VALLEY BUSINESS

Were several hundred presidential ballots improperly tallied in Florida’s Jackson County?

Democratic lawyer and former movie extra Phil Berg insists he has found enough such votes to sow further doubt about the already contested race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

County officials deny any wrongdoing or indeed any problem.

Berg said Monday that the Jackson County canvassing board put white oval stickers on several hundred ballots after they were rejected by tabulating machines on election night. The ballots then were fed back into the machines and counted.

“I think I caught them with their pants down,” said Berg, a colorful figure who enjoys the spotlight. “I think this could change the whole election.”

If so, it would come from an unusual source.

Berg, a former deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, is a perennial losing candidate who has run for governor, senator and county commissioner.

Berg also has appeared on the ever-wild “Jenny Jones” TV talk show, proposed marriage to his wife on a live Valentine’s Day special of “American Journal,” a tabloid TV news show, and acted as an extra in the horror movie “Fallen.”

Berg said he discovered the stickers Saturday when Vice President Gore’s campaign asked him to help monitor a recount of disputed ballots in Jackson County, in Florida’s panhandle.

The U.S. Supreme Court later halted all recounts across the state.

Board members offered a simple explanation Monday: The intent of the voters was clear enough to fix the ballots so they could be counted.

Unlike in other Florida counties where voters chose a candidate by perforating a tiny square of paper, called a chad, voters in Jackson County marked their choices with a pencil.

Sylvia Stephens, the county supervisor of elections, said the board fixed “maybe 100 or 200” ballots that were improperly marked. She said some had incomplete erasures, others had an X in the wrong place, some had the word “yes” written next to a candidate’s name and others had smudges that were incorrectly read as two votes.

“I know some of them we corrected went to Bush and some went to Gore,” said Stephens, a member of the canvassing board.

Berg doesn’t buy it. “I think it’s outrageous.” The friendly demeanor in the counting room Saturday “changed drastically,” he said, when he began asking questions about the oval stickers, “like a cold front came through.”

Berg said he gave the Gore campaign affidavits from the county Democratic chairwoman, who was unaware of the stickers when she monitored the count on election night, and from a fellow observer, who said he saw 50 ballots with stickers and all were for Texas Gov. Bush.

Judge Woody Hatcher, chairman of the canvassing board, defended the board’s actions. “It was not like we were substituting our judgment for voter intent.”

Nearly every elected official in Jackson County, which stretches from the Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico, is a Democrat.

But the conservative county has voted for a Republican president in every election since 1988. Bush carried the county by 2,270 votes.

Hatcher said the disputed ballots would be easy to find if either campaign wanted to pull off the stickers to see what was underneath.

So far neither campaign has asked to do so.