ELECTION 2000, Day 35
Will high court shut
'Pandora's box'?
Crazy quilt of recounting
standards
doomed to face Bush legal
challenges
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- Some Florida
counties think a dimple is a
vote. Others agree, but draw
the line at "rogue" dimples --
tiny indentations that show up
nowhere else on the ballot.
Some will only accept dimples
if they can see the signature
imprint left by a stylus --
rather than, say, a fingernail.
Others, such as Broward County,
are less fastidious.
Still others won't even
consider dimples and are
sticking with hanging chad. The
card must be penetrated. If it
is, they have a pretty good
hunch it's a vote.
That's the variation in
standards used to decipher
presidential undervotes by just
the 25 Florida counties with
punch-card ballots.
Another 41 counties use
pencil-marked paper ballots run
through computerized optical
scanners.
They have another set of
standards.
Some think a circled bubble is
a vote, even though it was
supposed to be filled in, and
therefore wasn't picked up by
the scanner. Others, like
Alachua County, aren't so sure.
Counties like Baker County, on
the other hand, instruct voters
to fill in arrows pointing to
candidates. Are partial marks
in the arrows, or marks around
the arrows, votes? Some say
yes, some say no.
The crazy quilt of standards
for manually examining
undervoted ballots is driving
advisers to George W. Bush,
well, crazy.
They argue it's a "Pandora's
box" that the U.S. Supreme
Court must close, lock and
throw away the key.
The high court over the weekend
halted a statewide hand recount
ordered by the Democrat-packed
Florida Supreme Court. The
ruling favored Al Gore, who
insists there are enough hidden
votes for him among the
estimated 40,000 undervotes
still "uncounted" to erase
Bush's certified 537-vote lead.
In its stay, the U.S. court
argued that the lower court
sent counties hunting for votes
without any rules or even a
clear description of the
quarry. The court is set to
hear arguments from lawyers for
both Gore and Bush today before
issuing a final ruling on the
recount.
What can be legally counted as
a vote? The Florida court
simply said it "shall be
counted as a 'legal' vote if
there is 'clear indication of
the intent of the voter.'"
In other words, good hunting.
A circuit court judge tasked
with overseeing the recount
didn't help. He offered no
uniform standard.
Unequal protection?
And he left it up to the
different canvassing boards to
figure out how to pan for
"legal" votes in a sea of blank
votes for president, which are
considered by many voting
experts to be nothing more than
"protests" -- as in "none of
the above."
"This is very disturbing," said
Ken Lisaius, a spokesman for
Bush's legal team in
Tallahassee, Fla.
"They've opened a Pandora's box
of inconsistent standards,
flawed hand-counting and delays
that ultimately call into
question the state's ability to
be represented in the Electoral
College," Lisaius said in an
interview with WorldNetDaily.
Far from settling anything,
such a hand recount would only
invite more appeals, he says,
on the grounds that differing
standards for counting would
deny Bush equal protection
under elections laws.
"There are some concerns about
equal protection," Lisaius
said.
Another concern: The state
courts haven't ordered
canvassing boards to keep
detailed logs describing the
complexion of the undervoted
ballots as they inspect them.
How many of the punch-card
ballots show indentations but
no penetration? How many have
partial penetration but not
enough for machines to pick up?
How many contain hand-written
notes signaling voter intent?
Or in the case of optically
scanned paper ballots, how many
show pencil markings inside the
bubbles or arrows? How many
outside? How many are partially
filled? How many have notes
scribbled on them?
Without a public record of such
data, the counting process
stays in the shadows where it
looks subjective and
suspicious, even to observers
in the counting rooms.
'Potential for mischief'
"We're wading back into
questions of subjectivity and
the potential for mischief like
we had in Broward County,"
Lisaius said.
Broward's canvassing board,
which is controlled by
Democrats, loosened standards
to allow counting dimples as
votes for president -- even if
no pattern of dimpling is found
on ballots. The relaxed
standard helped Gore net more
than 500 extra votes there.
Neighboring Palm Beach County,
meanwhile, adopted a stricter
dimple standard and came up
with far fewer votes for Gore.
Yet the Florida Supreme Court
"embraced both standards,"
Lisaius complained.
Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia
counties completed their hand
recounts last month. Miami-Dade
County finished only about a
fifth of its count last month,
and got through about a third
of its remaining 9,000 ballots
Saturday.
Union County, trivia buffs will
be interested to know, also did
a hand count last month -- on
Election Day, just as it has
done every election. Union,
which uses paper ballots, is
the only Florida county that
still manually counts its
ballots.
Officials there, however, may
still have to go back through
their 258 non-votes for
president to sort the
undervotes from the overvotes.
Some 40,000 undervotes out of
an estimated total of 64,780
undervotes remain to be
eyeballed statewide.
Many counties still haven't
segregated undervoted ballots
from stacks of thousands of
ballots cast. Some 16 counties,
including Orange and Escambia,
for example, have no idea which
of their votes are undervotes
or overvotes.
Undervotes vs. blank votes
In Wakulla County, an elections
office spokesperson says
officials never programmed
counting machines to tabulate
undervotes, because voters
there use a lever-like puncher,
not a stylus, that cuts ballots
cleanly and leaves no chad
hanging or dimpled.
So they figure any voters who
skipped the top race meant to
skip it.
Also, WorldNetDaily has found
in its survey of Florida's 67
counties that many define
undervotes differently. Some
categorize them apart from
"blank" votes.
With no definition provided by
the court, it's doubtful that
all undervotes -- including
blank votes -- would even be
reviewed if a statewide hand
recount were allowed to go
forward. So the reported total
of 64,780 undervotes may be
incomplete.
And the number would more than
likely change anyway in another
recount, thanks to the organic
nature of punch-card ballots.
In order to segregate
undervotes, many of the 25
counties using punch-card
ballots must run them through
their counting machines again.
Because chad fall off in the
process, machines would count
newly created holes as votes
and tabulations would change.
Those counties would come up
with not only different numbers
for undervotes, but new totals
for all races. And there's a
risk that some ballots would be
double-counted, notes Bush
lawyer Phil Beck.
Such endemic problems would
make it even harder to get a
"final" apples-to-apples
reading on results across the
state. The state could drift
even further from the most
scientific canvass, which was
the original Nov. 7 tally.
"The (Florida) Supreme Court
has created an impossible
problem here," Beck said.
What's more, some ballots would
be mangled, or "eaten," by the
machines, leaving it up to
local officials to "recreate"
ballots. Several had to be
recreated in Palm Beach County,
for example.
Paper ballots also get chewed
up. A whopping 188 ballots had
to be "reconstructed" in
Gadsden County, for instance.
'Through the ringer'
In addition, Lisaius fears that
the chain of custody over the
evidence has been broken so
many times -- with ballots
having been repeatedly pulled
from locked boxes, handled by
workers and volunteers, run
through machines and locked
back up (not to mention trucked
across the state, in the case
of Miami-Dade and Palm Beach
counties' ballots) -- that even
voters might have a hard time
recognizing their intent at
this point.
"These ballots have been
through the ringer," he said.
"You saw what happened in
Broward County. They found chad
on the floor and on the tables.
They came from somewhere. They
didn't magically appear. They
came out of those ballots."
"So there's some real questions
about the integrity of those
ballots," Lisaius said.
Besides, he adds, voters'
purpose in skipping the White
House race was more than likely
to protest the slate of
presidential candidates.
"They're not votes," he said.
"Florida is in the middle of
the national average of about 2
percent of people choosing not
to vote in the national
election."
In fact, WorldNetDaily has
learned that many of the 41
counties with optic-scanned
paper ballots alerted voters
when they skipped the top race
and offered them a second
chance to vote. Yet they still
chose not to vote.
Take Alachua County, for
example.
Elections office spokeswoman
Roxanne Watkins says machines
there were programmed to reject
undervotes as voters fed in
their ballots. Voters were
alerted that they failed to
vote in the top race and were
given the option to vote again.
Most of them declined. Of the
county's 225 undervotes, most
were blanks (the others had
bubbles that were filled in
wrong).
Brevard County reported 277
blank votes for president --
even though the county programs
its scanners to spit back
ballots with races left blank.
Voters, who fed in their own
ballots, were alerted to the
possible oversight with a
digital message. They ignored
it, and the precinct workers
overrode the machine to accept
their ballots and count their
votes in down-ballot races.
Hanging dimples?
Beck argues that, if dimples
are allowed as legal votes, a
hand recount can't stop at
undervotes.
All 6 million ballots cast in
the state would have to be
looked at, he argues, for a
thorough and fair review of the
results.
Why? Beck points out that some
ballots that have been clearly
punched or marked for Gore, for
instance, may also have a
dimple or mark next to Bush.
Those Gore ballots should then
-- if dimples are the standard
for legal votes -- be
reclassified as overvotes and
tossed out, he says.
Maybe this is what those four
Florida Supreme Court justices
who ordered the hand recount
meant by "practical
difficulties" in their majority
opinion |
