"BOCA RATON -- City council candidate Susan Saxton today plans to request a hand recount of 11,009 ballots from her two-vote loss to Councilman Dave Freudenberg in Tuesday's election. Saxton, a Republican, is pinning her hopes on chads -- and on one of George W. Bush's lawyers from last year's ballot imbroglio."

Candidate to seek hand recount

By John Murawski, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 16, 2001

BOCA RATON -- City council candidate Susan Saxton today plans to request a hand recount of 11,009 ballots from her two-vote loss to Councilman Dave Freudenberg in Tuesday's election.

Saxton, a Republican, is pinning her hopes on chads -- and on one of George W. Bush's lawyers from last year's ballot imbroglio.

Her case will be argued Tuesday to the Boca Raton canvassing board by Brigham McCown, a West Palm Beach lawyer who honed his election-law skills last year working in Bush's historic election dispute with Al Gore.

McCown will contend that a manual recount is needed because the margin of error that separates Saxton from Freudenberg is a mere 0.003 percent.

"It could change the outcome of the election," McCown said.

Saxton had an automatic machine recount Wednesday at the West Palm Beach office of Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore. The second machine count did not change the results for the two candidates -- yielding 5,018 votes for Freudenberg and 5,016 for Saxton.

But the machines tallied a new vote for Carol Hanson, who won one of the two at-large city council seats Tuesday. The new vote convinced Saxton that machines can't be completely trusted.

"Maybe there was a hanging chad that closed up (during the machine recount)," Saxton said Thursday. "There's certainly a possibility that there are other little chads out there that aren't cooperative."

"I can't imagine why they wouldn't grant a hand recount," she added. "If I were 30 votes away, that's a different story. But we're talking two votes."

Freudenberg, also a Republican, will have his chance Tuesday to try to dissuade the canvassing board from granting a hand recount. On Thursday he practiced poking holes in Saxton's chad case with arguments used by Bush's lawyers in November and December.

"It was wrong then; it is wrong now," said Freudenberg, a city council member since 1999. "Hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts," he said. "I certainly don't agree with the concept of putting us through Chad II, the Son of Chad."

In addition to the chad question, the county elections supervisor is looking into possible irregularities with a ballot box from a Boca Raton polling place, McCown said. The ballot box arrived about two hours late in West Palm Beach on Tuesday for the first machine count, he said. It was not sealed or locked as required, McCown said.

Boca Raton's canvassing board is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 8 a.m. in city hall. If the board denies Saxton's request -- something McCown said would be shocking -- she could appeal to circuit court. If the board grants the recount, the board would set the time and place.

The city's canvassing board is chaired by the county's supervisor of elections and includes the Boca Raton city clerk, Sharma Carannante, and one city council member. The Boca Raton council will meet Monday to pick the member who will sit on the canvassing board, McCown said.

McCown worked for the Bush campaign's bid to count overseas military ballots and he appeared on C-SPAN and other media outlets, he said. In January, he worked for the Florida GOP as an observer and spokesman during the media recount of Palm Beach County's ballots.

McCown said a manual recount was wrong in Bush's case, but only because before the Nov. 7 election, Palm Beach County lacked a policy on counting swinging, hanging or pregnant chads.

But since then -- and more importantly, before Tuesday's municipal elections -- the county had adopted a standard, McCown said. On Nov. 16, the Palm Beach County Canvasing Board took the standard used by the Broward County Canvassing Board, he said.

Under those rules, a partially punched chad clinging by two corners may be counted as a vote. In addition, indented chads may also be counted as a vote if there is clear evidence of a voter's intent to cast that vote. "We have a different standard that's to be applied," he said.

john_murawski@pbpost.com


-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), March 17, 2001

Answers

Once again...

If you lose a close election, the only way to pull out a win is to change the count. The only way to do that is to get a recount. This is simple common sense. If you just accept defeat because you got fewer votes, you will LOSE. Doh!

And even if the count is accurate and you lost fair and square, the recount might be inaccurate in your favor. You might even be able to help this out if you're clever. Just keep redefining a "vote" until you get more of them.

Neither party has any monopoly on poor losers, I see.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 18, 2001.