Take a peek at the vote for slot machines.
fuggetabout Kerry v Bush.
What Florida events in November let slide through a special pro-gambling amendment to the constitution – by a whisker – and still bypass the recount that is mandated for a close vote tally? What would a recount have found about the accuracy of machines that counted Castor v. Martinez, Kerry v. Bush — and that counted the ballots for new betting machines.
Specifically, the vote to permit slot machines, as in casinos, race tracks, betting parlors, jai lai.
Amendment #4 in Florida to allow slots at the tracks passed narrowly in a roller-coaster down-then-up vote count that pushed the amendment over the top — thanks only to the strange, belated appearance of absentee ballot counts that were opti-scanned in Broward County, and a flipped vote total in Pinellas County.
Follow the flip.
You can find good coverage of the slots vote reversal in the Thoroughbred Times, the Florida Baptist Witness (I've linked thru to these publications below), and in leading Florida papers. -->
As of November 3, the statewide vote margin on Amendment 4 never exceeded 10,000 – ranging from a 6,500-vote edge against allowing slots in South Florida to a margin of 10,000 or so more citizens voting against slot machines.
The amendment looked headed to a razor-thin defeat. Not only that, the 0.1% total state margin would have required a recount of the vote tallies for the constitutional Amendment. (Anything less than 0.5%.) So the vote was 50-50 with 99% of the votes counted, a squeaker.
But a week later, the Amendment was ahead by 93,000 votes. How so?
Well, Broward County found 78,000 absentee votes that had not been counted (absentee votes in Broward are opti-scanned; only the in-precinct Election Day votes are touchscreen). The vendor for Broward is ES&S. Part of the problem was that the ES&S tabulator model used for absentees in Broward could not breach its limit of 32,000 votes without generating a massive numerical error, a newly discovered "counting-backward glitch" (that affected also some North Carolina counties and God knows where else, and that ES&S now has to fix and reprogram for future elections).
Amazingly, in this 50-50 election a miraculous 74,000 of 78,000 new Broward absentee voters voted "Yes" on slot machines. So most voters in the state were split right down the middle, but 95% of the newfound absentee voters were strongly in favor of betting.
Truly, a miracle for betting afficionados and the state Dept. of Education which wanted a dedicated share of the gambling revenues.
Now who was suspicious of these new counts? Well, Paul Seago, executive director of Orlando-based No Casinos, Inc. Also, state rep Randy Johnson (R-Celebration) who was chairman of No Casinos. They maintained doubts about the final approval margin, 119,000 votes, for the pro-slots measure.
Florida Baptist Witness, Nov. 18
Johnson acknowledged that even if a judge voided all the absentees from Broward, opponents of slot machines would still lose.
However, he said invalidating questionable votes could reduce the margin of passage below half a percent, which would trigger a statewide recount.
Johnson checked with statistical experts and he came away believing the disparate vote pattern could not have strayed so far from 50-50 merely by chance, that it would be a 1-in-a-million possibility. [same link as above]
[Johnson's/No Casinos's] lawsuit said that state law mandates that if a county canvassing board determines that unofficial returns may contain a counting error it shall correct the miscue and recount the affected ballots, or request the Department of State to verify the vote tabulation software.
The suit alleges that Broward's canvassing board abused its discretion by failing to conduct a manual recount or ask the state to verify its software. The simplest way to ensure an accurate vote tally on Amendment 4 was to recount the absentees ...
The second aberration was Pinellas County, where a 17,000 vote reversal was recorded and sent off to Tallahassee for final inclusion and certification. The flipped vote-margin remains in the state certified count to this day, even though all parties acknowledge the error. [Translation – Glenda Hood leaned on "regulations" and "deadlines" to forbid the correction of the state number.] The error was not by machine so much as by a paper and pencil reversal by a worker. Staff of Elections supervisor Deborah Clark, a Jeb Bush appointee, learned of the flip on November 4, but 8 days later Clark still sent Tallahassee the wrong results (supposedly approved by 17,000 Pinellas voters instead of rejected by a 17,000 vote margin in Pinellas). "Pinellas elections office knew [Nov. 4] soon after Election Day of a discrepancy in vote totals on a statewide slot machine initiative, but they didn't fully investigate for two weeks." So the false vote totals were maintained knowingly for weeks, until state certification was past.
Clark reported to the state that Pinellas voters approved the measure by about 17,000 votes - the exact opposite of the results. By the time she reported the error,
it was too late to change the official results. [
Recall the explanation - State officials refused to correct the acknowledged error, citing a certification deadline. Jeb promises to fix the law for future elections!
insertion by Joan]
The slot machine measure passed [in the final count] by more than 119,000 votes statewide. A margin of fewer than 33,717 votes would trigger a recount. But it would take both a rejection of Broward's 78,000 absentee ballots, as No Casinos sought, AND intervention by a judge in Pinellas' vote count to trigger a recount.
Here's the math: Only if you remove both of these Broward (74k) and Pinellas (17k) stunners, does the final 119,000 margin of approval tumble to just 26,000, or less than 4/10 of a percent ( .004, or 0.4% ) and trigger a re-count. If we doubt only the 74,000 of 78,000 Broward absentees [but letting Pinellas stand] that would shrink the margin to 43,000 or 6-tenths of a percent, and that's still not close enough to easily entitle us (or entitle No Casinos, Inc.) to a recount for Amendment 4. So if you don't correct the Pinellas votes as well, you don't reach the 1/2-percent threshold. Only if the Secretary of State and Pinellas corrected the Pinellas flip would Florida lower the edge(margin) to not more than 26,000 votes (0.4%).
A statewide recount would have found if the new absentee 95% yes-votes counted by the ES&S Model 650 tabulator were accurately summed. That would be for starters. Then the Broward in-precints DREs (ES&S), Pinellas DREs (Sequoia), Miami-Dade machines, . . ., would also get a going over.
Well, thanks to Deborah Clark's determined efforts to keep the known counts out of the certified counts, and the overwhelming support among Broward's absentee voters, the recount was AVERTED.
Oh, P.S. Republican Randy Johnson decided in mid-December to drop his lawsuit to force a recount.
"Our case has terrific merit, but it's unlikely we'd be able to change the election outcome," State Representative Randy Johnson (R-Winter Garden), chairman of No Casinos, told the newspaper [Miami Herald].
the Thoroughbred Times, Dec. 11
What a relief! Who needs recounts?
The relief is almost audible.
Sigh - Jeb. Sigh - Slots proponents.
Sigh - Glenda Hood. Sigh - George.
Other sources
Throughbred Times Dec. 11
Florida Baptist Witness Nov. 11
"The secretary of state's office simply attributed the huge swing to late-arriving absentee ballots."