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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (1537)	12/19/2000 10:25:18 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

From today's NYT, lest we forget about those Florida votes: December 19, 2000 Single-Page Format INSPECTING THE VOTES Florida Ballots Are Getting New Scrutiny, by the Media By DEXTER FILKINS ORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In a small downtown warehouse occasionally filled with the rumbling sounds of passing trains, the tabulating of presidential ballots has started all over again. It is not the politicians this time, but the news media. The representatives of several of the country's largest news organizations gathered in Broward County's election storage room today in what could become a large-scale effort to examine tens of thousands of ballots across Florida that were not included in the final tallies for 2000 presidential election. While at least one news organization said it wanted to count the ballots and see which candidate would have won, other news organizations said they had no intention of going that far. The goal for some here is to provide detailed descriptions of the untallied ballots for their readers and viewers and let them decide how to add them up. With 67 Florida counties and tens of thousands of uncounted ballots, the process that began here today may take several weeks. "What we want to do is show the general public what is on these ballots," said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Miami Herald, a newspaper represented here today. "I don't think we are going to count ballots as such, but we will record, document and tabulate them. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what qualifies as a vote." The reporters and editors who inspected ballots today included representatives of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. They started in the warehouse here because Broward County election officials became the first in the state to open some 6,600 ballots for public examination. The ballots, stored in metal boxes stacked in the county warehouse, included only those that did not register a choice for president, those known as the undervotes. The undervotes were at the core of the post-election struggle between President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. Representatives for Mr. Gore argued that vote- counting machines around the state ignored votes legitimately cast for each candidate, while spokesmen for Mr. Bush argued that standards for counting such ballots were too varied and too subjective for accuracy. Mr. Gore believed that the uncounted ballots might have cost him Florida's 25 electoral votes and hence the election. Canvassing boards in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and other Florida counties hand-counted all or some of the undervotes, but the United States Supreme Court stopped a statewide hand count of undervotes, saying among other things that the standards used to count them differed too much from county to county. Election officials have estimated that there are some 45,000 undervotes in Florida. Some of the organizations here, including The New York Times, said that they were also considering examining thousands of ballots on which more than one candidate's name was detected by the counting machines. These ballots are known as overvotes, and campaign officials have estimated that there are as many as 110,000 such ballots across the state. Some news organizations that sent representatives to the Broward County meeting today said they were still trying to determine whether it was feasible to examine and make sense of all of Florida's untallied ballots. Many news organizations have already asked election officials in Florida to make their untallied ballots available, and in some cases, they have filed lawsuits to force counties to make them available.