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In Pinellas' recount, ballots that had been overlooked favor Gore, and ballots that had been counted twice hurt Bush.
By EDIE GROSS
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 10, 2000
Vice President Al Gore's lead over Texas Gov. George W. Bush widened by 478 votes in Pinellas County on Thursday, the second-largest change of any county in Florida's dramatic recount of presidential votes.
"What happened was there were several times election night when a card-reader operator did not follow proper procedure," said Pinellas Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark. "Someone made a serious error, several serious errors."
One election worker overlooked at least 1,125 absentee ballots during the first count, Clark said, and another election worker apparently counted some ballots twice.
The change caught the attention of the Bush camp, which sent Pinellas elections officials a letter questioning the new totals.
The discrepancies in vote totals were reported all over Florida on Thursday as elections officials scrambled to turn in accurate recounts to the secretary of state's office by the 5 p.m. deadline.
The biggest change occurred in Palm Beach County, where Gore gained 751 votes and Bush picked up 108.
In Pinellas County, Clark traced the problems to five batches of absentee ballots. There were 40 types of absentee ballots in all, each different depending on which elections the voter was allowed to participate in.
One of those absentee ballots covered voters in the Democrat-heavy southern part of the county. While there were 1,555 ballots in that batch, only 430 were put through the ballot-reading machine on election night, Clark said.
She suspects that election worker might have been distracted, thereby forgetting to read 1,125 of the ballots. Reading them the next day generated quite a few votes for Gore, Clark said.
The opposite problem occurred with a second type of absentee ballot that covered mostly north county residents, who generally are more Republican.
In that case, another worker counted 1,782 ballots when only 1,398 existed. Thus, 384 were counted twice.
Bush lost some votes when those twice-counted ballots were removed during the recount.
Republicans, who traveled from Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, on Thursday to watch the second recount in Pinellas, were not happy with Clark's explanation.
Today, several plan to compare a list of voters who requested absentee ballots to the stack of ballot envelopes received. They want to make sure that no ballots were submitted for people who did not request them.
Benjamin Ginsberg, the legal counsel for the Bush-Cheney national campaign, faxed a letter Thursday evening to Clark, noting his objections.
"On behalf of Bush-Cheney 2000, this is to advise you that we strongly object to the conclusion reached in Pinellas County after the re-canvass of votes held on November 8 and 9, 2000," the letter begins. "Prior to the certification of these results, Bush-Cheney 2000 urges the (county) to provide a satisfactory explanation for this huge disparity, one of the largest in Florida. Justice and equity demand that these results be re-examined, corrected and carefully explained."
Even if the state had not ordered a recount in the presidential race, the supervisor's office would have discovered the mistakes, Clark said. Each morning after an election, workers reconcile the number of ballots counted at headquarters with the number submitted at each polling place and those sent in by absentee voters.
Clark declined to say what would happen to the workers who made the mistakes. None are full-time employees of the elections supervisor's office, although all have worked during previous elections.
Clark, who has worked for the elections office for 23 years, was appointed supervisor in May after longtime supervisor Dorothy "Dot" Ruggles died of breast cancer. The two were close friends. Clark was elected to the post Sept. 5.