Lake County

http://orlandosentinel.com/news/local/lake/orl-recount-12192000-story.story?coll=orl%2Dhome%2Dheadlines
David Damron, Ramsey Campbell and Roger Roy of the Sentinel Staff
                   Posted December 19, 2000 8:31 AM EST

An inspection of more than 6,000 discarded presidential ballots in Lake County on Monday revealed that Vice President Al Gore lost a net 130 votes that were clearly his even in a conservative, GOP bastion that president-elect George W. Bush   dominated as a whole.

The review found 376 discarded ballots in Lake that were clearly intended as votes for Gore: In each case, an oval next to his name was filled in with a pencil and the voter mistakenly filled in another oval next to a spot reserved for write-in candidates, writing in Gore's name or running mate Joe Lieberman's there as well. Another 246 such ballots showing clear votes for Bush and running mate Dick Cheney were thrown out. Had all such ballots been counted, the result would have been a net gain of 130 votes for Gore.

Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew said the Sentinel was engaged in "mischief making" by treating "illegal votes" as legal votes....
"To publish illegal votes as legal votes would be to  mislead the readers and the public," Eskew said. "These are illegal votes, and your paper is publishing them as legal votes."

And ballots exactly like those rejected in Lake -- and now called "illegal" by Eskew -- were counted by canvassing boards in places such as Orange and Seminole counties and are now part of the certified totals.

Lake reported 3,114 so-called "overvotes" in its certified presidential results, and county officials had been preparing to evaluate those ballots as part of the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court halted that effort the next afternoon, Lake officials had already sifted through 91,989 ballots cast countywide to  segregate the presidential overvotes as well as about 3,000 overvoted ballots rejected by tabulation machines in other races.

It was this pool of more than 6,000 ballots examined by three Sentinel reporters under a Florida public-records law request. Reporters were not allowed to touch ballots, but the newspaper paid for three election workers to spend the day holding them up for inspection. The process was observed by representatives of both parties.

The count went quickly because voter intent was easily detectable. Lake ballots are marked with pencils and tabulated with optical-scanning devices. There are no issues of "dangling chads" or "pregnant chads" to contend with, as there are in counties that use punch-card voting systems.

GOP partisans say they don't put much stock in any new numbers coming out of Florida now. Bush spokesman Eskew said GOP observers watching the Lake review on Monday dispute the accuracy of the Sentinel's inspection. They claimed that as many as 29 votes counted as write-ins for Gore by the Sentinel were actually written as "Gore and Cheney" or Gore and Green
Party candidate Ralph Nader on the ballot.

But such ballots were specifically excluded in the Sentinel's methodology. The review also found -- but did not count -- hundreds more questionable ballots that machines tossed aside or local election officials deemed invalid. Many of these arguably could have been judged as intended for a single candidate.

Some of those were ballots in which the voter penciled in the oval next to the name of more than one candidate, but then tried to erase one.  On some ballots, the voter nearly rubbed through the paper trying to erase a vote.

These hundreds of more marginal ballots -- which the Sentinel did not include in its tally -- also fell heavily in Gore's favor.

Lake also reported 245 "undervote" ballots, in which counting machines could discern no votes. Only 50 of those undervotes were separated by election officials before the federal high court stepped in. An examination of those ballots by the                    Sentinel found only a dozen that could be counted. Of those, Bush and Gore had six each. But those were not included in the newspaper's tally.

On some, voters had used an ink pen rather than a pencil, and the machines were apparently unable to detect their vote. Others circled the candidate's name or put an X or check mark next to a name or in one case the party designation.

The reason these votes weren't counted Nov. 7 is somewhat confusing. On election night, Lake's canvassing board decided in a 2-1 vote not to count ballots that included an unqualified write-in candidate. Bush and Gore were not legal write-ins, they decided.

But Catherine Hanson, a Lake canvassing-board member and county commissioner, said Monday that if she could do it all again, in a race this close she would have looked at and counted clear votes that the machines skipped over.

"We were trying to do our best. It was consistent with what we had done in the past," Hanson, a Republican, said Monday. "I wouldn't say it was a mistake, but we would have done it differently if we know what we do now."