AREA COUNTIES SET TO RECOUNT APRIL GAMBLING VOTE

The April election remains unfinished business for county election officials throughout Missouri who are gearing up for a recount of ballots on the statewide gambling measure.

In counties where ballots are counted by hand, that's a major task. But in Cape Girardeau County and surrounding counties, punch-card and optic-scanner systems will make the job much easier, election officials said.

"It's not going to be a problem other than getting the people (election judges) together," said Cape County Clerk Rodney Miller.

Four election judges will be in attendance when the ballots are recounted at the Cape County Administrative Building in Jackson beginning around 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Miller estimated it would take about four hours to recount the more than 15,000 ballots cast in the April 5 election.

The absentee ballots will be counted by hand, a job that could take about two hours, he said. Running the punch cards through the computerized tabulating equipment could take another two hours, he said.

"Everything will be counted again; it will just be like the normal election," said Miller.

He explained that the computer program is set up to count all the votes, not just the votes on the riverboat gambling issue.

But only the recounted vote totals on the gambling measure will be reported, said Miller.

He said his office was notified Thursday by the Missouri secretary of state's office to proceed with a recount.

Missouri's counties must recount their ballots by May 24, Miller said.

Proponents of a riverboat gambling amendment, which was narrowly defeated in April, had requested a recount.

The constitutional amendment, which would have given the legislature authority to specify the games of chance that could be offered by riverboat casinos, failed by 1,267 votes out of more than 1 million cast.

Voters in Cape, Scott, Bollinger and Perry counties were among those rejecting the ballot measure.

This will be the first statewide recount since 1940, when Republican Forrest C. Donnell was sworn in as Missouri's governor after a post-election challenge.

Perry County will recount its ballots Thursday beginning at 3 p.m. County Clerk Randy Taylor said, "I think it will take us two hours."

Between 2,300 and 2,400 ballots were cast in the election in Perry County, so the recount "won't take very long," he said.

In requesting a recount, pro-gambling forces questioned if every punch card in the state had been "fanned" by hand before being inserted into the counting machines.

Fanning the punch cards causes loose chads to fall out. A chad is the tiny piece of paper on the ballot card, meant to be punched out by the voter. When a chad hangs onto a card, the counting machine could misread the ballot, gambling proponents pointed out.

But Taylor said fanning is routinely done as part of the vote counting process in Perry County.

"I have a lot of confidence in our system," said Taylor, who doubts the recount will change the election outcome.

He said he's glad Perry County has a punch card system because having to count all the ballots by hand -- as is still done in some counties -- "would be a job."

In the last few years a number of Southeast Missouri counties have abandoned the practice of counting ballots by hand and gone to punch-card or optic-scanner systems.

Bollinger County is in its second year of using a scanner to count ballots, said Diane Holzum, county clerk.

She said Friday that she had yet to receive instructions about a recount from the secretary of state's office. But she said that with a scanner, a recount wouldn't take long.

In the April election, Scott County used its new scanner system for the first time. County Clerk Bob Kielhofner was out of town Friday and could not be reached for comment.