Rule on recount calls for printout

By Dara Kam

Special to The Palm Beach Post

Saturday, October 16, 2004

TALLAHASSEE — Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a long-awaited rule Friday evening on how to perform a manual recount on touch-screen voting machines.

In Florida's partisan-charged election battleground, it sparked immediate controversy.
 

Hood's rule instructs elections supervisors to print out images of undervoted ballots, essentially the same images voters see on ATM-style machines. That falls far short of what U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, wants a federal judge to decide next week — that voters be given a hard copy of their ballot so they can be sure the machine counted it correctly.

"This is a huge exercise in futility," Wexler's chief of staff, Eric Johnson, said Friday.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore said her office would comply with the recount rule, but it would take a lot of time and paper.

Others were more brutal.

"What is the usefulness of doing it?" said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, one of the groups that challenged the rule this summer. "A recount has got to be more than a reprint... at best this is a quasi-recount."

Florida law requires a manual recount in elections that are decided by 0.25 percent of the votes cast or less. County canvassing boards look at the ballots and determine what the "voter intent" was in instances of undervotes and overvotes, which occur when more than one candidate is chosen.

"There's no way to determine what the voter intended to do," Johnson said. "There's no way to determine whether the voter pushed the button three times and nothing happened. It can't be done with this machine."

The rule will likely be challenged.

LePore said that the tests conducted by supervisors before the machines are used in elections guarantee the machines will tabulate the results properly.

"That is the exact reason why every single voting system that is used in an election goes through our preelection logic and accuracy testing," agreed Hood's spokeswoman, Jenny Nash.

The rule calls for segregation of the machines that indicate they contain undervoted ballots in the close race and a printout of the "ballot image report."

LePore said she would re the results cartridge into the cartridge reader, upload the information and print it out. "It's going to take a long time" and "a lot of paper" to do that, she said.

Counting teams for the race or issue being recounted will highlight ballot images containing undervotes and "determine if there is a clear indication on the ballot image containing the undervote that the voter made a definite choice," the rule says.

If an objection is made by an observer, a note naming the person who made the objection and their affiliation and the nature of the objection, as well as the names of the counting team members, will be attached to the ballot.

That would present a new image of Florida recounters to the country. Instead of people peering through magnifying glasses at punch cards, the photos would show recounters highlighting printed pages.

Hood's general counsel, Richard Perez, issued the rule three days after meeting with attorneys from the groups who won a challenge to Hood's April rule exempting the 15 counties that use the ATM-style machines from conducting manual recounts in tight elections.

Although he promised to consider their input regarding the rule, Perez caught the lawyers off-guard by issuing it before they responded to a draft proposal he gave them Tuesday.

An administrative law judge threw out Hood's rule, challenged by the union representing government workers, the ACLU and People for the American Way, a civil rights organization based in Washington, in August and ordered her to instead draft a rule to regulate how manual recounts can be performed.