Washington Post article excerpt below is very telling on the problems in manual recount (last paragraph) as are the photos of counters holding ballots up to the light looking for something. People have biases (conscious or unconscious). How can you count a million ballots manually and eliminate these biases? Criteria has changed once, how many more times will they change - and who is the god who sets these criteria (a democrat in this county?). Gore's people were very intelligent in pushing for a manual recount in these four counties, forcing Republicans to be the first to go to court first for an injunction to stop the manual recount. Will Florida be done with all of this by December 18 when the Electoral College votes? The elections are rapidly becoming a farce and a crisis.
washingtonpost.com
A painstaking hand count of presidential ballots began yesterday in Florida as legal maneuvers increased on both sides in the agonizingly close battle for the state's 25 electoral votes that will determine the identity of the next president.
Under the watchful eye of representatives of Vice President Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, election officials broke the seals on silver metal boxes and began inspecting 4,500 ballots cast Tuesday in four precincts of Palm Beach County, making up 1 percent of the county's vote. More ballots could be counted later, depending on the results of this sample.
But the count proceeded very slowly yesterday amid confusion and controversy over the criteria to be used to determine the intentions of voters whose cards failed to register a presidential choice. Part way through the count, election officials said they were changing their standards for making that judgment.
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As if to illustrate Baker's contention, the spokesman for the Palm Beach County election commission told reporters, four hours after the recount had begun there, that officials had issued new instructions to the workroom. In the beginning, the teams of vote counters held up each ballot without a clear presidential choice to the ceiling lights, and if they agreed that they could see through one box, they credited the vote to that candidate.
But rules adopted by the county in 1990 said that for a vote to be valid, at least part of the "chad," the square that is to be punched out, must be separated from the rest of the ballot. That regulation was substituted for the "seeing daylight" standard, and previously counted ballots would be reexamined, officials said. Simple indentations would not be taken as evidence of voter intent. |
