-Caveat Lector- Seminole voting-machine glitches hurt Gore most <http://orlandosentinel.com/news/orl-ballot021501.story?coll=orl%2Dnews%2Dheadlines> David Damron of the Sentinel Staff Posted February 15, 2001 SANFORD - Even in the Republican bastion of Seminole County, a hand recount of all presidential ballots may have helped Al Gore instead of George W. Bush, a ballot review indicates. County election officials have identified 83 ballots with clear presidential votes that cannot be read by machines. The same ballots apparently fell through the cracks on Election Day. An Orlando Sentinel review of those ballots Wednesday found 48 clearly marked for Gore and 35 for Bush. The possibility that Gore might have gained 13 votes in a Seminole recount may fascinate political junkies. But an equally significant finding of the review is how finicky even the most reliable voting machines can be in determining what is a good vote and what is a flawed ballot. Some pen marks made by voters on ballots that were rejected look exactly like markings made on ballots that were counted. The best explanation officials can offer is that the rejected ballots were marked with the right color but the wrong brand of ink, or even that pens supplied in voting booths may have lost some of the carbon content in their ink. The ballot-machine manufacturers and Seminole election officials also said that even such variables as the humidity in the air could affect whether a tabulating machine could detect a mark made by a voter. The bottom line is that officials aren't sure why, or even if, the ballots weren't counted on Election Day. They only know they can't be counted by tabulating machines now. "I just can't be sure," said Assistant Supervisor of Elections Dennis Joyner. "You could run these things [ballots] through tomorrow, and they could go through." Democrats reacted to the newspaper's latest findings by saying they offered more proof that hand counts are more reliable than machine counts. Republicans countered that voters were still to blame, even if the mistake amounted to using ink with the wrong chemical composition. "That's why we were so intent on counting every vote," said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe. "And it shows exactly why Republicans didn't want to count every vote." Poe said the Seminole ballots also undercut the assertions of Bush campaign officials that machines are more accurate and reliable than human counters. James Baker, Bush's chief advocate in the Florida recount fight, at one point argued that machines were neither Republican nor Democrat. "They may not be Republican or Democrat, but they can be wrong," Poe said. 99.8 percent counted The number of glitches found in Seminole is miniscule considering that the county's system recorded presidential votes on 99.8 percent of the 137,970 ballots cast Nov. 7. But Poe said even tiny margins of errors aren't tolerable when the votes at issue might have changed the outcome of a presidential race decided by just 537 votes statewide. "If our banks were this sloppy in how they counted money, they'd be out of business," Poe said. But GOP officials said the system wasn't at fault, just a small fraction of voters who couldn't deal with it. GOP not sympathetic "Here we are in the electronic age, and you're suggesting we should hand-count ballots," said Florida Republican Party Vice Chairman Jim Stelling. "It isn't rocket science to cast a vote." Stelling said the majority of glitches in Seminole, where he's the GOP chairman, resulted from voters using the wrong pen or not marking the oval properly. "I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people." Seminole voters mark their ballots with special felt-tip pens provided in voting booths and then feed them into optical scanners placed in each precinct. This system proved to be the most reliable because it rejects mismarked ballots on the spot and gives voters a chance to correct them. Bush won Seminole County with a landslide 55 percent to 43 percent over Gore. In those official totals, the county reported 219 "undervotes" and 48 "overvotes." Undervotes are ballots on which no presidential vote was detected, and overvotes are those with more than one vote detected. But in January, when election officials began sorting through the piles of votes to identify rejected ballots for media inspection, they could not find all the undervotes. They initially found only 127 clearly blank ballots. Everything else looked like votes the machines should have read. So officials sifted through the ballots again and set aside hundreds of "potential" undervotes. On these ballots, voter markings may not have completely filled the oval or the ink appeared to be a slightly different shade. Machine may not 'see' "What you can see, the machine may not necessarily see," explained Charlie Conrad, an official with Global Election Systems Inc., the Texas-based maker of Seminole's machines. Seminole's next step in sorting was to feed the potential undervotes into machines to see which ones were rejected. Eventually, the machines isolated 83 more apparent undervotes. To this day, nine of the Seminole undervotes remain unaccounted for. Orange County has a system similar to Seminole's, and also had trouble accounting for all its undervotes. But officials there solved the problem by re-tallying the entire vote by hand and creating new totals for Bush and Gore. Officials then set aside only the obvious undervotes and overvotes for media inspection. Results of the new hand count were released Friday by Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles. Taken together, the county and newspaper findings showed that, had Orange County's canvassing board examined all its ballots, Bush would have gained 298 votes and Gore would have picked up an additional 501. That would have given Gore a net gain of 203 votes. Independently, the Sentinel has now completed a review in 17 counties with about 10 percent of the 180,000 uncounted ballots statewide. The results in Seminole are consistent with the findings elsewhere, that hand recounts would have helped Gore even in GOP strongholds Bush won easily. All but two of the 17 counties studied were carried by Bush on Election Day. Review on way A more comprehensive statewide review paid for by the Sentinel and other major media outlets is also underway. Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Sandra Goard acknowledged she cannot fully account for all of her ballots without a tedious hand count such as the one in Orange County. But she said she won't do that unless a judge orders her to. "That would take forever and a day," Goard said. ---- Michael Griffin of the Sentinel staff also contributed to this report. David Damron can be reached at 352-742-5926 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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