David Damron and Roger Roy
                   SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
                   Posted May 7, 2001

                   PENSACOLA -- One of the best-kept secrets in Florida's disputed 2000 presidential
                   election is that thousands of ballots that ultimately counted were never even filled out by voters.

                   With no outside scrutiny, county officials on Election Day made new copies of at least
                   10,000 mismarked or torn absentee ballots that the counting machines initially couldn't
                   read. More than 2,400 absentee ballots were duplicated in Escambia County alone -- about
                   11 percent of all absentee votes cast in that county.

                   Among the 10,000 ballots duplicated statewide were untold numbers of ballots that
                   machines couldn't read but that election officials said showed "clear intent" in the
                   presidential race or other contests. By duplicating those ballots to make them
                   machine-readable, officials saved many from being thrown out in a presidential race
                   decided by just 537 votes.

                   This systematic effort -- blessed by Florida law but never raised in the pitched
                   election-recount fight -- challenges the successful GOP courtroom argument that
                   without clear standards, humans should not be looking for voter intent where machines
                   couldn't find any.

                   In fact, election workers did just that -- and long before a recount fight made each ballot a
                   legal battleground. Ironically, the process probably helped the candidate who would
                   later argue so vehemently against manual recounts -- George W. Bush.

                   Mostly absentee ballots

                   An Orlando Sentinel analysis of the absentee-duplicating process across Florida
                   found it was concentrated in the 26 counties with the same optical-scan voting technology
                   state lawmakers decided last week to require statewide. With tabulating machines based in
                   polling places, the system gives voters a second chance to correct ballot mistakes on the spot.

                   All but a handful of the ballots saved by election workers in those 26 counties were
                   absentee ballots -- a category of votes that Bush dominated by a near 2-to-1 margin. But
                   because the duplicating process is so loosely documented, county workers can't say how many
                   of the rescued votes were in the presidential race and how many were in other races.

                   "This is a startling and important development," said Kendall Coffey, a leading recount
                    lawyer for Democrat Al Gore. Coffey said he had not heard of any widespread
                    duplications being done to save flawed ballots.

                   Though he agreed it surely helped Bush, he didn't condemn it. The counties
                   did, albeit selectively, stick to the principle of "count every vote," he said.

                   But on a different level, Coffey said, such a vote-salvaging effort was
                   basically what the Florida Supreme Court ordered on Dec. 8, when it told
                   counties to look at uncounted ballots and tally those showing "clear intent."

                   Coffey contends that knowing about the duplication of rejected ballots surely
                   would have bolstered Democratic arguments to keep the hand counts going.

                   The fact was, hardly anyone knew. "I never heard this was going on until
                   now," Coffey said.

                   Of course, the state court order never played out because the U.S. Supreme
                   Court stopped it the next day and ultimately ruled that such a recount would
                   deny equal protection to all voters. Justices cited a lack of uniform statewide
                   standards as a main reason to shut the hand count down.

                   Practice is legal in Florida

                   Bush recount lawyer Barry Richard discounted the importance of knowing
                   about the duplicated absentees last week, saying it would have had little
                   impact on judges deciding vote cases. He too, was unaware it had been done.

                   Still, even had it been known, "I think the same legal result would have
                   occurred," Richard said.

                   Duplicating ballots is perfectly legal. State rules have always required that
                   duplicates be made for unreadable ballots. A Volusia County vote fraud case
                   reaffirmed the practice.

                   In a 1996 sheriff's race, Gus Beckstrom filed a suit challenging his
                   1,100-vote loss to Sheriff Bob Vogel. Beckstrom argued that fraud and
                   negligence occurred in counting more than 27,000 absentee ballots -- many
                   of which were marked over again by election officials because they were
                   illegible to computer scanners.

                   The state Supreme Court ruled that no fraud was involved, and said Vogel
                   deserved to win. But the case drove home the point that county officials cannot
                   alter the original ballot to save it -- they must create a duplicate ballot instead.

                   The reason officials in most of the 26 counties with precinct tabulators gave
                   for duplicating so many absentees is that they wanted mail-in ballots to be
                   counted as carefully and fairly as those cast in polling places.

                   The voting machines in these precincts are designed to immediately reject
                   unreadable ballots so voters can fix them. But absentee voters aren't around
                   to make corrections when officials find mistakes on Election Day.

                   To make matters worse for absentee ballots, they arrive folded and stuffed
                   into envelopes. The folds sometimes cause ballots to get caught in counting equipment.

                   So counting machines might turn them into accordions. Or, like some in
                   Orange, they were mangled into puzzle pieces for workers to put back
                   together and duplicate.

                   Still, they get counted. However, in many cases, absentees were in good
                   shape physically, but badly mismarked by voters.

                   Some voted for too many candidates in a race -- a clear "overvote" -- or
                   made no marks at all -- a clear "undervote." Even duplicated, such ballots
                   could not be counted. But an overvote ballot where two ovals were marked
                   but one of those was erased would usually pass the "intent" test with
                   officials. So they would create the duplicate ballot with only one oval filled,
                   and it would be fed through the machine and counted as a vote.

                   If the ballot was too marginal for election workers to make the call, it would
                   be passed on to the canvassing board.

                   "The absentees are scrutinized to make sure every vote counts," Walton
                   County Elections Supervisor Melissa Beasley said. "It's a very lengthy process."

                   Absentees a GOP priority

                   In Florida, Republicans mounted an aggressive absentee-ballot effort and
                   targeted voters with personal appeals from Gov. Jeb Bush and other GOP luminaries.

                   State Republican Party Chairman Al Cardenas boasted at one time that the
                   GOP held at least a 100,000-ballot advantage in requested absentees over Democrats.
                   And these tedious ballot-salvaging expeditions occurred almost exclusively
                   within that pool of mostly Republican voters.

                   So the Election Night vote-saving effort was surely adding to Bush's eventual
                   lead at the same moment TV networks were declaring and retracting
                   winners in Florida's razor-thin race.

                   Given that, Democratic leaders still maintain they would not have mounted
                   challenges to throw out these salvaged absentees, had they known they existed.

                   "Whether it favors one candidate or not, every vote should count," said state
                   Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe. "The whole question in all of this was
                   always fairness anyway."

                   Standards varied widely

                   Even within the 26 counties that made the extra effort to salvage absentee
                   votes, standards and procedures varied.

                   Orange County officials rarely looked for voter intent in the absentee pile.
                   They only did it in cases when a single candidate was picked at the top of
                   the ballot and again as a write-in candidate. But while such "write-in
                   overvotes" were salvaged in Orange, Columbia County officials refused to
                   accept them -- even though state law says they are valid votes.

                   Seminole and Alachua County looked at all overvotes and duplicated those
                   with clear intent. But exactly what amounted to "intent" on Election Night
                   differed from one county to the next.

                   Sometimes the contradictions came within a single county. In Escambia,
                   standards for what counted as a vote differed between absentees and votes
                   cast at polling places.

                   Absentee ballots that contained write-in overvotes were duplicated and
                   counted. Identical ballots from precinct polling places were also reviewed by
                   election workers -- but these were thrown out as overvotes.

                   Among those rejected ballots from Escambia precincts were 118 legally
                   valid votes for Gore and 49 for Bush, a Sentinel examination found. Counting
                   these ballots would have trimmed 69 votes from Bush's 537-vote margin of victory.

                   Escambia Election Supervisor Bonnie Jones said the double-standard for
                   write-in overvotes was adopted because names of the qualified write-in
                   candidates are posted in polling places. Absentee voters who wouldn't see
                   those postings are at a disadvantage, said Jones, a longtime Democrat now
                   registered with no party affiliation.

                   Like other counties that duplicated ballots, Escambia officials can't say how
                   many went to a particular candidate, or even a particular contest on the
                   ballot. Whatever the number, the votes almost certainly benefited Bush, who
                   won Escambia's absentees by a three-to-one margin.

                   Escambia's "duplicating team" of more than a dozen poll workers went to
                   great lengths -- working until 2 a.m. -- to make sure their absentee voters
                   got a second or third look to have a mistaken ballot corrected and duplicated.

                   But the same election officials opted not to program their precinct voting
                   machines to give voters a second chance. They decided it would cause long
                   lines and cost them too many extra ballots -- valued at 23 cents apiece.

                   Finding exactly how many votes were saved in the ballot-duplicating efforts
                   and checking the accuracy of the process would be a massive undertaking.
                   An inspection would have to match up thousands of original ballots, which
                   are voided and set aside, with their corresponding duplicates, which are
                   mixed in with the rest of the votes.

                   In Bay County, where 1,478 absentee ballots were duplicated, that difficult
                   job would be even harder. Election officials there sealed the original ballots
                   in envelopes and refuse to open them now.

                   So one of the best kept secrets of Election Day 2000 may just stay that way.