-Caveat Lector- GOP v. Recount, Take Two <http://www.tnr.com/031201/crowley031201.html> Media Hounds by Michael Crowley Issue date 03.05.01 BROOKSVILLE, FLORIDA - Brooksville is a dreary rural town about an hour north of Tampa that greets visitors from the interstate with a dilapidated bowling alley, a septic-tank dealership, and a string of old cars rotting by the side of the road. Ordinarily it's a sleepy, out-of-the-way place. But it's home to the Hernando County election office, and so, for a few hours last week, Brooksville was ground zero in the ongoing inquiry into exactly who won a majority of the roughly six million Florida votes cast for president of the United States. On a humid Wednesday morning, Hernando's tiny election office is crowded with visitors: four researchers from the consortium of major media organizations (including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and the Associated Press) reexamining all 180,000 Florida ballots that registered no vote for president; two reporters from The Miami Herald, which is conducting its own recount; and four Republican activists observing the proceedings. All stare solemnly as county election workers gingerly hold up Hernando's rejected ballots for examination one by one. What they see is at once funny and sad. The county uses a fill-in-the-bubble "optical scan" system, and dozens of ballots show two, three, or more bubbles filled in the presidential column. On some ballots the entire column is filled in. More than a few contain votes for every candidate except one. Some absentee voters apparently tried in vain to white-out reconsidered votes. One patriot wrote in "Bart and Homer Simson [sic]"; another scrawled the words "Terrible Choice!" across the page. But amid the mass of incoherent ballots, election workers turn up several that express a clear preference for one candidate, usually Al Gore. By my count, Gore picks up a net total of ten votes here: a small dent in George W. Bush's official 537-vote statewide margin of victory but potentially significant given Hernando's tiny voting population of about 91,000. All in all, Brooksville seems to be playing its role in a tedious but sober and fair-minded effort to discern the intent of the Florida voters on November 7, 2000. But not according to Frank Colletti, chairman of the Hernando County Republican Executive Committee. "It's absurd," he booms, waving his hand toward the stacks of ballots in the county election office. "There's everything in the world [on the ballots]. They're going to find whatever they want to find." A Republican colleague of Colletti's whose name I don't catch adds his two cents: "All those papers fit together with the same political bent." Sound familiar? It should. In order to discredit a media survey they fear will discover enough missed Gore votes to undermine Bush's tenuous claim to presidential legitimacy, GOP activists are reopening the anti-recount playbook that helped put their man in office in the first place. Their goal: to transform a deliberate, comprehensive ballot review conducted by unbiased outside researchers into a chaotic, corrupt, and unfair process, a circus of fallen chads and incompetent methodology conducted by partisan hacks seeking to overturn the election. And the Republicans are doing a pretty good job. After all, they've done it once before. The media consortium has gone to great lengths to make its count professional and unbiased. Rather than dispatch their own reporters, consortium members hired the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit social science institute at the University of Chicago, to run the ballot review. Norc designed an elaborate classification system, giving its researchers standardized forms and codes to categorize ballots as objectively and in as much detail as possible. Researchers in counties using punch-card ballots not only note, for instance, which chads are detached from a ballot and by how many corners. They can also choose from more nuanced descriptions such as "Dimpled chad, no sunlight," "Dimpled chad, sunlight," or "Dimple with or without sunlight, off chad, on border above." In the case of optical-scan ballots, the options include "Circled party name," "Other mark on or near candidate name," and "Arrow/oval marked other than fill, then erased or partially erased." Every ballot is examined independently by three researchers, all of whose conclusions will be entered into norc's final database. In order to be hired, researchers cannot have worked for or donated money to a state- or national-level political candidate in the past ten years. They're even required to pass eye exams. Moreover, unlike other recent ballot reexaminations, the consortium is statewide and counts both "undervotes," which result when a machine fails to detect any presidential choice on a ballot (an undetached chad, for instance, or a bubble circled rather than filled in), and "overvotes," which result when a machine detects multiple votes for candidates. During the election recount, the Gore campaign focused almost exclusively on undervotes, which were believed to be concentrated in poorer, Democratic-leaning areas where older, punch-card ballots were used. But over the past few months partial reviews by Florida newspapers have suggested that Gore might have had a far larger advantage in ballots spoiled by overvoting. A Miami Herald/USA Today examination of Miami-Dade County's undervotes released this week, for example, showed Gore picking up a mere 49 votes at best; an Orlando Sentinel survey of overvotes in smaller (and highly Republican) Lake County, by contrast, discovered 130 votes clearly intended for Gore, many of them cases in which Gore's bubble was marked and his name was also entered in the "write-in" area. The Lake County figures, along with similar results from Orange County, have led many observers to predict that the consortium, analyzing NORC's data, will find more than enough lost Gore votes statewide to overtake Bush in a comprehensive statewide tally. Which is why the GOP is preemptively trying to discredit whatever numbers the consortium ultimately comes up with. As soon as norc researchers began their work, the GOP dispatched party activists, at considerable expense, to oversee the ballot reviews in all 67 counties. "We do keep an eye on the media," explains state GOP spokeswoman Portia Palmer. And so it's déjà vu. During the official recount, Republicans depicted county election workers as fatigued little old ladies who couldn't handle the strain of counting ballots for hours. This time around, they've pounced on the fact that norc is employing temporary local hires (always under the supervision of a norc team leader) so they can paint the counters as poorly trained, unreliable "temps." "We have problems with their training and their ability, and it just varies widely from county to county," says David Johnson, executive director of the Florida GOP. "In one case [a GOP activist] thought the temp wasn't able to see clearly enough to see a dimple or a pinprick.... There's an overall obvious lack of preparation on their part." In Brevard County, Republican election supervisor Fred Galey snorts dismissively, "They got some temporary employees and trained them for about an hour." Remember how Republicans complained in November that county workers were shifting their standards in the middle of the recount? Those talking points have been dusted off, too. Washington Post editor Dan Keating, a spokesman for the consortium, says Republicans have accused consortium workers of redesigning their evaluation forms in the middle of their review; he suspects GOP activists were confused by the use of separate forms for different counties' voting systems. And then there are the GOP press releases touting uncorroborated "eyewitness" accounts of recount malfeasance. One recent release declares that a "clearly intoxicated man reviewed hundreds of ballots in Clearwater." (Keating says he's baffled by the charge.) Another release expresses alarm over reports of "chads falling from at least two ballots," arguing that it "highlights the arbitrary nature of the ballot evaluation effort currently underway and the effects of repeated handling on fragile paper ballots." Of course, should one of the contested media surveys unexpectedly show Bush coming out on top, it abruptly ceases to be a crime against democracy. When the Herald's Miami-Dade undervote count showed only a minimal Gore gain, for example, Republicans were only too happy to lay aside their media-bashing and trumpet the new count as further evidence of Bush's legitimacy. "Now, after a ballot review using liberal standards unprecedented under the law," said Mark Wallace, a Miami lawyer for the Republican Party, "we find President Bush would still win. At some point the Democratic National Committee needs to accept that, and that time is now." And, if all else fails, the GOP has its own recount to fall back on, one certain to muddy the waters even further. Their insistence that all this recounting undermines the presidency notwithstanding, Republican operatives in Florida are keeping their own tally of the ballot recounts and, as one press release puts it, applying "a clear legal standard established by the United States Supreme Court ... i.e. a clearly punched out chad for punchcards or a clearly filled out oval for optiscan machines." The result? Bush's lead has grown from 537 votes to 843. Who would have guessed? ----------- MICHAEL CROWLEY is an associate editor at TNR. <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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