The representatives of several of the country's largest news organizations gathered in Broward County's election storage room today in what could become a large-scale effort to examine tens of thousands of ballots across Florida that were not included in the final tallies for 2000 presidential election. While at least one news organization said it wanted to count the ballots and see which candidate would have won, other news organizations said they had no intention of going that far. The goal for some here is to provide detailed descriptions of the untallied ballots for their readers and viewers and let them decide how to add them up. With 67 Florida counties and tens of thousands of uncounted ballots, the process that began here today may take several weeks. I don't think we are going to count ballots as such, but we will record, document and tabulate them.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about what qualifies as a vote.
The reporters and editors who inspected ballots today included representatives of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. They started in the warehouse here because Broward County election officials became the first in the state to open some 6,600 ballots for public examination. The ballots, stored in metal boxes stacked in the county warehouse, included only those that did not register a choice for president, those known as the undervotes. Representatives for Mr. Gore argued that vote-counting machines around the state ignored votes legitimately cast for each candidate, while spokesmen for Mr. Bush argued that standards for counting such ballots were too varied and too subjective for accuracy. Mr. Gore believed that the uncounted ballots might have cost him Florida's 25 electoral votes and hence the election.