Florida officials will not require any recounts of votes cast on touch-screen voting machines during Tuesday's state primary, despite a ruling by an administrative judge that counties using electronic voting are not exempt from laws requiring the re-tabulation of votes in close elections.
The judge, Susan Kirkland, issued a ruling Friday in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. In it, she points out that the Florida legislature decided earlier this year not to amend state law to bar recounts of electronic votes.
"The whole reason that touch-screen machines were put into place and that some of the counties chose to use them was to avoid the problems they encountered in 2000," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State. "This is a step backward to that time."
President Bush won the state's electoral votes by just 537 votes after 36 days of recount and contest.
Florida law requires a manual recount of the votes in any election in which the winner's margin of victory is a quarter of a percent or less of the total vote. But Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued an administrative rule earlier this year that officials in 15 counties using touch-screen ballots would not need to recount those votes because the results would be no different.
Kirkland's order throws out that rule.
"If the legislature had intended that no manual recounts be done in counties using voting systems which did not use paper ballots, it could easily have done so; it did not," Kirkland wrote in her final order.
State officials have 30 days from Friday to appeal the ruling.
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