Recount confirms Bogdanoff's victory in House race

By Jeremy Milarsky
Staff Writer

January 9, 2004

Surrounded by a small army of lawyers and players in Broward County's Republican Party, Ellyn Bogdanoff on Thursday learned what she'd suspected all week: She won Tuesday's election for Florida House District 91 by a mere dozen votes.

A state-mandated recount on Thursday, supervised by canvassing boards in Broward and Palm Beach counties, changed the total vote count for only two candidates, and neither was a frontrunner. By the end of the day, records showed that Bogdanoff, a political consultant from Fort Lauderdale, had defeated Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Mayor Oliver Parker, by a 12-vote margin.

But the scene at elections offices in both counties was reminiscent of the 2000 presidential race.

At issue were 139 ballots cast in Broward County in which voters either chose more than one candidate or no candidate at all. An additional 83 absentee ballots in Broward and one in Palm Beach County were rejected for legal reasons in most cases, because the voter did not sign the ballot.

"It boiled down to a very close election," said Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes.

Florida law required Thursday's recount because the votes that propelled Bogdanoff to victory accounted for less than half of 1 percent of the total votes cast. As soon as today, election officials plan another recount in which five paper ballots, all cast by mail and too few to change the winner, will be recounted by hand. Only after the hand recount is finished can the vote be certified.

In Broward, Thursday's recount changed the vote total for only two candidates. Bruce McNeilage, who finished fourth, won an extra vote because officials found two absentee ballots stuck together in a box. Julie Morrall, who finished fifth, lost a vote when officials discovered one ballot was actually an overvote, in which the voter ed more than one candidate, and a tabulation machine misread it.

In Palm Beach County, voters cast only three undervotes, those in which the voter s no candidate, and none of them were absentee ballots. Snipes and Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore need permission from the state government to proceed with the hand recount.

In Broward, the five votes in question are two undervotes and three overvotes. The remaining 134 invalid ballots cannot be manually recounted because they were cast electronically on computerized voting machines and there is no written record of those votes.

The lack of a "paper receipt" in Broward's voting machines has been a hot topic for the County Commission, which voted to buy the electronic voting machines in 2001. Palm Beach County also does not have receipts.

Parker on Thursday said Broward's machines may be illegal because they do not leave a paper trail to double-check results. He claimed that state law requires a manual recount of all the votes declared invalid in an election in which the winning margin accounts for less than one-quarter of the vote total, as it does in this case.

When told that machine votes from Broward could not be recounted by hand, Parker said, "That tells me they picked a voting machine that doesn't follow the [law]."

County Attorney Ed Dion dismissed that argument, saying Florida's administrative code says only paper ballots can be counted by hand.

"The way the state has set this up is for only the ballots that you can physically review [by hand]," he said.

Parker also questioned why more than 130 people would show up at the polls and not vote.

"People don't go to a one-issue election and not make a choice," he said.

Carlos Reyes, a lawyer with Bogdanoff, said Parker should concede.

"I'm hoping common sense prevails and that he realizes every race has a winner and a loser," Reyes said.

Far fewer attorneys and political observers showed up in Palm Beach County.

LePore, who worked through the hotly contested 2000 presidential race, said, "It was like déjà vu."

Palm Beach County officials expect one last review today.

District 91 generally runs along the coast of Florida, from southeast Boca Raton to Dania Beach, east of Interstate 95.

Tuesday's election was called because former state Rep. Connie Mack IV resigned last year to run for Congress.

Staff Writers Kathy Bushouse and Buddy Nevins contributed to this report.



Jeremy Milarsky can be reached at jmilarsky@sun-sentinel.com or 954-572-2020.