Florida’s Fragile Chads May Shrink Pool of Undervotes

Even if the Florida Supreme Court somehow surmounts the hurdles laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday night and attempts to resume the manual ballot count in Florida, the state will face an unexpected problem that could add new uncertainty to the result: the possibility that votes either will disappear or be counted twice as counties search to identify their elusive undervotes.

The problem arises because several counties--in reexamining ballots after the state Supreme Court on Friday ordered recounts to resume--found fewer undervotes than they had in their certified results last month. Undervotes are ballots on which the tallying machines did not record a presidential preference.

In each of these counties, the assumption is that the number of undervotes is dropping because--as ballots are rerun through the counting machines--chads fall off, allowing the machines to count them as votes for George W. Bush or Al Gore after failing to read them last month. But because the state Supreme Court decision last week only authorized the counties to count the undervote, they have no authority to conduct a full automatic recount and allocate those new votes to either Texas Gov. Bush or Vice President Gore, election officials say.

As a result, those ballots are essentially disappearing from the final totals.

The number of vanishing ballots is relatively small--but enough to potentially make a difference in a race this close. In Pasco County, for instance, the tally Saturday found 66 fewer undervotes than were listed in the certified results.

“You have X number of undervotes on Nov. 8; on Dec. 9, you have a different number,” said Pam Iorio, the election supervisor in Hillsborough County. “The only way we get at that is to run a full automated recount of all the other votes. Well, we cannot do that without a court order. It is another twist and problem to this process.”

Bush aides, meanwhile, pointed out that if the recount process resumes, some counties could find more undervotes than they did last month. That raises the possibility that some ballots already counted for either Gore or Bush in the certified result last month could be tabulated again as an undervote in a new recount.

In their brief to the Supreme Court, Bush attorneys said that when Miami-Dade County officials sought to segregate their undervotes for the original hand count last month, the number of such votes in 34 precincts was higher than it was after the first automatic recount.

All of this underscores the difficulty of establishing, with any mathematical precision, an answer to the vexing question of who won Florida--and thus the White House.

“There will never be total satisfaction in the public’s mind about the Florida vote--not because there has been fraud or wrongdoing but because the margin for victory is less than the margin of error,” Iorio said. “There is no final absolute mathematical answer to this.”

To Bush aides, the difficulty of synchronizing the undervote in any new count with last month’s results demonstrates that further recounts could produce a distorted tally.

Whether the number of undervotes comes out “over or under” the previous total, “we are sitting on top of a big problem,” said Tucker Eskew, a Bush spokesman here. “The opportunity for double-counting ballots is just inherent in this process. We believe that Florida’s most accurate count has occurred, and to revisit these undervotes is to manufacture votes whether by mischief or mistake.”

If the recount resumes under the state Supreme Court rules that were in force Saturday, it appears that a number of counties would end up recording fewer votes than they did in the results certified last month.

As throughout each stage of this process, the problems are greatest in counties that used punch card voting systems. On Saturday, to isolate their undervotes, many counties used computer software first tried in Miami-Dade; that program stopped the counting machine each time the equipment could not discern a voter’s intent from the ballot. That allowed workers to pull out the undervotes and isolate them so that the county canvassing boards could assess them through the manual recount.

The problem was that in a number of counties, that process produced a slightly different number of undervotes than the last machine recount in November.

In Hillsborough--a populous county that includes Tampa--the sorting on Saturday produced 5,531 undervotes, 14 fewer than last month. Marion County saw the number of undervotes shrink by 36 in Saturday’s count. Pasco County’s undervote total dropped from 1,776 last month to 1,710 on Saturday. Pinellas County had not accumulated a final total of undervotes, but was on pace to find as many as 40 fewer than last month, according to local officials.

For all intents and purposes, under the current rules, those votes will disappear.

According to partisan observers and local officials, some counties attempted to compensate for the problem by searching for undervotes in each precinct until they found the same number as the machines had recorded on election night.

That’s the approach Orange County, which includes Orlando, was using when the Supreme Court pulled the plug on the recount last weekend. Orange County uses the more advanced optical scanning equipment that requires voters to fill in an arrow to indicate their preference.

Margaret Dunn, the county’s senior deputy supervisor of elections, said officials “eyeballed” the ballots, precinct by precinct, trying to determine which ones the machines had failed to read in the last recount. Sometimes that was obvious, she said; but in some instances, they were uncertain which ballots were the undervotes and were compelled to run them through the scanning equipment again to see whether the machines could read them.

Dunn said election officials looked for undervotes in each precinct until they found the same number as the machines had recorded in the final recount.

That approach eliminates the possibility that the number of undervotes will change. But Eskew says it leaves open a comparable risk: that the ballots assessed to be undervotes in the new count will not be the same ones rejected by the machines last month. That means a ballot included in the original certification as a vote for Gore or Bush might be pulled out of the stack and counted again because it is mistakenly judged to be one of those that the machines originally rejected.

“The big problem is, even when the bottom line matches up, it doesn’t mean the ballots match up,” he says.

Even in the punch card counties using the vote sorting software, some officials say there is no way to be entirely certain that the ballots identified as undervotes now are the same ones the machines failed to read last month.

“I don’t know how you could be sure,” said Bob Stewart, a member of the Pinellas County canvassing board.

Privately, Gore aides acknowledged that changes in the number of undervotes since the final machine recount in November are a legitimate concern. But they argued that the shifts are not unfair because they do not inherently benefit one candidate or the other; and they said that the problem can be mitigated if the counties are permitted to conduct a new automatic count of all votes as they review the undervotes.

Another complete recount could solve the problem of double-counting in this way: If a ballot initially recorded as a vote for Bush or Gore were read as an undervote this time, that same ballot would then be subtracted from the candidates’ total on the other side of the ledger: the tabulation of votes that were read by the machines. As a result, even if that ballot--now considered an undervote--were converted into a vote for Bush or Gore during the recount, their totals wouldn’t change.

Alternately, if a new automatic recount were conducted, any of the original undervotes that now were read by the machine would be allocated to Bush or Gore--eliminating the problem of vanishing ballots.

“If you want total clarity on this issue you have to take this next step of having an automatic recount of all the votes,” Iorio said.

Even that, however, wouldn’t resolve all the questions. Bush aides worry that running the ballots through the machines again creates both legal problems and practical concerns--because some ballots on which voters legitimately did not intend to select a presidential candidate might have chads fall out, creating a “vote” where none really existed.