Board votes to certify House 91 results

By George Bennett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004

In Florida's post-Votomatic era of election recounts, there is no squinting at punch cards to try to divine the meaning of dimpled chads.

But the alternative, on display for the first time Friday, presented a new set of questions.

Required by state law to conduct a "manual recount" of an election in which most of the voting was done on paperless electronic voting machines, Broward County's elections canvassing board threw up its hands. After debating about 90 minutes Friday afternoon, it decided to seek more guidance from the state Division of Elections and revisit the issue Monday.

Palm Beach County's elections canvassing board grappled with the issue for half an hour Friday night, then voted to certify its portion of the election results after determining there were no actual "ballots" to recount.

The counties were responding to Tuesday's tight special election for a state House seat that covers portions of Broward and Palm Beach counties. Out of 10,844 votes cast, returns showed Ellyn Bogdanoff defeating Oliver Parker by 12 votes, with 137 voters casting blank ballots on touch-screen voting machines.

Florida law requires a manual or hand recount of all "under-votes" and "over-votes" in an election decided by less than 0.25 percent.

But touch-screens leave behind nothing to count by hand.

"The nonvotes exist in cyberspace," Parker complained to the Palm Beach County canvassing board. "We have no way to bring them from cyberspace to real space to look at them."

Therefore, Parker argued, the election results could not be certified.

Palm Beach County Attorney Denise Nieman said the canvassing board faced a "quandary" but advised it to certify the results.

She noted that the state's recount statute contemplates examining "ballots" and determining whether a voter made a clear choice on each ballot.

"You have to have a ballot to make a clear choice... There's no ballot," Nieman said.

Therefore, she said, the canvassing board can't determine a "clear choice" for any of the under-votes and must let the results stand.

The canvassing board County Judge Barry Cohen, Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore and County Commission Chairwoman Karen Marcus voted unanimously to certify Palm Beach County's results, which account for about 5 percent of the votes in Tuesday's election.

The certification came at the end of a meeting that officially began about 10 hours earlier. The Palm Beach County canvassing board had just convened Friday morning when the meeting was interrupted by a phone call from the state Division of Elections. Canvassers were advised to hold off on their recount until the division could establish guidelines on how to conduct a manual recount for a paperless election. The meeting recessed until Friday night.

LePore assumed the state would send written guidance to the canvassing board during the day. Instead, LePore said, she spent "several hours" on the phone with Division of Elections Deputy Director Sarah Jane Bradshaw and General Counsel Sharon Larson, but the division would not put anything in writing.

"I have a concern they would not put that in writing... I have a problem with that," LePore told the canvassing board.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, whose office oversees Florida elections, acknowledged that the county canvassing boards are venturing into uncharted territory.

"I believe that this is the first time the manual recount issue has come up with the touch screens," said Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, sent Hood a letter Friday arguing that electronic voting machines should be outfitted with printers so voters could verify their ballots before they vote and elections officials would have a paper record for any recount.

"These results are the latest wake-up call to the very real possibility of another national election debacle in Florida if we do not put in place ballot printers for touch-screen machines," Wexler's letter says.

Hood had not seen the letter Friday and could not comment, Nash said.

Parker doesn't believe 137 voters showed up for a single-race election and decided not to vote. Frustrated that touch screens make it impossible to examine under-votes to try to figure out voter intent, he sounded nostalgic for the punch cards that fell from favor after the 2000 election.

"What we've really done is gone backward," Parker said. "At least with the old punch-card system, we would have had actual votes to count."

george_bennett@pbpost.com