With only hours to go before a winner is declared in Florida's presidential balloting, weary election officials in Broward County finished their manual recount of ballots late tonight, cutting Gov. George W. Bush's lead over Vice President Al Gore in half. At the same time, their counterparts in Palm Beach County prepared to spend the night checking frantically for dimples, hanging chads and daylight in hundreds of punch cards before the deadline of 5 p.m. Sunday.
That time was set by the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday for all counties to report their final results to Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, who plans to go before the cameras shortly afterward to announce a winner.
The counting left Mr. Gore hundreds of votes behind Mr. Bush of Texas, and Mr. Gore's aides said they did not expect him to take the lead. Mr. Bush retained an official lead of 930 votes, but Mr. Gore had a net gain of 466 votes statewide in an unofficial tally of hand-counted ballots. If the votes hand-counted in Miami-Dade County last week were included in these figures, Mr. Gore would have 157 more votes, but the county election board stopped its manual recount on Wednesday, and those votes are not included in the unofficial hand-count tallies.
The Broward elections board finished counting 2,422 votes at eight minutes before midnight, giving Mr. Gore a net gain of 567 votes. Wiping their eyes in exhaustion, the three members of the elections board stood up in satisfaction when the counting was done and shook hands with the partisan observers who had monitored their every move. A cheer went up in the courtroom in which the ballots were counted.
But the counting there broke out in acrimony this morning when the canvassing board began considering a stack of about 500 dimpled absentee ballots, where holes had not been punched all the way through. Lawyers for the Republican Party argued vehemently that such ballots should not be considered because absentee voters could see whether they had fully punched the hole.
A Broward County spokesman said all of the dimpled absentee ballots had already been hand-counted in the presence of Republican and Democratic observers, but he acknowledged that they had not been mentioned when the county first released the number of disputed ballots it would count.
In Palm Beach County, the canvassing board said that Mr. Bush had gained 10 votes by late afternoon, but Democrats said that when later counts were included, Mr. Gore was ahead by 78 votes. Mr. Gore's poor showing in the Palm Beach County hand count was largely because of a tougher standard employed by county officials in judging whether dimpled ballots should be counted, a standard that Democrats pledged to challenge in court next week.
The manual count moved much more slowly in Palm Beach. Denise Cote, a spokeswoman for the county, said election officials there counted 2,000 ballots on Friday and 900 Saturday, but had roughly 7,000 left to finish by Sunday night. Judge Charles E. Burton, chairman of the Palm Beach County canvassing board, said that if the county did not finish, it would send whatever results it had completed to Tallahassee by the deadline. (The state elections division said it had not decided whether to accept partial results.) But Judge Burton was optimistic that the board would complete its task.
''We'll stay all night if we have to,'' he said.
But even as the hand-counted ballots piled up in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, it became increasingly clear as the tumultuous week ended that the certified results Ms. Harris planned to announce on Sunday would immediately be swept away in a tide of litigation to be filed by both sides.
No matter which candidate is able to declare himself the president-elect on Sunday night, lawyers for Mr. Gore plan to be in court first thing Monday morning to formally contest the election in three counties.
''I think that both sides probably will want to be sure that the results in the counties they're contesting are heard in front of a court, regardless of how the overall statewide votes are,'' said David Boies, Mr. Gore's chief lawyer in Florida. ''I don't think either side will withdraw their contests just because on Sunday at 5 p.m. one side or the other is a few votes ahead.''
The contests grew in importance for Mr. Gore as Democratic officials acknowledged he would probably not prevail in the hand counts. Assuming he mounts a legal contest, aides said the vice president would probably address the nation next week to explain his decision to press on.
Aides worry that he has not stated his case plainly enough to voters and that his previous public comments have been more a call for patience than an explanation of his position. Without a clear explanation why he has refused to concede, the aides said, Mr. Gore knows his support could weaken.
Republican lawyers, meanwhile, filed lawsuits in four counties late tonight -- Hillsborough, Okaloosa, Pasco and Polk -- demanding that discarded military ballots be counted before the Sunday deadline. The ballots had been cast aside because they lacked postmarks, dates or proper signatures, but the Bush campaign said they should have been allowed and that a fifth suit would be filed Sunday morning in Orange County. Mr. Bush's campaign had already asked Circuit Judge L. Ralph Smith to reinstate some of the ballots on Friday, but withdrew the suit today after the judge said in court that he was unlikely to reinstate the ballots.
And lawyers for both sides began work this weekend on briefs requested by the United States Supreme Court, which agreed on Friday to hear Mr. Bush's appeal from the Florida Supreme Court's ruling allowing manual recounts to continue beyond the state's deadline for certifying returns. The initial briefs have to be filed by 4 p.m. Tuesday, and the justices will hear oral arguments at 10 a.m. on Friday.
If the court rules in Mr. Bush's favor, saying that Ms. Harris was within her rights to cut off the hand counts after seven days, that could undermine the challenges Mr. Gore is mounting in the three counties, and would probably overturn a victory by Mr. Gore if he should be declared a winner by Ms. Harris on Sunday. A ruling for Mr. Gore would mean the election would probably be determined by the outcome of the challenges, which are likely to wind up back in the Florida Supreme Court.
The expanding universe of litigation made it clear that the real deadline in the case is Dec. 12, the date by which the states must select their Electoral College delegates. The Sunday deadline will be useful psychologically to the declared winner, who may in the public mind be harder to dislodge after a certification from Ms. Harris and the state's Election Canvassing Commission. But with so many hearings and briefs planned for the coming week, the joy of declared victory may be short-lived if the winner must struggle to avoid being unseated.
Florida, indeed, offers ample precedent for successful election challenges that topple victors. Most recently, in 1997, an appeals court unseated Xavier Suarez, who had been elected mayor of Miami, after his challenger, Joe Carollo, contested the election on the basis of fraudulent absentee ballots.
In the Bush-Gore case, the Gore camp will not be alleging fraud but rather errors and legal violations in counting ballots. In Miami-Dade County, the Democrats plan to sue because the elections board there voted to stop their manual recount of ballots, a direct result, according to the Gore campaign, of a heated demonstration by Republican partisans in the elections office. In Nassau County, the campaign will contest the decision to toss out a recounted tally where Mr. Gore picked up 52 votes. And in Palm Beach County, the challenge will center on the decision by the elections board not to count many dimpled ballots as votes.
The Democrats have seized in particular on the demonstration that they say caused the Miami-Dade board to stop its hand counts, charging that it was an orchestrated effort by Republicans to disrupt the count. Many of the demonstrators in Broward County said they were former recount observers who were being put up in local hotels and given meals by the Republican Party.
In this race, of course, it will not be possible for a state court to unseat a president-elect directly, so the object of Mr. Gore's contest will be the electors that the State Legislature must select by Dec. 12. The Legislature is dominated by Republicans, many of whom have said they are so angry at Mr. Gore's legal challenges that they would vote to choose electors pledged to Mr. Bush even if Mr. Gore should be certified as the winner on Sunday.
But after the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on Friday afternoon, the leaders of the Florida House and Senate chose a somewhat less confrontational tack, announcing plans to join Mr. Bush's side before the Supreme Court. The Legislature's strategy will stay in the courts only for a short time, though. Johnnie B. Byrd Jr., a senior House Republican and co-chairman of the Legislature's select committee on the election, vowed in an interview today that even if contest actions are still unresolved by the Dec. 12 deadline for naming electors, the Republican-dominated Legislature will go ahead and pick a slate of 25 electors loyal to Mr. Bush. ''It's been fun, but we're ready for a little finality,'' he said.
The old Don had helped the humiliated man in the black robe get justice. He had treated the judge's enemies as his own enemies.
He had caused those who tried to ruin the judge to weep bitter tears. He made sure the nominee under his protection got justice and became a justice.
''Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do me a service in return,'' the old Don, the head of the WASP Corleones, whispered to the younger man.
For Clarence Thomas, that day has arrived. Don Georgio of Kennebunkport needs a splash of service in connection with the hotheaded Sonny, who has gotten himself into his biggest scrape yet. Nearly a decade has passed, and now it time for Clarence to repay his political godfather.
Imagine what might have secretly transpired between the two:
''Look how the Democrats massacred my boy with dimpled ballots and endless hand recounts,'' an emotional Don Georgio confides in Justice Thomas. ''It's a low-tech lynching. I want you to use all your powers and all your skills. I don't want his mother to see him this way.''
Just when you thought our electoral spectacle could not get more surreal, labyrinthine, incestuous and conspiratorial, we now have Jeb's legislature joining W.'s lawsuit before Daddy's old Supreme Court.
''It's just a family affair,'' laughed a Bush aide in Tallahassee.
If the Bush forces angrily discounted a decision of the Florida Supreme Court that went against them, because all the justices were appointed by Democratic governors, then why would the Gore forces trust a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court if it went against them, when seven of nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, including two by W.'s dad?
The highest court in the land is supposed to be above politics. But nothing has been above politics so far in this presidential mud wrestle.
And the two candidates whose marathon donnybrook has now spilled into the Supreme Court made that body a major campaign issue.
W. expressed the highest respect for Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Al Gore seized on this to scare women voters: ''When the names of Scalia and Thomas are used as benchmarks for who would be appointed, those are code words, and nobody should mistake this, for saying that the governor would appoint people who would overturn Roe v. Wade.''
How rich to see W., whose campaign was steeped in skepticism about Washington, the federal government and trial lawyers, send his lawyers to Washington to petition a states' rights Supreme Court to overturn a state decision.
The theme of revenge, so prominent in the race, is continuing in the coda. Cuban-Americans in Florida, still angry at the Clinton administration over the seizure of Elian, threatened to go back to the streets, which helped stop the Miami-Dade hand count that Al was hoping would put him over the top.
The Bush team filed suit with the Supreme Court in Washington knowing that the Supreme Court in Florida would ''always be a problem and that there had to be recourse,'' as one Bushie put it.
But the legal tactics of the two camps are running ahead of their political strategies.
Bush advisers were riding the tiger this weekend, unsure if the high court would prolong the wrangling rather than head it off. Their hope had been that W. would eke out an edge in votes by the 5 p.m. Sunday deadline, and Katherine Harris would hold a press conference certifying W. the winner.
Then he could have emerged and declared himself the president-elect -- as Napoleon once took the crown from the pope and proclaimed himself emperor.
''We were counting on Katherine 'Where is my ambassadorship? I held up my end of the deal' Harris to complete her duty,'' a Bush adviser in Florida said mordantly.
But now they are not sure what to do. If Al Gore ''steals enough votes to win'' on Sunday, in the Bush argot, at least the W. camp will have the U.S. Supreme Court to keep hopes alive. But what if W. gets his votes, and then the justices validate the Gore hand recounts -- hoisting W. with his own legal petard?
Will W. get Jebby's legislature to come to his rescue? Will Al keep counting and counting and counting . . .
"This race is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O."
"Turn the lights down, the party just got wilder."
"It's cardiac-arrest time in this presidential campaign."
"He swept through the South like a tornado through a trailer park."
"Don't bet the trailer money yet."
"It's too early to say he has the whip hand."
"Now Florida, that race, the heat from it is hot enough to peel house paint."
"It's a ding dong battle back and forth."
"If he doesn't carry Florida Slim will have left town."
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun."
"They both have champagne on ice, but after the night is over, they might need a pick axe to open them."
"This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach."
"It's about as complicated as a wiring diagram to some dynamo."
"Only votes talk - everything else walks."
"This will show you how tight it is - it's spandex tight."
"We're going to go to some of those longnecks from a long time ago."
"He's going to find that people will hang on him like a coat rack."
"This election swings like one of those pendulum things."
"This race is as tight as the rusted lug nuts on a '55 Ford."
"What we know is that there will be no decision until some of those races are decided."
"Al Gore has his back to the wall, shirt tails on fire with this race in Florida."
"You talk about a ding-dong, knock-down, get-up race."
"When it comes to a race like this, I'm a long distance runner and an all-day hunter."
"It's the American way: if you don't vote, you don't get to whine."
"Smelling salts for all Democrats please."
"Maybe you can bring some perspective on this, we're plum out."
"When the going gets weird, anchor men punt."
"Tipper is probably telling her husband to hook a U, go back to the house to get a recount."
"It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat, Republican or a mug wamp, elected officials play it straight."
"Florida is the whole deal, the real deal, a big deal."
"The presidential race still hotter than a Laredo parking lot."
"These returns are running like a squirrel in a cage."
"It was as hot and squalid as a New York elevator in August."
"Bush has run through Dixie like a big wheel through a cotton field."
"This will have the people in Austin standing up like they got stuck with hat pins."
"...in Austin, between the 10 gallon hats and the Willie Nelson head bands."
"The big burrito out there in California"
"They'll be doing back flips in Nashville."
"It would be Shakespearean for Al Gore to lose because of his home state."
"I think you would likelier see a hippopotamus run through this room than see George Bush appoint Ralph Nader to the Cabinet."
"None of this television mumbo jumbo, let's get in there and count the votes."
"Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon."
"We've lived by the crystal ball, we're eating so much broken glass. We're in critical condition."
Just when you thought the Florida recount story was settling down into a familiar bitter partisan dispute, the Orlando Sentinel has changed the story line again. The Sentinel, remember, was the paper that first uncovered the hidden cache of valid, uncounted "overvotes"—seemingly double-voted ballots that, as the massive media recount of Florida has now confirmed, were the key to a potential Gore victory, if only he had known it.
Gore instead focused on "undervotes," ballots that initially registered no vote at all. It has been widely assumed that the real-life, statewide recount of Florida votes that was ordered by the Florida Supreme Court a year ago—and then abruptly stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court—was also limited to undervotes. Certainly the Florida court's opinion focuses on undervotes.
But the Sentinel had the wit to call up Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, who was actually supervising the real-life recount on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it. Lewis told the Sentinel that "he would not have ignored the overvote ballots."
Though he stopped short of saying he definitely would have expanded the recount to include overvotes, Lewis emphasized 'I'd be open to that.'
"If that had happened," the Sentinel notes, "it would have amounted to a statewide hand recount. And it could have given the election to Gore," since salvaging the valid overvotes turns out to have been "Gore's only path to victory." Lewis had apparently planned a hearing for later that Saturday, at which the overvote issue was going to be discussed.
Why is this significant? Because the comforting, widely publicized, Bush-ratifying spin given to the recent media recount by the New York Times(and the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post) has been that—as the Times' lede confidently put it—"George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." [Emphasis added.] (The Times' front-page headline was "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.")
We now know, thanks to the Sentinel, that this Times take (and the somewhat more hedged ledes in the Journal and Post) is thoroughly bogus—unfounded and inaccurate. If the recount had gone forward Judge Lewis might well have counted the overvotes in which case Gore might well have won. Certainly the Times doesn't know otherwise.
That Judge Lewis would probably have counted the overvotes at the perverse (in hindsight) urging of the Bush camp (which either wanted to delay the proceedings or erroneously thought the overvotes would boost Bush's total) doesn't alter this conclusion.
It looks as if the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who stopped the Florida count cast the deciding vote after all. …
P.S.: Does this mean Gore's undervote-obsessed recount strategy wasn't foolish, as previously charged in this space? Not necessarily. By the time the issue of the overvotes was raised before Judge Lewis, on Dec. 9, it was almost too late to count them before Dec. 12, the date accepted (foolishly!) by Gore's lawyers as the deadline for selecting Florida's electors. Any recount, even if it put Gore ahead, would have been chaotic and disputed, as this Sentinel companion story suggests. Had Gore instead asked for a full statewide recount immediately after the Nov. 7 election, as some of his aides urged, there would have been plenty of time to count both undervotes and overvotes before Dec. 12.
P.P.S.: If any paper gets a Pulitzer out of this Florida mess, shouldn't it be the Sentinel?
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Big thing of the day was 2 hour meeting in the Situation Room on the Iran affair. George S. is still stubborn that we shouldn't have sold the arms to Iran - I gave him an argument. All in all we got everything out on the table. After meeting Ed M. & Don R. told me of a smoking gun. On one of the arms shipments the Iranians paid Israel a higher purchase price than we were getting. The Israelis put the different in a secret ban account. Then our Col. North (NSC) gave the money to the "Contras". This was a violation of the law against giving the Contras money without an authorization by Congress. North didn't tell me about this. Worst of all John Poindexter found out about it & didn't tell me. This may call for resignations.
Reagan Diaries, 11/24/86
