Broward To Count on Thanksgiving
Updated 2:02 PM ET November 22, 2000
By TERRY SPENCER, Associated Press Writer
PLANTATION, Fla. (AP) - Broward County election officials agreed Wednesday to sacrifice part of their Thanksgiving holiday to finish a hand recount before a state Supreme Court deadline.
The canvassing board decided it can't stop working just "because we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving instead of finishing what should be done," said Suzanne Gunzburger, a Democrat and member of the Broward County Canvassing Board.
Broward County appeared to be the first of the three counties to complete the process as workers finished recounting all 588,000 ballots from 609 precincts and most of the absentee ballots. The three-member canvassing commission is going through the remaining absentee and questionable ballots. The state Supreme Court has given counties until Sunday to report their recount figures.
Palm Beach elections workers were continuing their recount while the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board voted Wednesday afternoon to stop its manual recount.
On Thursday, the board will move from the county's emergency operations center in Plantation to Judge Robert W. Lee's courtroom in Fort Lauderdale to finish the recount.
"I don't think we have a choice," Lee said. "We have a deadline that's been set by the Supreme Court."
Board members also agreed that Lee, the board's chairman, should take Broward's recount sheets to Tallahassee on Sunday and gave him authority to make any clerical changes to the forms in case Secretary of State Katherine Harris rejects them on some technicality.
By Wednesday afternoon, with 41,500 absentee ballots counted, Al Gore had gained a net of 56 votes beyond the numbers previously certified by the state. The board still has to go through as many as 2,000 critical disputed ballots.
Lee said there were 1,000 to 2,000 ballots with dimpled or partially removed chads - the tiny pieces of paper in punch-card ballots.
Dimpled ballots are those on which a punch card has a bump, as if someone tried to punch out the perforation to indicate his or her choice for president.
The Supreme Court did not specifically tell canvassing boards how to treat those questionable ballots. But it did say it would be appropriate to look for a voter's intent.
Republicans have maintained the questionable ballots should not be counted.
"If we proceed down the road of changing the standard, we will be raising the subjectivity index tenfold ... That's not the way we should be choosing a president," Broward GOP Chairman Ed Pozzuoli said in a letter to the three-member board, which is overseeing the county's recount.
Republicans maintain that dimples in the perforated punchcard ballots should not be considered valid votes. Democrats argue that canvassing boards should look at the dimples to see whether a voter's intent can be determined.
So far, board members have been setting the dimples aside, and they have not said how many they have collected for examination. Initial results from machine tabulations last week found more than 6,000 "undervotes" - ballots with unclear selections.
Since Tuesday, the canvassing board has tossed out about two dozen absentee ballots because voters pushed out a chad and then taped it back in and voted for someone else. The board said it is considering such ballots as overvotes.
David Fink, a Democratic attorney, said jokingly: "We have got to stop distributing that instructional video `How to Tape Over Your Chad."' |
