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Dimpled chads dispute backfires on gore { November 23 2000 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,401608,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,401608,00.html
Dimpled chads dispute backfires on Gore
Tempers fray in scramble to meet court's deadline
Special report: the US elections
Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 23, 2000
The Guardian
The race for the presidency yesterday boiled down to a scramble in three Democratic counties to sort through about 28,000 disputed ballots in the teeth of determined Republican opposition before a Sunday evening deadline laid down by the Florida supreme court.
As tempers frayed in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties - a strip of south Florida coastline which has become ground zero in a bizarre electoral endgame - Republican and Democratic representatives engaged in ballot-by-ballot combat as the counting accelerated.
In Miami-Dade county, scuffles broke out between Republican count observers and police after election officials took the controversial decision to scrap a general recount of its 588,000 votes, in order to concentrate on 10,750 contested ballots which are thought most likely to yield extra votes for Al Gore.
Two hours later, the county canvassing board took an even more explosive decision when it bowed to a combination of Republican anger, tight timetables and sheer exhaustion, and called off even that count. If the board's decision stood, it would be a potentially disabling blow to Al Gore's hopes that the recounts would give him the votes he needs to capture Florida and the White House.
In their earlier meeting, the three members of the board argued that it would not be able to perform a complete recount by 5pm on Sunday, the deadline set by the state's supreme court.
The Republican observers chanted "cheats" and "the world is watching" and accused a Democratic official of stealing a ballot from the Miami-Dade counting room. Kendall Coffey, a Democratic lawyer, said the official had only taken a sample ballot for use in court, but the incident reflected an increasingly volatile mood surrounding the recount.
In Palm Beach county, Democratic lawyers took election officials to court in an attempt to force them to count all "dimpled" or "pregnant" ballots, on which the voter had dented the punchcard ballot but had failed to punch a complete hole alongside the name of a presidential candidate. Such ballots would not be registered as votes by vote-counting machines, but could conceivably be interpreted as votes by the human eye.
Dimpled ballots are at the centre of the rancorous post-election struggle. In the counties where the Democrats had demanded a hand recount, the new tallies did not appear to be producing enough extra votes for Mr Gore to overturn George W Bush's 930-vote lead in Florida.
By yesterday, the recounts had boosted Mr Gore's total by 106 in Broward (with all precincts counted), 157 in Miami-Dade (with about a fifth of its precincts counted), and three in Palm Beach (with a fifth of the precincts counted). Analysts said that many of the precincts yet to be counted were mostly Republican.
However, a total of 27,761 ballots were rejected as "undervotes" by counting machines in the three counties, and have to be reviewed by three-member canvassing boards in each county.
Undervotes are ballots which register no presidential vote on the machines, but the Democrats argue that many of them are "dimpled" ballots which ought to be counted. They believe that an analysis of these "dimples" would swing the Florida result to Mr Gore.
Republicans have been outraged by the attempts to include "dimpled" ballots as votes and point to the changing criteria used by the three canvassing boards to interpret them as proof that the process is subjective and haphazard. The Florida supreme court ruling delivered on Tuesday night gave no firm guidelines.
The Miami-Dade board has used a liberal interpretation of the dimpled ballot, counting as votes any ballot where the chad (the small perforated cardboard rectangle the voter is supposed to punch out to indicate his or her preference) had been pushed in enough to allow a chink of light through the punchcard.
Broward county has yet to make up its mind over "dimpled" ballots. Palm Beach initially used this "sunshine rule" but switched after a few thousand votes had been counted, to accept only "dimpled" chads as votes for the presidency if the voter had consistently marked other parts of the ballot (for congressional and local positions) with the same sort of marks.
"We are trying to find out why the voter had a problem," Charles Burton, the head of the Palm Beach canvassing board said yesterday. "If they consistenly had the problem, we are determining that shows intent [to vote]."
Mr Burton was speaking in a Palm Beach courtroom, where Democratic lawyers were attempting to force the canvassing board to accept all "dimpled" ballots.
Republicans vehemently opposed the move.
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