Texas Hand Recount Begins

Nov. 20 -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s campaign has lambasted the ongoing hand recounts in Florida, but a Texas Republican is hoping a manual check of ballots could help win him a seat in the State House of Representatives. And that means checking chads.

A bipartisan group of residents in Texas’s northeastern Smith County are gathering today to begin counting ballots by hand. But instead of relying on a machine count, the group will use a method endorsed in a 1997 law signed by Bush.

In Texas House District Five, Democratic Representative Bob Glaze, of Gilmer, defeated Republican candidate Bill Hollowell was defeated in the Nov. 7 election.

In the first count, Glaze received 21,496 votes to Hollowell’s 19,416 — winning by 2,080 votes, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

But last week, the Secretary of State approved Hollowell’s request for a recount in the district, which includes Smith, Upshur and Van Zandt counties.

A committee of 12 registered voters, six Republicans and six Democrats chosen by a judge, is carrying out the recount in Smith County. Each of the three counties will have its own bipartisan recounting committee. The recount must be completed in all three counties by Nov. 20, said Jane Dees, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State.

A Texas Voter’s True Intent

To determine voter’s true intent, Smith County ballot counters will hold some 11,000 punch cards to the light and stare through holes. They will inspect partly dislodged, dimpled, and so called “pregnant” chads. Ballot counting rooms in District 5 are likely to bear a striking resemblance to the images on television of vote counters examining punch cards in Broward County, Fla. — one of the four heavily democratic counties in which the Gore campaign is seeking a manual recount.

Unlike Florida, where ballot counting standards are at individual counties’ discretion, Texas has a statewide standard for manual counts. The rules for recounting ballots by hand are included in Texas’s 700-page Election Code and are similar to the standards currently being used in Broward County, Fla.