Chads, both hanging and pregnant, are no longer part of the election lexicon. Butterfly ballots long gone.
But with governor’s race polling showing a straight up tie, the specter of a recount, looms. Again.
A decade after a tied election in Florida captured the world’s attention, the stakes may be a little more parochial, but both parties are gearing up for the prospect of a dead heat governor’s race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink heading into overtime.
Both sides have legal teams ready.
Republicans have retained former Jeb Bush legislative director and elections lawyer Hayden Dempsey to deal with possible recount issues. Democrats, still stinging from their loss in Bush v. Gore a decade ago, have a cadre of lawyers ready if the race is that close. Assisting the party’s general counsel, Mark Herron, is lead counsel Stephen Rosenthal. The Sink campaign has also enlisted Tallahassee attorney Ron Meyer. Other lawyers will work on the teams on both sides.
Florida law requires a machine recount if unofficial returns show a candidate defeated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast. The ballots are run through the machines again after election officials make sure the machines are working properly.
If the machine recount comes up with a race that is within one quarter of 1 percent, local election officials must conduct a manual recount of questionable ballots in which the machine counted multiple votes for a single race or did not detect any vote for a particular race despite votes elsewhere on the ballot.
In real terms, if 5 million people turn out to vote, as is generally expected, a race would have to be decided by 25,000 votes or less to trigger a machine recount. A manual count would come if the gap closed to under 12,500.
Lawyers on both sides said that if around midnight Tuesday the difference looks like it will be less than 40,000, in the words of one of the attorneys, “everybody will be pretty puckered up.”
After the two recounts, results would be certified Nov. 16. Legal challenges would be due 10 days later. Recounts would end if the gap was too wide to be crossed by the contested votes or if the losing candidate calls it quits.
With the prospect the closest recent governor’s race, Sink said her campaign was ready to fight if necessary to make sure that every legal vote is counted.
“The laws are pretty clear,” she told the News Service of Florida. “If it’s really close, everything is set in law and we’ll be prepared.”
In fact elections lawyers say that the rules are actually more clear now than they were following the 2000 recount, when many lawyers had no idea what to do about chads on punch cards, for example. Chads are gone now – the state uses scanned ballots marked with a pen – but state lawmakers and elections officials underwent a clarifying exercise following the 2000 debacle. The standards for determining what a voter intended are now generally thought to be clearer, elections officials say, for example, though not everyone agrees they’re foolproof.
In Martin County, elections officials have already conducted two machine counts and two additional over/under vote counts during the primary this year, said Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis. In both races, the recounts went smoothly.
“We’re ready to rock and roll,” Davis said.
By Michael Peltier
The News Service of Florida
