FEP 43
Page 21


P: What happened at this point as you're organizing the count? Do you use county
 employees and allow one member from each party to watch, so that there would
 be four people looking at the votes?

M: Here's what we did. We set up twenty to twenty-five tables, something like that,
 in the training room, and at each table there were four people. The ballots were
 to be handled by two county employees. The two county employees would be
 sitting across the table from one another. One would have a stack of ballots,
 uncounted. That employee would hand it to the other employee across, and that
 employee would then show it to the other people, a representative of the
 Democratic Party on one end and a representative of the Republican Party on
 the other end, four people at each table. If they were all able to agree that, yes,
 this is a vote for whoever, that was tallied both by one of the county employees,
 as well as each party representative. Now, if they are not able to agree on what
 the vote was for president, then that went into an envelope which came to the
 canvassing board to make the decision.

P: Were you deciding them as you got them?

M: Yes, we were.

P: And what standard did you use?

M: The intent of the voter.

P: I should point out you have the optical scan machines. If somebody had not
 blackened the oval but had circled Bush or had written in Bush, would you then
 award that vote to Bush?

M: Yes. It's amazing how creative people were in mis-marking the ballots, and I'm
 sure these were virtually all absentee ballots because if you go to a precinct and
 you mis-mark your ballot, it's going to be rejected by the optical scanner right
 there. You put it in the slot [and] it'll kick it right back to you.

P: So, technically you can't overvote.

M: Exactly. The poll worker would say, well, you've mis-marked your ballot. Let me
 take this one from you, let me give you another blank ballot, and please vote for
 only one candidate for president [and] fill in the oval. On the ballots that we had
 to look at, somebody would fill in an oval for one of the candidates for president,
 for example, then they would cross through that, and then they would draw an
 arrow to another candidate and say, this is the one I want.
 21