Two candidates for a governing board draw cards to decide the winner of a tie.
By BILL COATS
Published November 11, 2004
[Times photos: Mike Pease
Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson, center, watches as Nathan Whitaker draws a playing card to break the 461-461 tie vote between him and Mary Castro, right, for Cheval West Community Development District Board of Supervisors. Whitaker's king of hearts beat Castro's three of clubs.
TAMPA - An election that was a cliffhanger for a week turned, at the final moment, into a landslide:
King of hearts vs. three of clubs.
Nathan Whitaker, who drew the king from an arc of playing cards at a Hillsborough County elections office Wednesday, thus won election to the governing board in Cheval West, an affluent development of nearly 800 houses in northwest Hillsborough.
Seconds earlier, his opponent, Mary Castro, had chosen her card, given it a glance, then tucked it against her heart.
Whitaker, 35, pulled the king and flipped it onto the table. Castro, 57, lay the three next to it and reached for Whitaker's hand.
"Congratulations," she said.
Whitaker and Castro were on the ballot in Cheval during last week's election, and the vote has come out tied, or nearly so, with counting and recounting ever since.
Around 10 p.m. on election night, they had 459 votes apiece. Whitaker called Castro to congratulate her on the tie. But elections workers tallied absentee ballots into the night, including some from Cheval West that had been rejected by machines.
Dawn broke, and Whitaker led 461-459.
Election math, conceived for much larger contests, came into play. If the margin had been five votes or more, no recount would have been conducted. If it were three or four votes, Castro could have asked for a recount.
She wouldn't have. "It's not that big of an office," she said.
But two votes required an automatic recount.
So on Friday, elections staffers reran the cartridges from Cheval's voting machines. They rescanned the absentee ballots.
They produced a tie: 461-461.
That led to the final recount Wednesday before the county Canvassing Board, which consists of two county commissioners and a county court judge.
Their task: look at 42 absentee ballots on which the machines concluded no vote had been cast. Could they see any faint, tie-breaking marks?
Judge James Dominguez slid each ballot from left to right. The canvassers' eyes panned in unison. They saw no uncounted votes.
"They were all completely blank," said Chuck Smith, the systems administrator for the county elections office. "The voter apparently intended to not vote in that race."
Florida law says a tie may be settled by "lots." Assistant County Attorney Ken Tinkler told the candidates that could include drawing straws, choosing cards or a coin flip. Coin tosses have been popular in settling other ties around the state.
But Whitaker and Castro had talked.
"I think we'd prefer cards," said Whitaker, an attorney.
"Ace high?" asked Castro, a Dillards sales associate.
Whitaker agreed.
At that point, the war in Iraq entered into the election in Cheval.
Christina Voehl, administrative assistant to Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson, had been assigned the duty of bringing a deck of cards to work, just in case. She unpacked camouflage-colored Iraq's Most Wanted Cards, the type distributed among American forces to help identify the most wanted Iraqi leaders.
"That's what I had in the house," Voehl said. "It was a gag Christmas gift from my mother-in-law."
Castro's three of clubs represented Sayf al-Din al-Mashhadani, the 46th-ranked Iraqi in the deck, captured months ago. Whitaker's king of hearts represented Hani abd al-Latif Tilfah al-Tikriti, who carries a $1-million reward and is the highest-ranking Iraqi official still at large.
The cards took Whitaker aback.
"There was something unsettling about using that deck to settle an election in the land of the free and the home of the brave," he said.
Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson, center, watches as Nathan Whitaker draws a playing card to break the 461-461 tie vote between him and Mary Castro, right, for Cheval West Community Development District Board of Supervisors. Whitaker's king of hearts beat Castro's three of clubs.