Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
In many counties, the recount just gets started when the order comes to stop.
By STEPHEN NOHLGREN and CRAIG PITTMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 10, 2000
Until the country's highest court slammed on the brakes Saturday afternoon, election officials all over Florida raced to handcount any votes that their machines might have missed on election night.
They wrestled with recount standards, peered at hanging chad and tried to figure out what the voters intended.
Counties that started their counts found remarkably few new votes. Instead, they decided that thousands of disputed ballots favored neither candidate.
Then, with only a handful of new votes logged in, Florida's election officials locked up the remaining ballots and returned to their golf games and parties.
It was "like starting a marathon race and somebody stops the race just when you're getting in stride," said County Commissioner Bob Stewart, a member of the Pinellas canvassing board. "We were just figuring out how to count the damn things."
Under a state Supreme Court order issued Friday, elections officials were supposed to examine about 40,000 ballots. The deadline was 2 p.m. today. When the count stopped about 3 p.m. Saturday, only 4,000 or so had undergone review. Few results were announced.
An unofficial tally from the Associated Press and St. Petersburg Times reporters showed that Vice President Al Gore had winnowed roughly 15 votes off Texas Gov. George W. Bush's Friday lead of 154.
The campaigns offered their own assessments. Ron Klain, Gore's senior campaign attorney, estimated that the vice president gained 58 net votes from 13 counties.
By far, the most votes counted Saturday were those from Miami-Dade. That county's recount took place in Tallahassee's main public library, where a team of judges had waded through about 3,600 of the 9,000 ballots before the court ordered a halt. No official tally was announced, but Barry Jackson, a Republican observer in the counting room, told reporters he saw 92 new votes for Bush and 50 for Gore.
Manatee, Madison, Escambia and Liberty counties finished, but many counties, like Pinellas, had barely started. Some big counties, like Hillsborough and Duval, had not even begun to count before the order to stop arrived.
Hernando Supervisor of Elections Ann Mau first got word in a call from Republican state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite, who was watching CNN. But that wasn't official enough.
"We all know what happened with CNN on election night," Mau remarked. "We have to wait until we get a court order."
About 20 minutes later, an official fax arrived and Mau climbed on a metal folding chair.
"We have an order that says to stop what we're doing," she shouted to the roomful of election workers. "Stop. Don't count. We're not going to count until we get some other order of some kind."
The statewide recount was set into motion late Friday, when a divided Florida Supreme Court not only granted Gore's request for hand counts in selected Democratic strongholds, but also extended that order to every county.
As Bush's lawyers threw together overnight legal appeals, local officials grappled with the daunting logistics of carrying out the court's wishes and, perhaps, deciding the presidency.
Just finding which ballots to count was a considerable obstacle.
During contentious recounts last month in Volusia, Broward and Palm Beach counties, canvassing boards took days to quibble their way through every last ballot. The Florida Supreme Court, facing a critical Tuesday deadline in the electoral countdown, ordered an abbreviated recount of only the so-called "undervotes," ballots that contained no discernible vote for president when counted by punch card machines or optical scanners.
Many undervotes were caused by "chad," leftover pieces of paper that dangled from ballots when voters didn't quite punch all the way through on election night. To find these undervotes Saturday, election officials had to run the ballots back though the counting machines, knocking off some of the chad in the process.
A ballot that counted as an undervote on election night suddenly looked like a counted ballot to the machine.
Noting that Pasco had 1,776 undervotes on Nov. 8, Pasco elections supervisor Kurt Browning assessed the odds of coming up with that same number during Saturday's recount:
"I have a better chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery," he said.
Sure enough, the machines identified only 1,710 undervotes Saturday, meaning 66 ballots were damaged by the machines. "It's chad's fault," Browning quipped.
The Pasco canvassing board had time to count only 110 ballots. Five went to Bush, two to Gore and the rest remained a no-decision.
In Duval County officials didn't even get started. Roughly 5,000 undervotes were registered on election night, but officials waited all day Saturday to install computer hardware and software flown in from Miami that would identify the ballots to be recounted.
"Without the software we can't start," said Duval canvasser Rick Mullaney.
Another issue was how to count the undervotes once they were identified.
In earlier recounts, Palm Beach and Broward canvassing boards had counted so-called "dimpled chads" and "pregnant chads," indications that a voter tried to punch a hole but only succeeded in making an indentation.
Other counters argued that only ballots with some kind of puncture hole should count.
The Florida Supreme Court gave no concrete guidance, only ordering canvassers to count ballots where there is "a clear indication of the intent of the voter."
Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis, ordered by the court to implement its ruling, used similar language, telling local boards to write their own standards and fax them to his court in Tallahassee by noon.
But as the deadline loomed, Pasco election officials discovered the Tallahassee fax line was busy. They had to keep trying to get through.
Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio called other counties to encourage consistency, promoting her strict standard: Count votes if two or more corners of a hole are punched out. If one corner is punched, decide on a case-by-case basis. Count no dimples except in extreme circumstances.
Pasco agreed to her formula. Pinellas and other counties followed their own method. Pinellas, which had time to examine only 224 ballots, found three new ones that deserved to be counted. All were dimpled, two for Bush, one for Gore.
In Citrus, where voters are supposed to color in ovals on a paper ballot that is later read by a scanner, election officials followed a more informal guideline: "If it's blank, nothing voted. Pretty clear?"
Still, sorting the Citrus ballots remained laborious. Six workers slowly looked over more than 3,000 ballots from one precinct, hunting for eight undervotes. Their first review yielded only six. The workers were hunting through the stack of ballots a second time when the court order stopped them.
Despite the confusion and frustration, Saturday's recount remained remarkably civil. Any repeat of the yelling and door-pounding that punctuated the South Florida recounts was squelched by an order from Judge Lewis that political partisans could observe and lodge objections in writing, but had to keep their mouths shut.
"It's like walking into the room where somebody's taking final exams," Leon County Clerk of Courts Dave Lang said. "It's a very calm but deliberative atmosphere."
As the news about the U.S. Supreme Court order rippled out, though, the party operatives observing the process could keep still no more.
In Tampa, Republican volunteer Bill Bunkley didn't like it one bit that elections staff continued to draw precinct tallies of undervote ballots, even though they were just looking for a raw total number and not counting who the votes were for.
"Stop! Stop! Stop all counting!" he yelled. "S-T-O-P!"
- Staff writers Ryan Davis, Scott Barancik, Jim Ross, Adam C. Smith, Kathryn Wexler, Edie Gross, Linda Gibson, Josh Zimmer and Thomas C. Tobin contributed to this story, which also contains information from Times wires.