Hamilton Co. recount under way

By Cindi Andrews
Cincinnati Enquirer staff writer  14 December 2004

The recount got under way in Hamilton County today with about 20 Republicans, Green Party representatives and Democrats looking on.

Two teams of four election workers are hand-counting 3 percent of the votes for president - revisiting 30 of the county's 1,013 precincts and then other workers are running the ballots through the vote-counting machine.

The other 97 percent of the 433,000 ballots cast must only be checked for hanging chads.

If the hand and machine counts don't agree in a given precinct - and that had already happened twice by 10 a.m. - a senior team of one Democrat and one Republican conduct a second count.

In the problem counts so far, the discrepancies came when an election worker only saw a vote for President Bush or Sen. John Kerry and didn't notice a second vote for a third-party candidate. Such overvotes result in neither vote counting.

"The machine doesn't miss it but the eyes do," Dennis Predmore said after clearing up the discrepancy in the absentee vote count for precinct 4-I.

The stakes are high for election officials conducting the recount, because they are trying to avoid having to recount by hand all 433,000 Hamilton County ballots. The process could take two to three days if the people and the machines come up with the same numbers. If not, workers fear they'll be spending Christmas hunched over stacks of ballots.

Third-party presidential candidates David Cobb and Michael Badnarik requested recounts in all 88 Ohio counties.

"I've been very impressed," Pam Futerer of Hartwell as she coordinated the Green Party's recount witnesses in Hamilton County this morning. "In Hamilton County I don't think there are really going to be any problems. It's just keeping them honest."

Warren and Clermont counties also began their recounts today, and Butler County starts Wednesday.