-Caveat Lector-
N. Florida county tries to fill in blanks on ballots
By Mary Ellen Klas,
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Friday, November 10, 2000
QUINCY -- In a small side-street office of this rural North
Florida town, four county officials -- all of them Democrats --
spent seven hours Wednesday examining every pencil mark on 2,073
ballots that had been rejected by Gadsden County's ballot
scanning machine to try to reconstruct what the voters meant.
The machine was calibrated to reject any ballot that had anything
from a stray mark to an extra vote for a candidate.
But rather than reject these ballots outright -- as they did in
Palm Beach County and many other counties that use punch ballots
-- the practice of the Gadsden County canvassing board is to look
at each questionable ballot to try to determine the intent of
each voter.
Some voters colored in the circle for one candidate, crossed it
out and then filled in a circle for another. Others filled in
the circle for a candidate, then wrote the name of the same
candidate in the write-in space, as if for emphasis.
'`The only ones we reconstructed were the ones we could tell the
intent of the voter," explained Sterling Watson, a county
commissioner and member of the canvassing board.
Watson, two other county commissioners and a county judge were
the people trying to read the minds of their fellow voters.
This county, the most Democratic in the state, cast 16,812 votes
in the presidential race, 66 percent of them for Vice President
Al Gore.
When campaign officials for both Gore and his Republican
opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, learned of the uncounted
ballots, they dispatched election law lawyers to the tiny town.
When the Gadsden officials began at 3 p.m, they suspected the
results of their efforts had the potential to change the outcome
of the presidential race.
When they ended their recount at 10 p.m., they found only 170
additional votes for Gore, 17 additional votes for Bush and the
threat of a lawsuit from the Florida Republican Party.
"They're not simply recounting the votes they counted (election)
night, they're adding ballots by taking into consideration
ballots that were not considered," said Ken Sukhia, a Tallahassee
attorney representing the Republican Party.
County officials justified their actions, saying they simply
forgot to review the ballots before they certified them to the
secretary of state on election night.
"It was not done. It should have been done," said Watson.
"This is Gadsden County, we get a lot of concerns about the
ballot box. We wanted to do it to make sure we had the most
accurate count."
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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