Republican attorney Mark K. Seifert has e-mailed THE SCRAPBOOK a diary of his experience as a Florida recount monitor, parts of which we reprint here:
“The hand recounts in Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties are a grotesque sham. I have personally reviewed around 2,000 ballots in two of these counties and can report that this process is utterly illegitimate. There are virtually NO uncounted ‘votes’ for Gore; just non-votes that Gore supporters on these canvassing boards are reinterpreting into Gore votes by flimflam, trickery, and deceit.
“In one Dade County precinct, there were 48 presidential undervotes out of 1,200 ballots. The vast majority of these undervotes were clean as a whistle in the presidential column. There were a few ballots with dimpled or ‘pregnant’ chads. Very little pressure is required to dislodge the chads and I NEVER saw a ballot with more than one dimple, i.e., the votes in the other races on the ballot were clearly indicated and the chads removed. This means that the voter casting these ballots clearly knew how to vote and was capable of doing so. My own interpretation is that the voter changed his mind, deciding not to vote. It appears likely that these ambivalent voters will now be dragooned into the Gore camp.
“In Broward, my Democratic counterpart challenged an undervote where there was a dimpled chad for Gore. Later, I challenged a clear vote for Gore where the voter had also dimpled Bush. If a dimple for Gore on one ballot is to be considered a ‘vote,’ shouldn’t the dimple for Bush on another ballot also be counted a vote, and cause the clear vote for Gore to be removed? After all, that dimple would mean an ‘overvote,’ the term of art for a ballot that contains votes for two candidates in the same race. The answer is . . . maybe! The canvassing board will make that judgment. Since the standards appear to change as needed, the board could decide to count the dimple for Gore and ignore the dimple for Bush. I had this outrageous concept put to me as legitimate by a Democrat observer.
“In Broward, I overheard a gentleman leading the Democrat contingent complaining to a younger colleague, ‘We just can’t keep sending all these blank ballots back there to the canvas board. We’re going to lose credibility.’ She responded, ‘Listen: Every one of those blank ballots we send back there is a potential vote for Al Gore.’
“After last week’s review of around 6,000 votes from precincts in Dade County, the canvassing board claimed to have found 6 supposedly uncounted ‘votes’ for Gore. During the evening’s examination of dozens of questionable ballots, the board members disagreed 16 times over whether a particular ballot constituted a ‘vote’ for Gore. Since each ballot must objectively either contain a vote for Gore or not, at least one member of the canvassing board was wrong on each of those occasions. Their error rate is more than twice that of the machines they are supposedly checking! Every time these hand recounts are expanded and extended, these errors are multiplied.
“There are virtually NO Republicans on the canvassing boards deciding what constitutes a Gore vote in Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties. There are NO Republican judges involved in any of the associated state court cases at any level. In short, there appears to be nothing to stop the Democrats from stealing this election, and they surely intend to do just that.
“The Clinton-Gore Democrats appear incapable of embarrassment. This is official vote fraud being committed in the open by Democrat office-holders. It’s pitiful.”
