county judge, the chairman of the County Commission and the local elections supervisor recounted the votes by feeding punch cards through tabulation machines three times. The makeup of the canvassing board is supposed to insulate the process from politics. In each county, the process was overseen by representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Today's recount results may not satisfy all questions about how the election was handled in Florida. Voter complaints, many of them challenging the configuration of the Palm Beach County ballot, flooded into the state elections office and the attorney general's office.
Mark Wallace, an attorney for the Bush campaign, said their side would look at the new numbers and "respond appropriately." They insisted that the ballots were not misleading.
One lawsuit was filed Wednesday over the Palm Beach County ballot, and state Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, said the Democrats would likely go to court early today to get a restaining order to prevent the new results from being certified.
Although the new totals helped close the gap for Gore, they don't do enough to win the state, but Klein said that with 19,000 votes thrown out because of confusion, they should win the state.
State Democratic leaders held out the possibility of lawsuits challenging irregularities they say have popped up across the state.
"We've not been down this pathway before. We want to do it right. There are very serious concerns about what happened (on Tuesday)," said Bob Poe, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party. "The people of Florida and the nation are owed an answer -- nothing less than the presidency of the United States hangs in the balance."
But Roberts said that the state's 67 elections supervisors performed well in an election that brought out a record number of voters.
"It was closer in Florida than anywhere else," Roberts said of the election. "Nothing went wrong in Florida. We counted the results but we have a recount process in the law. That doesn't mean that any part of our system failed."
He said he set today's deadline for the recount to let elections supervisors send tired staffs home to rest before the retally began.
"We wanted to allow them some time. They had their staffs up all night. Tired people make mistakes and we don't want that," he said.
But South Florida counties, where Gore had his biggest turnout, began the work immediately.
In Broward, about a dozen vote counters gathered for three hours at a nondescript warehouse on the south side of the New River in Fort Lauderdale to recount about 588,000 votes cast in Broward on Tuesday.
"We've never had anything of this magnitude occur before," said Broward Elections Supervisor Jane Carroll, who is ending a 32-year career as head of the elections office.
She predicted that the recount -- the largest in the county's history -- would change little. "I have never done a recount that has changed a race," she said.
When the final tally ended with Gore netting a one-vote loss, she said, "I told you the vote count could change but it would make little difference and it didn't. This was quite a (last) hurrah. I'd give us an A-plus in handling the election last night."
The Gore campaign immediately informed David Leahy, the county's elections supervisor, that it would file a request today for a manual count.
"When there is a request filed, it will be considered," Leahy responded to Joseph Geller, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, moments after announcing the recount results.
The latest Miami-Dade totals didn't include 41 federal absentee ballots from overseas for Bush or 38 for Gore. Perhaps 50 to 100 more such ballots may be coming in, Leahy said.
The ballots were to be certified today by a canvassing board composed of Leahy and County Court Judges Lawrence King and Miriam Lehr.
The revised totals did not change the percentages in Miami-Dade, with Gore receiving 72.91 percent and Bush 52.57.
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