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No recount, but Reno presses on
By THOMAS C. TOBIN, LUCY MORGAN and WES ALLISON
She trails McBride by more than 8,000 votes and has until 5 p.m. Tuesday, the state's deadline for certifying the official results, to catch up. "If Reno makes it up by next week, she wins," Secretary of State Jim Smith said. "If she doesn't make it up, she doesn't win." The Democrats' predicament crystalized on Friday, another chaotic day in Florida electoral politics. Reno asked for a statewide manual recount of Tuesday's primary votes and was told it is too late for recounts. McBride, who has declared victory based on the unofficial results, lost steam because of uncertainty in Miami. Smith, the state's top election official, said there was every reason to remove the Miami-Dade and Broward elections supervisors because of the vote-counting mess, but wouldn't advise it just now. And in Miami, at Reno's request, a sight Floridians hoped they would never see again after the 2000 presidential election: a frantic search for uncounted votes. "Right now we're moving through a little bit of rough water, but it's smooth sailing up ahead," said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe, downplaying the post-election spectacle that has slowed his party's plans to "slingshot" out of the primary with momentum against Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. Poe predicted it would all be over soon. "That's not a candidate that has rancor, who's going to fight this tooth and nail," he said of Reno. "This is not Bush-Gore." Indeed, it is not a recount like Florida had in 2000, with punch cards and chads. It is more a re-accounting, with "activators" and touch screens. In every election, county officials file all their returns with the state, take another look at their numbers, then file official returns a few days later. Tuesday is the deadline for official returns from this week's primary, and that is where Florida's latest political drama is expected to end. Miami-Dade officials will work through the weekend to locate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of votes that were never harvested from touch screen machines and sent to election headquarters for counting. A large percentage of those uncounted votes were expected to be for Reno. In neighboring Broward County, which also went heavily for Reno, officials were auditing results from one precinct that showed 0 percent turnout among more than 800 registered voters. Reno asked officials in Broward to review as many as 200 precincts. She said she would concede only after the review process in both counties has run its course. "I'm going to be prepared to concede when I've done everything I can to get the votes counted," Reno said Friday on CNN. "My whole purpose is to get the votes counted and to let the votes speak, not Janet Reno speak, but let the votes speak. That's what the democratic process is all about." Reno has said she doesn't want to challenge the election results in court, which is an option under state law after the results are certified. Her campaign attorney, Alan Greer, confirmed that, saying, "She does not want to freeze the Democratic Party." Gone is Reno's chance for a statewide machine recount, which is automatic under state law when the runner-up is less than one-half of 1 percent away from the winner. The deadline came and went when the unofficial returns left Reno more than 1,000 votes short of meeting that requirement. "There will be no more recounting," Smith said Friday as the state's Canvassing Commission rejected a last-minute Reno appeal for a statewide manual recount. Her last hope, then, rests with the re-accounting in Miami, which started Thursday when county officials -- with prodding from Reno's campaign -- discovered that hundreds of votes were never harvested. Reno's camp discovered 80 precincts with results that didn't make sense, and Supervisor of Elections David Leahy quickly agreed. Precincts with 1,000, 1,200 and 1,400 voters showed zero votes being cast. Other precincts showed improbably high turnouts, including one where totals had 99 of 100 registered voters turning out on Tuesday. Many precincts recorded a number of votes cast in the governor's race, but the number did not match the total votes for all three candidates. With just such a catastrophe in mind, every touch screen voting machine is designed to retain a record of how each person voted. Over the weekend, officials will retrieve the machines used in each of the precincts in question. They will insert an activator that is designed to lift results out of each machine. Those results will be tabulated and added to the county's totals. They will do this for the 80 precincts cited by Reno, plus several others. They also will look for problems in other precincts. They will not, however, examine all 7,200 touch screen machines used in Miami-Dade, said First Assistant County Attorney Murray Greenberg. "There's not enough time." Somehow -- most likely because of poll worker error -- thousands of votes were never recorded in the activators on Election Day. Officials believe that poll workers, some with the state minimum of three or four hours training, improperly operated the activators. Other touch screen counties had as much as 12 hours of poll worker training. "I think the days of the virtually volunteer poll worker are gone," said Greenberg, adding that Miami-Dade probably would supplement its poll worker corps with county employees in November. With the new touch screen system, he said, "you need techies at every polling place." Using Miami-Dade's voter turnout of 32.7 percent, an Associated Press analysis concluded that as many as 8,000 votes were still uncounted in the 80 precincts cited by Reno. There was no way to know how many additional votes would be found in the other precincts to be examined, or in Broward County. With seven weeks left before the general election, the continued uncertainty slowed McBride's plans for a fast start against Bush. Democrats canceled a "unity tour" and the McBride campaign canceled a meeting with fundraisers, both planned for today. He will appear with teachers at a union conference in Orlando today. McBride walks a precarious line, wanting to generate voter excitement but not antagonize Democratic Reno supporters crucial to his general election campaign. On CNN's Inside Edition Friday, he tried to talk about November's election but kept getting questions about September's. "If anyone was not allowed to vote or a person's votes were not counted, that's a terrible thing," McBride said. "We do not need a rerun of the 2000 election. It was the governor's responsibility, I believe, to get all this fixed. ... I think a lot of the difficulties on the ground were the fact that the governor didn't do that, so for all those people who feel that their votes were not counted, we need to get them counted." Also Friday, Smith, the secretary of state, told Bush in a letter that the election was a "significant success story" overall, with 65 Florida counties getting it right. He said Leahy, the Miami-Dade elections supervisor, and Miriam Oliphant in Broward, were guilty of misfeasance for not properly overseeing the election in their counties. He said there was reason to have them removed from office, but advised against it, saying it would disrupt the Nov. 5 election.
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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