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| For Immediate Release | |
| Feb 12, 2001 | Contact: Press Office 202-646-5172 |
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Change in Standards During Recount Led To 884 Additional Gore Votes (Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the non-partisan public interest law firm which is conducting a recount of disputed ballots in Florida, announced findings today that raise significant questions about the manual recount of presidential ballots in Broward County. The analysis is the result of an independent forensic examination by the certified accounting firm Johnson, Lambert & Co., which has expertise in counting ballots and detecting fraud. The accounting firm’s report on its count in Broward County will be available on the Judicial Watch’s Internet site at www.judicialwatch.org. The examination of Broward County’s manual recount has raised the following issues: * The Broward Canvassing Board used a “strict standard” in determining votes in the initial review of the ballots during the manual recount. This “strict standard” recognized a vote only in the event that a chad was perforated cleanly or was hanging by no more than two corners. The Canvassing Board then changed this “strict standard” to a “liberal standard,” which included counting dimples and other marks as evidence of voter intent. This change to a “liberal standard” resulted in 1,354 additional presidential votes from the undervote pool, 884 of which went to Al Gore. Under the “liberal standard” of review, Bush received 97.9% of his additional votes from dimpled and pregnant chads and Gore received 96.9% of his additional votes from dimpled and pregnant chads. * Dimpled chads that led to 1,354 additional presidential votes under the Board’s “liberal standard,” were indistinguishable from dimpled chads that were ultimately counted as undervotes (or no vote for a presidential candidate). The determination of a vote was extremely subjective. * The ballots reviewed by Johnson, Lambert were kept in ballot storage boxes. There were no separators within the box delineating ballots which were counted as votes, undervotes, or overvotes. A county employee “found” the various categories of ballots by looking at the ballots and trying to determine where the various categories began and ended within a box. Broward County provided no reconciliation, which would have assured the accounting firm that all the appropriate ballots were made available for review. * During the initial recount using the “strict standard” determination, eight percent of the Bush vote and seven percent of the Gore vote ballots had some kind of punched or marked condition in the other (Bush or Gore) chad. This was despite the “strict standard” which allegedly awarded votes only in unambiguous cases. Later, under the “liberal standard,” most of these ballots should have been recorded as overvotes (and thus as no vote for either Gore or Bush). “The audit’s results show that Broward County’s recount can not be trusted to be an accurate reflection of the will of the Broward County voter,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. |
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