By Gary Fineout
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TALLAHASSEE - Nearly eight years after the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the state's top elections official wants to make sure all ballots are counted by hand the next time there's a close contest.
George W. Bush captured the presidency by a 537-vote margin, but only after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount of ballots in Florida that had been ordered by the state;s highest court. In the wake of that contested election, as much of the state moved to touchscreen voting, the state changed its recount rules.
But now that Florida is switching over to paper ballots, Secretary of State Kurt Browning says there should be a manual recount of every single vote in a close race.
"You want to make sure those ballots say either you won or lost the contest," said Browning
, a former elections supervisor from Pasco County. "It's the next logical step. If you have given voters the ability to cast ballots in all 67 counties on paper, then you need to have some ability to recount those ballots. People have got to have confidence in their system."
The Republican controlled state House has included the recount changes in an elections bill approved by a House panel Friday. But the Senate has not gone along with the change so far, citing the concerns of local elections supervisors, who say they fear manual recounts could lead to a repeat of 2000, when counties were unable to finish recounts by state deadlines ordered by the state.
"We want to count every ballot but we want to be able to accomplish the task," said Miami Dade Elections Supervisor Lester Sola.
There is no current law that requires all ballots to be hand-counted in a close race.
Counties now have 12 days to turn in returns. If results show that if a cand
idate lost by less than one-half of 1 percent, the ballots are resubmitted into a machine. If the second set shows a margin of one-quarter of 1 percent or less, a manual recount is done -- but only of so-called "overvotes or undervotes", those in which a voter has either marked more than one candidate or left the ballot blank.
Back in 2000 many counties still used punch-card machines, in which voters would punch out a tab in the ballot that was then read by a computer. Those were replaced by ATM-styled touch screen machines in 15 counties. But Gov. Charlie Crist last year pushed to end the use of touch screen machines and replaced them with paper ballots fed to an optical scanner.
Sola said recount teams would face a much more daunting task now since they would have to go over as many as 2.8 million sheets of paper in Miami-Dade County alone.
Sandy Wayland, president of the Miami Dade Election Reform Coalition, said if lawmakers want to change recount standards
they should give counties more time to count.
"It seems like they are sabotaging the recount before it starts," Wayland says.
But Browning says a manual recount can be done in a reasonable time. This week he ordered teams of state workers to count 14,000 optical scan paper ballots used in Orange County during the 2000 election and timed them. Florida still has roughly 5,000 boxes of ballots from the disputed election stored in Tallahassee.
By Browning's math, it would take Miami Dade County about 32 hours to count all the ballots if there was 70 percent turnout of the county's more than one million registered voters.
"We think these concerns are really unwarranted," he said.