Q & A/Florida commissioner recalls recount mayhem

Carol Roberts served on the three-member Palm Beach County, Fla., canvassing board for the 2000 presidential election. Along with Theresa LePore, designer of the county’s butterfly ballot, and Judge Charles Burton, she stood at the center of the Florida recount. A Democrat, she has been a county commissioner for 14 years and has overseen at least eight elections.

Q: What was your first clue that this election was going to be different from others?

A: I went to vote early in the morning, and I was mobbed by people who told me that there was a problem with people being unable to read and interpret the ballot. Then I went to another polling place and found out that they had many, many questions, and they couldn’t get through to the supervisor of elections office on the phone. When I came to my office around 10:00, a fellow commissioner told me they were getting tons of phone calls. So I knew that morning we were going to have a problem. I didn’t know the magnitude of the problem.

Q: Can you describe what it was like to recount those ballots for two weeks straight?

A: I had no expectations that we would have the kind of confusion, the kind of harassment, the kind of delaying tactics that were used in this hand count. The Republican observers right from the get-go seemed bound and determined to delay the counting. Some of them questioned every single ballot that had a Gore hole in it — not a chad hanging, not a dimple.

We didn’t have a lot of chads. In fact, I asked the supervisor if we used a different manufacturer for the ballots than Broward County because it seemed like the media was making such a big thing about Broward County having chads flying all over. We didn’t.

Q: In general, how common are punch cards that don’t indicate a full punch-through on a vote?

A: Well, it’s apparently more common that we realized. Palm Beach County had 10,000 out of 462,000 ballots that were considered an undervote, which had either hanging chads, maybe a dimple or a small mark that you would consider a dimple that was hardly discernible.

Q: Did you associate the design of the ballot with some of those undervotes?

A: No, the design of the ballot was probably what you could attribute the overvotes to. The overvote is if you vote for two or more candidates in the same election, and we had a little over 19,000. But Duval County had 27,000 overvotes, and they used a ballot that was designed by the Secretary of State.

In Palm Beach County, we had a ballot that on either side of the page right next to each other were ballots like a butterfly’s wings. The caterpillar ballot had five names on one page and then you turn the page and there were five more names. That was the design suggested by the Secretary of State. Sixteen counties in Florida used the caterpillar ballot, which had bigger problems than the butterfly ballot.

Q: Do you have any advice for other canvassing board members from your experience with this election?

A: I believe that they need to work very closely with their supervisor of elections and to make sure that the equipment they have works the way it’s supposed to. I’ve had a lot of calls from colleagues who have said, “There but for the grace of God go us.” So I think if we did nothing else, we raised the awareness of other elected officials as to how poor our whole system is in the United States. We have a problem in the United States that I believe the federal government as well as state governments and local governments all need to look at and address.