January 2001

BDO Seidman Chosen to Help Media Count Florida Ballots

MIAMI—After more than a month of scrutiny by judges, politicians, and election officials, the media is taking a crack at scrutinizing the presidential election ballots cast in Florida, relying on the accounting firm of BDO Seidman to tally the ballots using impartial and unbiased CPA standards.

Major news organizations, including the Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times, have staked their claims to help complete the review of ballots in the hopes of determining whether county election officials had properly counted them in November.

Although the fate of the presidency is already decided and conservative groups are criticizing the latest round of recounts by the media organizations, these news groups turned to an impartial organization to help conduct the tally. To assure impartiality and accuracy, the Miami Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder, retained the services of Chicago-based Seidman, which operates more than 40 offices in the United States, to lend an independent and neutral hand in overseeing the tallying of the Florida ballots.

BDO Seidman was hired to observe each ballot, record the marks it finds, and tabulate the results for the Herald, according to a letter published in the Herald by Executive Editor Martin Baron.

Seidman was chosen because the newspaper wanted a public accounting firm, with CPA standards, to be involved in the ballot review, said the Herald’s associate editor, Mark Seibel, in a discussion with NYSSCPA.ORG.

“The Herald was looking for a neutral and publicly recognizable observer,” said Scott Univer, Seidman general counsel. “People trained to do counting like the certified public accountant.”

Further, the men and women of Seidman have no expectations one way or another as to the results of the ballot count. “This is a matter of historical interest to the state and to the entire country,” Univer said.

The work of counting the ballots by Seidman is being conducted out of their Miami office. The accounting firm expects to count the ballots in all 67 Florida counties, according to Univer.

Seidman is conducting the tallies by having various teams go to each county and work with election officials, according to Univer. The accounting firm’s representatives are not handling the ballot cards, relying, instead, on the election officials of each county to hold up the card so Seidman representatives can observe the marks, Univer said.

Because county supervisors of elections are making the ballots available on varying schedules, Univer expects Seidman’s tabulation to take a number of weeks to complete.

Unlike the controversial televised recounts conducted in Broward and Palm Beach counties by election officials during the Thanksgiving holiday, the current ballot tally is not being scrutinized by around-the-clock television coverage. Rather, Seidman representatives have been conducting their own semi-private, independent review. According to Baron, the Herald and other Knight Ridder newspapers may have assigned reporters to review ballots from time to time, but any results published in the Herald will come from Seidman’s observations and tabulations alone.

Yet Seidman’s Univer does not call the project a “recount,” stressing that Seidman is not making any determination of the outcome of last year’s election. “We are not drawing any conclusions,” said Univer. “We are not applying any standards to determine the intent of voters. We are just getting the total numbers and reporting them to the Miami Herald.”

Over the past few weeks, Seidman representatives have been separating the ballots into different categories, depending on whether the ballot cards had votes that were cleanly punched out, remained unmarked, or had chads (the piece of the ballot card that is punched out to properly register a vote in some Florida counties) that were dimpled, pinpricked, one-corner detached, two-corner detached, or three-corner detached.

The Florida votes for the presidential election first gained prominence when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore asked Florida state courts to order a recount of votes cast in that state, claiming that votes were not being properly counted. According to Gore, ballots with partial chads were not being properly counted or even invalidated because the chad was not fully detached.

After weeks of protests by supporters on both sides, a manual recount in Broward and Palm Beach counties, and court action going as high as the United States Supreme Court, Gore conceded the election to George W. Bush. The U.S. Supreme Courts final decision was to stop the ballot recounts, which were riddled with claims of nonuniform standards being applied to determine the validity of each ballot.

Since Gore’s concession in early December, several news organizations covering the election decided to perform their own “unofficial” recount. The Herald said it chose to count the ballots because the paper believed there was substantial, continuing public interest in documenting and tabulating the marks that appear on the ballots.