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©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 27, 2000
FERNANDINA BEACH -- It appears that one of two strange things happened here in Nassau County. Maybe 218 votes were skipped in one count, though no one involved can offer any evidence. Or maybe 218 phantom voters were created in another count, but there is no evidence of that, either.
In the long list of oddities that have marred the presidential balloting in Florida, tiny Nassau County, in the far northeastern corner of the state, has come up with a unique one. And the way county officials chose to resolve the issue, producing a net gain of 51 votes for Gov. George W. Bush, has led to charges of secretive, partisan manipulation of the totals and another in the procession of lawsuits over this election.
Because the election-night tally of Florida's nearly 6 million votes was so close, state law mandated that county officials run the ballots through their counting machines again a few days later. That state count showed 4,000 more votes than the first one. Election officials say such an increase is standard fare, mostly because partially detached pieces of chad on punch-card ballots fall off the second time through, allowing the machines to see votes they had previously missed.
But in Nassau County, which Bush carried by more than 2-to-1, the second tabulation of more than 23,000 votes produced 218 fewer than the first count, narrowing the governor's lead over the vice president by 51 votes. Like their counterparts in every county, members of Nassau's canvassing board certified the recount figures and submitted them to the state.
On Friday, however, the canvassing board voted to rescind that certification, and certified the election-night count, adding 51 votes to Bush's lead at a time when recounts in two other counties -- Broward and Palm Beach -- were shrinking his lead statewide. Secretary of State Katherine Harris' office accepted that decision.
Democrats cried foul, calling the reversal illegal. Sunday, David Boies, a lawyer for the Gore campaign, referred to "the inexplicable actions in Nassau County," when he said the vice president would oppose the county's reversal in a planned lawsuit contesting the election results. Sunday marked the deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court for submission of manual recounts by Palm Beach and Broward, and Bush clinged to a lead of a few hundred votes.
Boies said the vice president might also contest the results in Seminole County, where county officials allowed Republican Party workers to correct thousands of flawed absentee ballot applications sent in by Republican voters, a move that Democrats have called illegal. Some local Democrats have already sued to void those votes, an action that, if successful, could tip the state to Gore.
In Nassau County, both sides acknowledge that, normally, no one would sweat such a small discrepancy. But in a contest this close, with each candidate needing Florida's electoral votes to win the presidency, no figure is too small to fight over.
Shirley N. King, the county supervisor of elections for 20 years, said that in reverting to the original count, she wanted to ensure that people were not disenfranchised. Democrats protest that the decision was made with little public notice, the day after Thanksgiving and with many Democrats out of town, including a canvassing board member who, in his absence, was replaced by a Republican.
King -- who, in her career, has switched from Democrat to Republican and back -- has a theory about what happened, but admits she cannot prove it without another recount. As a member of the three-person canvassing board, she voted to approve the election-night count that favors Bush, but looking at the two sets of numbers, she conceded Sunday, "I couldn't swear to either one of them."
Nassau's vote total changed about 1 percent from one count to the next, compared to an average for all counties of 0.07 percent. Only one county, Gadsden, had a larger percentage change.
In Nassau, each voter filled out three punch cards, an unusual feature that might have added to the confusion. King said that in doing the recount, she decided that to save time her clerks would separate the red cards bearing the presidential votes from the others, and run only the red ones through the counting machines.
"I think we goofed and we did not pull all of the red cards," she said. When asked why she believes that, she said, "I just think that's what it's got to be."
But some Democrats say it is just as likely that some ballots were accidentally counted twice the first time, or that the machines miscounted. "It could have been anything," said Linda Spencer, co-chairwoman of the county Democratic Party.
King repeatedly called for a manual recount as the only way to resolve the discrepancy, but the board could not order one without a request from one of the campaigns or one of the parties, and no such request was made. Bush opposed Gore's bid for manual recounts in southern Florida, and Republican officials in Nassau County said the governor's case would have been undermined by asking for one elsewhere.
Last week, King called a new meeting of the canvassing board, for the day after Thanksgiving. David Howard, the Democratic county commissioner who sits on the board, was out of town for the holiday, and the commission replaced him with a Republican commissioner, Marianne Marshal, who could not be reached for comment Sunday. Spencer also was traveling. Both said they had no inkling before leaving town that a meeting would be held.