Florida Counties Rush to Recount Unclear Ballots

Confronted with what the state Supreme Court chief justice called “an overflowing basket of practical problems,” Florida election officials and court clerks were in a frenzy Friday night, trying to prepare for an unprecedented recount of tens of thousands of ballots.

“I was hoping for a little finality,” said Miami-Dade County’s assistant elections supervisor Gisela Salas minutes after the Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts of at least 42,000 votes.

No such luck.

The high court’s decision to order a statewide recount of the undervotes--ballots on which machines did not register a choice for president--seemed to raise more questions than answers.

The county canvassing boards, many of which will begin the recount this morning, will have just four days if they want to finish by Tuesday, when the U.S. Constitution requires states to designate representatives to the electoral college. That raises a host of problems, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells argued in a dissenting opinion that accompanied the Supreme Court’s divided decision.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court told the counties to rely on Florida law to determine whether a disputed ballot contains a valid vote. But the state standard is loose at best, and says that ballot-counters merely should try to determine a “voter’s intent.” Once again, that raises the specter of a subjective count that relies on the “mind of the beholder,” Wells wrote. What’s more, he pointed out, the decision did not impose a timeline for the recount.

So, faced with the unknown, election officials across the state mobilized as best they could.

They began sifting through ballots and calling volunteers to form counting teams. They swarmed Office Depot for magnifying glasses that will be used to check chads and dimples.

Some counties never bothered to separate the undervotes from the rest of the ballots. In Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, elections supervisor Deborah Clark was preparing Friday night to begin feeding each of the county’s 406,956 votes through machines, just to sort out the ballots she’ll have to count by hand.

In Tallahassee--where officials will count, at minimum, 9,000 Miami-Dade County ballots that were trucked up last week--they prepared to take over the public library. Counting teams will arrive at 8 a.m.

“The library personnel will vacate the building,” said Dave Lang, the Leon County court clerk who is overseeing the logistics of the Tallahassee count. “The staff is absolutely ecstatic that the choosing of a new president could take place on their premises.”

In central Florida’s rural Okeechobee County, elections supervisor Gwen Chandler was resigned to a manual count--but wondered how her “staff” would manage under the time crunch.

“Oh, yeah, let me tell you about the staff,” she said. “There’s me and two other full-time people. . . . It’ll be very interesting to see how we do this.”

Many of the questions were dumped in the lap of Leon County Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis, who was back in court Friday night as attorneys for Al Gore argued to start the recount immediately--and attorneys for George W. Bush tried to slow it down.

Just before midnight, Lewis began shaping the state’s recount.

His decision was aimed primarily at avoiding the partisan rancor that marked South Florida’s earlier manual recounts. Lewis announced that he was enlisting the assistance of two judges in Tallahassee and, he hoped, other judges across the state to act as impartial arbiters of disputed ballots. And he outlawed the on-the-spot objections that became so common during those earlier recounts.

“I’m very concerned with the perception of these votes and whether they are going to be done accurately and fairly,” he said.

Lewis urged all counties that appeared to be affected by the Supreme Court ruling--primarily those that use punch card ballots--to finish by 2 p.m. Sunday and then send the new vote totals to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

Outside the state capital, not only were many election officials unsure how they were going to pull it off, some weren’t even sure whether they should bother.

Volusia County already has conducted a manual recount, and the Supreme Court’s decision only ordered manual tallies of votes that have not been counted. So assistant elections supervisor Denise Hansen wasn’t sure whether she should launch another count or not--and wasn’t pleased about the prospects.

“If they’re blank, they’re blank,” she said of the undervotes. “We’re not going to dream up who they voted for. I don’t know what the point of this would be.”

Leon County will be charged with counting Miami-Dade’s 9,000 undervotes, which arrived in Tallahassee by truck last week.

Lang has been preparing for a recount since the truck arrived from Miami. He has stocked up on pencils and legal pads, and maintained a list of volunteers to perform a recount. Allowing his vote-counting operation to fall apart before the Supreme Court ruled, Lang said, would have been like “washing your car before the rain.”

“I’ve had a sixth sense about this the whole time,” he said.

After weeks of uncertainty, most election officials seemed to take Friday’s ruling in stride.

“This is just another bump in the road,” said Don Hersey, the elections supervisor in Putnam County, a rural area south of Jacksonville where there were just 177 undervotes. “We’ll deal with it.”

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Times staff writer Mike Clary in Miami and researchers Lianne Hart, Lynn Marshall, Anna M. Virtue and Massie Ritsch contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Understanding Undervotes

The more than 42,000 “undervoted” ballots at issue in Florida did not register any vote for president.

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THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY

Punch card ballots, which are used in 24 Florida counties, are particularly susceptible to undervotes because people often fail to completely dislodge the little perforated paper tabs, called chads.

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Likewise, in the 41 counties where optical scanners are used, a vote may not register if the voter failed to blacken the oval next to his or her selection, for example, marking an X next to a candidate’s name or circling the oval.

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Sources: Times staff, AP, Florida Division of Elections

Researched by MASSIE RITSCH/Los Angeles Times