2004 United States Election Voting Controversies - Recounts

Recounts

Ralph Nader requested a recount of 11 wards in New Hampshire where vote totals for Bush were 5–15% higher than predicted by exit polls. The Nader campaign reports:

In Ohio, two minor-party candidates, Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green, though not on the ballot in Ohio) cooperated in requesting a recount.

According to Ohio recount rules, 3% of a county's votes are tallied by hand, and typically one or more whole precincts are selected and combined to get the 3% sample. The 3% must be randomly selected, and all hand counts are to be performed in public (with observers). After the hand count, the sample is fed into the tabulator. If there is no discrepancy, the remaining ballots can be counted by the machine. Otherwise, a hand recount must be done for the whole county.

The Cobb campaign claimed that the precincts were not randomly selected and the ballots were pre-sorted. They suggested that this indicates that precincts were selected that would match the machine count, in order to prevent a county-wide hand count, i.e. that it was "staged". Two poll workers were convicted of preselecting ballots for the recounts.

Around the country there were also recounts of races for state and local office. Most of them reflected simply the closeness of the official tally, but some also raised issues of election irregularities. These included the elections for:

• Governor of Washington, between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire. Issues raised included the mailing of absentee ballots, the counting of provisional and absentee ballots, correction of improper marks on optically scanned ballots, and alleged tampering with electronic voting machines. The first tally and the first recount gave the election to Republican Dino Rossi. However, after two statewide recounts, Gregoire, the Democrat, had a narrow lead of 129 votes out of 2.8 million cast. A Republican lawsuit seeking to overturn the result and force a re-vote was rejected by the court, after which Rossi conceded the election. See Washington gubernatorial election, 2004.
• North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture, between Britt Cobb and Steve Troxler. The number of votes lost due to a voting machine malfunction in Carteret County (over 4,000) exceed the reported margin of about 2,000. A new election was called for by state election supervisors, but was mooted when Cobb conceded.
• Governor of Puerto Rico, between Anibal Acevedo Vilá and Pedro Rosselló. Aníbal Acevedo-Vilá was declared the winner after several months of disputes The two candidates were separated by just under 4,000 votes.