Recount rules clarified

A month after a close Broward election using touch-screen equipment, Florida election officials have clarified electronic recount rules.

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD ebolstad@herald.com

ELECTIONS

The narrow margin in last month's race for a Broward-based state House seat has led to new guidelines for handling recounts on touch-screen election equipment.

The Division of Elections ruling, released Friday, prohibits elections officials from printing paper records from electronic voting machines.

The new guidelines apply to the 15 Florida counties using touch-screen equipment, including Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.

Votes cast on touch-screen machines in a close election will still be recounted by running the electronic votes again to verify the count.

But the state's ruling acknowledges that there's no way to account for an electronic undervote when a voter simply does not make a choice in a given race. It's impossible to tell what a voter intended because a printout of the so-called ''no vote'' would simply show a zero.

NO `OVERVOTES'

And because the equipment won't allow more than one choice on any candidate or question, there are no electronic ``overvotes.''

The overvote and undervote guidelines in state law apply only to optical-scan ballots, which are used in 52 of Florida's 67 counties. Absentee and provisional votes are cast on optical-scan ballots in all Florida counties.

''It clarifies that right now, we can only manually recount ballots we run through our optical-scan machines,'' Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said. ``All we can do is review the absentee and provisional ballots.''

The new rules were generated after Snipes raised questions about recount procedures following the Jan. 6 state House District 91 election. In that race, Ellyn Bogdanoff defeated Oliver Parker by 12 votes, which prompted the manual recount.

CONTRADICTIONS

But the issue was complicated by 134 voters who cast no vote on the machines, which elections officials found unusual in the special single-issue election in January.

Snipes and the canvassing board felt they received contradictory instructions about handling the manual recount, when state officials told them to print the ballot image of the 134 undervotes and count them.

But Broward officials objected, saying the printed record would show nothing but zeros and that there were no guidelines for it in state law. It's not like looking at punch-card ballots, said Broward County Attorney Ed Dion, who also serves as attorney for the county's canvassing board.

With those and with optical-scan ballots canvassing boards sometimes can tell that voters intended to punch through the card or make a pencil mark on the optical scan ballot. But not with electronic machines.

''Our biggest concern was because we didn't have any rules, we were going to fall back to where we were in 2000,'' Dion said.

The elections division ruling agreed with Broward's original assertion not to count the electronic undervotes.

The strongly worded state rule actually says elections officials have no authority to print paper records of votes from touch-screen machines during a manual recount.

It's unclear whether the stern language of the rule is an effort by state officials to quiet some of the debate over what are known as ``voter-verifiable paper receipts.''

County commissioners in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach have called for adding printers to their touch-screen equipment so voters can see a printed copy of their electronic ballot.

Wednesday, a Palm Beach County judge threw out a lawsuit by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler asking the state to order a paper record of electronic ballots.