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OVERLOOKED FRAUD IN FLORIDA
Reed Irvine The Miami Herald has begun examining the undervotes in every county in Florida. These are the ballots that do not show a machine-readable choice for president. In the 26 counties using punch-card ballots the voter had not cleanly punched a hole to indicate a choice for president. In the 39 counties using optical scan ballots, the voter had not filled in an oval with a pencil. There were 62,205 undervotes statewide. There were 117,596 overvotes, ballots on which the counting machines recognized votes for two or more presidential candidates and there- fore counted none of them. Florida law says that ballots should not be voided if the intent of the voters can be ascertained. Vice President Gore and his supporters have been saying that these ballots have not been counted and the voters who cast them have been disenfranchised. They were all counted. The official tally shows how many votes each of the candidates got and how many no candidate got because the voters had either not wanted to vote for any presidential candidate or because they did not follow instructions on what they had to do to enable the counting machines to register their choice. There are a lot of very angry people who don’t understand this. Judging from their comments on call-in programs, many of them believe that there was a Republican plot to disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority voters by not counting their legal votes. The Miami Herald, other news organizations, and Larry Klayman’s Judicial Watch are going over the undervote ballots to see how many of them clearly show which presidential candidate the voter favored. This is what the Gore campaign wanted done in four counties they selected. It is what the Florida Supreme Court ordered be done in all the counties. It is what the U.S. Supreme Court halted because no uniform standards had been set for determining voter intent and time was running out. The Miami Herald and other unofficial re-counters face the same problem of no uniform standards. Mark Seibel, the editor in charge of the project for the Herald, says they intend to apply both the standards used in the Palm Beach County recount, which shaved Bush’s lead by 215 votes, and the more lax Broward County recount, which reduced Bush’s lead by 567 votes. There is a problem with that. The canvassing boards in both counties changed their standards as their counts progressed. Neither board was finding enough Gore votes to make him the winner, using the strict standards that they first applied. Jane Carroll, the Republican supervisor of elections in Broward County, resigned from the canvassing board when the two Democratic members adopted more subjective standards. She said their objective was to get enough votes to elect Gore. Unless the unofficial recounts are done with a uniform objective standard on which all parties agree, they won’t be acceptable to at least half the country. The Herald and other media are overlooking what could be a more fruitful and less costly investigation. They should be trying to find out why the machine recounts in a handful of counties produced very large increases in the net vote for Gore that cannot be explained by hanging chads or other technical glitches. In Palm Beach, where the total vote was 462,000, the machine recount found an additional 751 votes for Gore and 108 for Bush. That’s an error rate of 1.9 per thousand ballots with 87 percent going for Gore. This accounted for 30 percent of the increase in Gore’s vote produced by the machine recount. In neighboring Broward County, where 564,000 votes were cast, the machine recount found an additional 43 votes for Gore and 44 votes for Bush. That is 1.5 errors per10,000 ballots, virtually equally divided between Gore and Bush. That is consistent with non-partisan hanging chads being dislodged in the counting process. If Broward had the same error rate as Palm Beach, the machine recount would have found 1,072 additional votes, and 932 of them would have been for Gore. The machine recount found no errors in 13 counties, single digit errors in 33 and double digit errors in 15. There were six with three digit errors that accounted for three-fourths of the net gain in Gore’s vote. The huge error rate in Palm Beach and the five other three-digit counties points to possible voter fraud. The Palm Beach figures shocked Jane Carroll, who has been supervisor of elections in Broward County for 32 years. She could see no way that it could be explained by hanging chads or other technical problems. Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org
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