Dec 30, 2000 - 12:02 AM

                Media recount boosts Gore
                BRAD SMITH  of The Tampa Tribune

                Vice President Al Gore topped George W. Bush by 120 votes in an unofficial look at Hillsborough County's disputed presidential ``undervotes'' by The Tampa Tribune.

                Gore captured 999 votes and Bush, the president-elect, gained 879 votes in the first manual recount of Hillsborough's 5,533 ballots that machines could not read.  Results in Hillsborough, one of the most hotly contested Gore-
Bush battlegrounds, are a microcosm of how Bush's razor-thin Florida margin could have changed if some 60,000 disputed undervotes in 67 counties were examined by hand statewide.

                Susan MacManus, political science professor at the University of South Florida, said the results will still be disputed, even once historical perspective is gained.

                ``There's always going to be controversy about the standards used. People will say different standards were used by different media,'' she said.  Hillsborough is significant because it had Florida's fourth-highest number of undervotes, after Miami-Dade's 10,750, Palm Beach's 10,582 and Broward's 6,686.

                Sometimes, machines miss votes on these ballots when, for example, a chad isn't fully dislodged from a punch card.
News organizations, including The Miami Herald and a consortium led by The New York Times, are conducting statewide reviews of these ballots.  Results are not expected for several weeks. News executives say the purpose is to clear up lingering
questions.

                So far, the only other results show Gore gained 130 unofficial votes in Lake County, according to a review by The Orlando Sentinel.  Republicans, meanwhile, denounced the latest Hillsborough numbers, and Democrats exulted.

                ``We carried the county by 11,000 votes, so let Gore have his few votes. Who really cares?'' said Margie Kincaid, Hillsborough's GOP chairwoman. ``I think the media spent their money for nothing. It's all pretty silly and it's not going to change anything.  It's just going to confuse a lot of people. It's just an exercise in futility.''

                But Hillsborough Democratic Chairman Mike Scionti said the results ``make sense.''  He predicted statewide results of the media recount will show Gore won Florida by 20,000 votes.

                Undervotes were at the center of a legal storm in last month's 36-day presidential election stalemate in Florida. With the White House at stake, Gore wanted undervotes counted by hand while the Bush camp was opposed, saying the statewide  vote was counted twice, on election night Nov. 7 and the next day because results were too close to call.

                The Florida Supreme Court ordered undervotes counted by hand in a victory for Gore on Dec. 8. But the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it the next day. Three days later, justices said there was no uniform standard for deciding whether
dimples, hanging chad and pinpricks were really votes.

                In the Hillsborough recount, journalists examined each of the 5,533 undervote ballots by hand, checking for dimples, pinpricks, hanging chad and clear punches on the data-processing cards punched by voters to register their choices for elective office.  The Tribune spent 19.5 hours sorting through the ballots, finishing a count on Friday that began on Dec. 21 and continued at the county election service center on Dec. 22 and Dec. 28. The newspaper and other news organizations paid
$58.12 per hour for election workers to hold up the ballots for counting.

                Florida law makes ballots public documents available for inspection, but they can only be handled by election officials.

                Brad Smith can be reached at bsmith@tampatrib.com259-7365