COUNTING THE VOTE: THE OVERVIEW; With Deadline Near, Florida Recount Grinds On
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.
This article, along with many others from November 2000, really demonstrates the chaos that was happening during that time. There is a lot going on in this article, just like there was a lot going on in Florida during the 2000 recount. Just seeing the numbers laid out in an article are surprising - just how many votes Al Gore got (and did not get) from the recount leave people wondering what could have happened. The lack of a standard for the counties in the recount is present in this article, the question about military ballots is here, and the amount of ballots that were not recounted is in here too. This whole debacle is so ridiculous, and everyone can see the mistakes that were made when they are written out on paper.
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