Duval (FL) Tosses 22,000 Votes
Politics/Elections News Keywords: PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, FLORIDA, DUVAL COUNTY
Source: The Florida Times-Union
Published: November 11, 2000 Author: David DeCamp
Posted on 11/11/2000 17:56:43 PST by tradcath
By David DeCamp
Times-Union staff writer
Nearly 22,000 Duval County votes for president were nullified after voters chose more than one candidate, the supervisor of elections confirmed Friday, resulting in an unusually high strikeout rate.
Supervisor John Stafford and his spokeswoman, Susan Tucker Johnson, attributed the voided presidential votes to a ballot listing 10 presidential candidates over two pages. Voters, they said, probably picked a president on page one, then voted again on the second page. Just the presidential portion of the ballot would then be thrown out, not the entire ballot.
The ballots tossed were more than found in Palm Beach County where the focus has been intense.
Another nearly 5,000 Duval presidential votes didn't count in the race because they "undervoted," Johnson said, meaning a candidate wasn't selected or voters didn't punch a hole in the ballot hard enough to mark their choice.
How the disqualifications affected votes for Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore is uncertain, Stafford and Johnson said. The election office's computer apparently can't separate votes by ballot page. A hand count would be needed, and Stafford said a few precincts may go through such a count next week to judge the voided votes' effects.
Though Bush won Duval by about 44,000 votes, the high-stakes contest for Florida's 25 Electoral College votes and the presidency teeters over a few hundred votes and numerous charges of irregularities. A handful of lawsuits have been filed protesting the Palm Beach County vote, in which voters said they were given a confusing ballot.
While Republican Stafford and a GOP leader backed the Duval County ballot as legitimate, a local member of Gore's campaign reacted with harsh questions.
"John Stafford, in the presence of our lawyer . .. told me there were 200 to 300" votes disqualified, said Mike Langton, Northeast Florida chairman of the Gore campaign. "Now all of the sudden there are 22,000. . . . This stinks all over the place."
Stafford, reached last night, denied making such a statement -- and Langton's suggestion that partisan politics may be at play.
Langton said he would advise upper leadership of the Gore campaign of the disqualified votes. "I definitely want to see hard evidence of this."
Attorney Mark Herron of the Democratic National Committee said last night that the deadline for requesting a manual recount passed at midnight, and the party had learned just hours earlier of the number of nullified votes. Previously, Democrats thought the number was in the hundreds, he said.
As more information arrives, Herron said, Democrats will begin to decide their move. Options include contesting the vote, which could effectively give them the same results as a recount request, he said.
The total rejected votes -- more than 9 percent of the total Duval voter turnout of 292,000 -- more than tripled the 7,800 votes that were struck from a 1996 election, when there were six fewer presidential candidates. Four years earlier, nearly 6,100 ballots were bounced.
That equates to between 2 percent and 3 percent of the ballots being disqualified from the previous two elections.
Generally, 2 percent or less of ballots are disqualified for over- or under-voting, said Rob Richie, executive director of the non-profit Center for Democracy and Voting in Takoma Park, Md.
"It sounds pretty irregular to me," Richie said of Duval's vote disqualifications this week. "Out of [nearly] 300,000 votes, that's extremely high."
The disqualified votes for president didn't necessarily ruin all ballots. Indeed, the nixed votes also raised eyebrows because they left the lower-profile U.S. Senate contest with nearly 10,000 more total votes than the presidential race, which historically is the big draw to the polls.
Stafford said the high number of disqualified votes were discovered Wednesday. They were reported to the state along with problems with voting access related to the motor-voter law and difficulty with a counting machine as part of the vote certification process.
"It puts us under scrutiny. I don't like it when anybody loses their votes," Stafford said. ". . . Bottom line is, I feel like we had a fair ballot and so does the canvassing board."
Mike Hightower, chairman of Bush's Northeast Florida campaign, suggested the problem was voter error, not misdeed or mistake over the ballot by election officials. "We make the assumption that all of our voters read directions," he said.
Langton pointed to a parallel between the disqualified votes in Duval and the ballot strife in Palm Beach County. There, 19,100 votes were rejected by voters picking more than one candidate for president.
"We'll probably be the next Palm Beach County," Stafford rued.
The Palm Beach ballot, however, ran the names of candidates on facing pages with voter punch holes in the middle, which voters say confused them. In Duval, all punch holes ran along the right side of each ballot page.
"It says clearly at the bottom of our first page 'continued on the next page,' " Johnson said, adding that only four or five complaints about overvoting were logged at the elections office.
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This news complicates things even further. The format could have lead to confusion just as easily for all parties, and since Bush won the county by 17 points, this may favor Bush; that is, if the hand recount in Palm Beach County is counted, the Duval votes may cancel them out.
You may recall that much of the confusion about Florida on election night started in Duval County. The Voter News Service (VNS) wrongly reported that Gore had taken the county and used this in its analysis to call Florida for Gore. This whole thing is such a mess. |
