-Caveat Lector-
Saturday, November 11, 2000
Story last updated at 1:13 a.m. on Saturday, November 11, 2000
Duval tosses 22,000 votes Unusually high rate to draw closer look
By David DeCamp
Staff Writer
Florida Times-Union
Nearly 22,000 Duval County votes for president were nullified
after voters chose more than one candidate, the supervisor of
elections confirmed Friday, resulting in an unusually high
strikeout rate.
Supervisor John Stafford and his spokeswoman, Susan Tucker
Johnson, attributed the voided presidential votes to a ballot
listing 10 presidential candidates over two pages. Voters, they
said, probably picked a president on page one, then voted again
on the second page. Just the presidential portion of the ballot
would then be thrown out, not the entire ballot.
The ballots tossed were more than found in Palm Beach County
where the focus has been intense.
Another nearly 5,000 Duval presidential votes didn't count in the
race because they "undervoted," Johnson said, meaning a candidate
wasn't selected or voters didn't punch a hole in the ballot hard
enough to mark their choice.
How the disqualifications affected votes for Republican George W.
Bush and Democrat Al Gore is uncertain, Stafford and Johnson
said. The election office's computer apparently can't separate
votes by ballot page. A hand count would be needed, and Stafford
said a few precincts may go through such a count next week to
judge the voided votes' effects.
Though Bush won Duval by about 44,000 votes, the high-stakes
contest for Florida's 25 Electoral College votes and the
presidency teeters over a few hundred votes and numerous charges
of irregularities. A handful of lawsuits have been filed
protesting the Palm Beach County vote, in which voters said they
were given a confusing ballot.
While Republican Stafford and a GOP leader backed the Duval
County ballot as legitimate, a local member of Gore's campaign
reacted with harsh questions.
"John Stafford, in the presence of our lawyer . .. told me
there were 200 to 300" votes disqualified, said Mike Langton,
Northeast Florida chairman of the Gore campaign. "Now all of the
sudden there are 22,000. . . . This stinks all over the
place."
Stafford, reached last night, denied making such a statement --
and Langton's suggestion that partisan politics may be at play.
Langton said he would advise upper leadership of the Gore
campaign of the disqualified votes. "I definitely want to see
hard evidence of this."
Attorney Mark Herron of the Democratic National Committee said
last night that the deadline for requesting a manual recount
passed at midnight, and the party had learned just hours earlier
of the number of nullified votes. Previously, Democrats thought
the number was in the hundreds, he said.
As more information arrives, Herron said, Democrats will begin to
decide their move. Options include contesting the vote, which
could effectively give them the same results as a recount
request, he said.
The total rejected votes -- more than 9 percent of the total
Duval voter turnout of 292,000 -- more than tripled the 7,800
votes that were struck from a 1996 election, when there were six
fewer presidential candidates. Four years earlier, nearly 6,100
ballots were bounced.
That equates to between 2 percent and 3 percent of the ballots
being disqualified from the previous two elections.
Generally, 2 percent or less of ballots are disqualified for
over- or under-voting, said Rob Richie, executive director of the
non-profit Center for Democracy and Voting in Takoma Park, Md.
"It sounds pretty irregular to me," Richie said of Duval's vote
disqualifications this week. "Out of [nearly] 300,000 votes,
that's extremely high."
The disqualified votes for president didn't necessarily ruin all
ballots. Indeed, the nixed votes also raised eyebrows because
they left the lower-profile U.S. Senate contest with nearly
10,000 more total votes than the presidential race, which
historically is the big draw to the polls.
Stafford said the high number of disqualified votes were
discovered Wednesday. They were reported to the state along with
problems with voting access related to the motor-voter law and
difficulty with a counting machine as part of the vote
certification process.
"It puts us under scrutiny. I don't like it when anybody loses
their votes," Stafford said. ". . . Bottom line is, I feel
like we had a fair ballot and so does the canvassing board."
Mike Hightower, chairman of Bush's Northeast Florida campaign,
suggested the problem was voter error, not misdeed or mistake
over the ballot by election officials. "We make the assumption
that all of our voters read directions," he said.
Langton pointed to a parallel between the disqualified votes in
Duval and the ballot strife in Palm Beach County. There, 19,100
votes were rejected by voters picking more than one candidate for
president.
"We'll probably be the next Palm Beach County," Stafford rued.
The Palm Beach ballot, however, ran the names of candidates on
facing pages with voter punch holes in the middle, which voters
say confused them. In Duval, all punch holes ran along the right
side of each ballot page.
"It says clearly at the bottom of our first page 'continued on
the next page,' " Johnson said, adding that only four or five
complaints about overvoting were logged at the elections office.
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