Recount confirms win by Alter in April 5 vote
By Matthew Hathaway
Of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
05/09/2005

Recount confirms
victory by Alter

Official says outcome
backs optical-scan use

Friday's recount of ballots cast in Jefferson County's state Senate election on April 5 had two winners: Republican Bill Alter and the county's new optical-scan voting system. Alter, of High Ridge, was sworn in to the Senate last month after an initial tabulation indicated he won the four-way race.

Friday's hand recount of the ballots at the Jefferson County Clerk's office showed that Alter defeated his closest challenger, Rep. Rick Johnson, D-High Ridge, by 72 votes.

That was a gain of four votes for Alter, over the previous count conducted the night of the election.

Susan Temple, a spokeswoman for Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, said the recount shows the effectiveness of optical-scan voting.

The April election was the first for Jefferson County under the new voting system. "I think this demonstrates the effectiveness and reliability of the optical scanners," Temple said. "It should give the public more confidence in the (voting) system."

With an optical-scan system, voters use a pencil to mark paper ballots, which are then counted by a computer.

A memory card in the scanner keeps a running tally of vote totals. After the polls close, those totals are transferred by a computer modem to the county clerk's office, where they are tabulated.

The paper ballots are stored in a sealed container, in case they are needed for a manual recount.

Friday's recount showed that Alter won with 6,880 votes to Johnson's 6,808, a margin of less than one-third of one percent of all ballots cast in the special Senate election. Independent candidates Rep. Harold Selby, D-Cedar Hill, and Christopher "Zip" Rzeppa won 6,280 votes and 2,853 votes, respectively.

The election was held to fill the Senate seat vacated by Steve Stoll, who resigned to become city administrator of Festus.

Johnson's campaign had requested the ballot recount, in part because of 191 so-called under-votes. For those ballots, machines did not record a vote in the Senate race. Ten bipartisan teams of 40 election judges supervised by county elections workers counted the nearly 23,000 paper ballots on Friday.