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By ADAM C. SMITH
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 10, 2000
JACKSONVILLE -- Could a recount in a county where George W. Bush took 57 percent of the vote actually net more votes for Al Gore?
Until the U.S. Supreme Court put a sudden stop to Florida's ballot recounts Saturday afternoon, Duval County stood to be a huge wild card.
A four-person, all-Republican canvassing board was poised to start examining by hand nearly 5,000 punch-card ballots where no presidential vote had been picked up in a machine count. Only two other counties, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, had more ballots to count, and Democrats were optimistic about this GOP stronghold.
"I was predicting (Gore) would probably come away with about 500 net votes," said U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, after the federal court halted Duval's recounts just as they were about to begin. "They're trying to crown King George, but you cannot feel good about the election unless you have a full count."
Reynold Hoover, a Jacksonville lawyer for the Bush campaign, while applauding the ruling, dismissed the notion that Gore stands to gain ground in a hand count of the northeast Florida county.
"This county is majority Republican," he said.
Duval held one of Florida's most troubled elections in which nearly 27,000 presidential ballots were rejected because voters either voted for more than one candidate or for none, according to the machine count. As many as 16,000 of those rejected ballots came from predominantly black neighborhoods that overwhelmingly backed Gore, and the county has faced strong criticism from civil rights leaders over its election.
But it's uncertain whether the ballots that were to have been counted this weekend -- those where the counting machine saw no presidential vote -- would have really favored Gore.
Duval used an unusual ballot where presidential candidates were listed on two pages, and thousands of voters mistakenly punched candidates on both pages. Nearly 22,000 over-voted ballots were rejected and 42 percent of those came from predominantly African-American city council precincts that handily backed Gore.
But those "overvotes" weren't the ones to be recounted. It was the "undervotes," in which the machine didn't detect a hole marked for a presidential candidate. Of the 4,967 undervoted ballots that the Florida Supreme Court wanted counted, only about 28 percent came from predominantly black districts, about the same percentage of the Duval population made up of black residents.
A New York Times analysis of Duval's undervotes concluded that Bush would likely pick up a few dozen votes from the recount.
Duval elections officials spent Friday night and much of Saturday morning awaiting special software from South Florida to enable them to segregate the undervotes from the rest of the ballot.
They were preparing to start that job, expected to take five to eight hours, when the ruling came in.
"We're stopping right now to see if we should keep on stopping," said canvassing board chairman Brent Shore, Duval's chief administrative judge.
After reviewing the Supreme Court order, the board promptly rejected a Democratic suggestion that they go ahead and finish separating the undervote ballots, to save time if the hand count is to resume next week.
"I believe stay means stay, and I think we have to await further orders," said Rick Mullaney, Jacksonville general counsel and a member of the canvassing board.
Democrats contend that the all-GOP Duval board wants more than anything else to avoid a count that might help Gore, though county officials insist they merely want to follow the law.
If the recount does resume, Duval will face a huge amount of work in little time. Aside from separating the votes, canvassing board members have yet to agree on a standard for what they will count as votes. On standby are eight to 10 two-person teams.
Amid the countless questions still to be resolved, elections officials in Duval agree on one thing: "Next time, we're not using this punch-card system," Mullaney said.