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12/14/00
10:40 a.m. |
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It's a point — a threat — that prominent Democrats have made repeatedly in the weeks since Election Day. And now, with Al Gore having finally bowed out of the race, it's about to become a reality. According to elections officials in some of the most bitterly contested counties in Florida, an assortment of journalists, lawyers, and activists are requesting to see the ballots that lie at the heart of the presidential-election recount battle. And early indications suggest that the next round of recounts will be as selective and potentially biased as those requested by the Gore campaign (and rejected by seven Supreme Court justices as unconstitutional). Indeed, it appears that some media outlets, rather than searching for a complete picture of what happened in Florida, are planning to finish the vice president's work for him. One of those new recounts will take place in Palm Beach County, where local officials conducted an election-night count, a mandatory recount, a sample manual recount, and a full manual recount in the days leading up to the Florida supreme court's November 26 certification deadline. In the last manual recount, the all-Democratic canvassing board rejected about 3,300 contested votes because it was not possible to ascertain the voter's intent on any of the punch-card ballots. The Gore campaign strongly objected; in various court pleadings, the vice president insisted that the canvassing board used too strict a standard in rejecting the ballots. But Gore's position was, at best, exceptionally weak. Even the Florida supreme court, which gave the vice president much of what he wanted in a 4-3 ruling last Friday, rejected his argument on Palm Beach County. Gore, the justices wrote, "failed to introduce any evidence to refute the canvassing board's determination that the 3,300 ballots did not constitute 'legal votes.'" The court denied the Gore campaign's request to re-examine the ballots. Now, several news organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, have requested to see the Palm Beach punch cards. But not all of the punch cards. According to Heidi Juhl, assistant Palm Beach County attorney, the Times's request specifically asks to examine the 3,300 ballots which, in the paper's words, "were set aside for a possible handcount." While it seems impossible to believe that a news organization of the Times's stature would not know that the ballots have already been handcounted — each one was personally scrutinized by each member of the county canvassing board &#!51; it appears the Times nevertheless wants to test Gore's contention that the ballots contain more votes. There's another reason for journalists to request what amounts to a partial recount. Simply put, viewing the ballots will cost a lot of money. Under Florida law, the ballots are public records, but the law also forbids anyone other than elections officials from handling them. That means that in any private viewing, an elections official will have to be present to hold the ballot in front of the reporter, who will not be able to touch it. Each county is now calculating potential costs, which will then be passed on to the news organizations. According to Juhl, when Palm Beach takes into account the cost of ballot-showing, security, and other services for the media recount, the price tag will come to about $600 per hour. And it would take hours and hours and hours — days and days and days — to count Palm Beach's 422,000 votes. Why spend all that money when there is a much smaller, more cost-effective, group of "contested" ballots? The situation is likely to be the same to the south in Miami-Dade County. There, the Gore campaign maintains that there are about 9,000 votes that were never counted — "not even once," in the vice president's words. According to Gisela Salas, deputy elections supervisor in Miami-Dade, 19 individuals and organizations have so far asked to see the ballots. They include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, as well as ABC, NBC, and The Nation magazine, among others. Here again, journalists are likely to concentrate on the 9,000 so-called "undervotes" while avoiding a costly re-examination of all of the county's 653,000 ballots. Whatever happens, it won't be terribly soon. At this moment, the ballots from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach are still in Tallahassee, where they were taken for the trials that eventually brought an end to the recount battle. But the ballots from another controversial county, Duval, are sitting in a vault on the second floor of the City Hall annex in Jacksonville, where they are ready and available for viewing. Several of the same news organizations that have requested looks at ballots in other counties have also asked to see the Duval ballots. In fact, some of those ballots have already been re-examined, although not by journalists. Last month, a Duval County woman named Julia Ann Cumming asked to look at the ballots from one precinct. Cumming is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by Jesse Jackson and others who allege that Duval's ballot was confusing that the vote counting rejected a disproportionate number of ballots in heavily African-American areas. County officials granted her request. Along with Cumming, the county invited representatives from the Republican and Democratic parties to witness the ballot-showing. They all gathered in the annex, which also houses the machines that originally counted all of Duval County's 291,000 ballots. An assistant supervisor of elections actually held up each ballot as Cumming and others took a look. It was a time-consuming process. Based on the hours it took Cumming to get through one precinct, Tracey Arpen, the county's deputy general counsel, estimated it would take about 800 man-hours for anyone to go through all of Duval's ballots. Although the county is offering a bargain-basement rate — about $120 an hour for two elections officials and the necessary support staff &#!51; a full-county count would likely cost about $50,000. It seems reasonable to suggest that even the richest news organization — already over budget after five weeks of unanticipated Florida coverage — will be reluctant to shell out the hundreds of thousands, probably millions of dollars, necessary for a full recount. There is, therefore, a convergence of Al Gore's position on "uncounted" votes and the news organizations' budgetary constraints. It's not a question of bias, the journalists and their bosses might explain; it's just far cheaper to concentrate on those "contested" votes in each county. It will be precisely the wrong kind of recount — at least for anyone seeking an accurate account of what happened in Florida. But it may give Al Gore the only measure of vindication he is likely to find. |
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e need
to find out who won," House minority leader Dick Gephardt said on Meet
the Press December 3rd as he called for yet another recount in Florida.
"You know, it would be terrible a month from now, after this is all over,
if Gore is not the winner, not declared the winner, somebody's going to
go back and recount these ballots, and look under the Freedom of Information
Act, and look and see who actually won. Would we want to wake up a month
from now and have the national popular winner and the actual winner in
Florida not be the president of the United States?"
