Chaos Deepens as Disputed Election Heads to Court
By Alan Elsner
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Nov. 12) - The chaos surrounding the disputed U.S. presidential campaign deepened on Sunday with four Florida counties moving to recount the vote by hand while George W. Bush and Al Gore prepared to do battle in court.
Florida's Palm Beach County early on Sunday ordered an extraordinary hand recount of all presidential ballots cast there after a sample retabulation of four precincts, representing around 1 percent of the vote, produced 19 more votes for Gore, the Democratic nominee.
According to at least one report, that brought Bush's lead in the crucial state to below 300, raising fears in the Republican camp that the widening recount, if allowed to proceed, could move Gore into the lead and win the election.
Palm Beach officials said if 19 votes emerged from 1 percent of the vote, the complete recount could change the picture by hundreds of votes.
Three other mainly Democratic counties -- Volusia, Broward and Miami-Dade -- were also either conducting or preparing to conduct manual recounts, in which officials examine each ballot by hand to decide the voter's intention.
In some cases, voters did not completely punch holes in their ballots. The officials must decide if incompletely punched holes should count.
Florida's 25 electoral votes would give either man the 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. Following Tuesday's election, Gore has 255 votes, Bush has 246 and 37 are undecided, from Oregon and New Mexico as well as Florida.
Former Secretary of State James Baker, representing Bush in Florida, said the country was on a slippery slope. He vowed to vigorously fight the manual recounts in the courts.
That process begins Monday at 9:30 a.m., when a federal judge in Miami will hear the Bush campaign's request for an injunction to halt the manual recounts. Whatever the ruling, the decision seems certain to be appealed to the next level, possibly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Asked if the Bush campaign would appeal if they lose, Baker replied on CNN: "We have said that we will vigorously contest the efforts for a manual recount in selective counties here in Florida. If that means going up, maybe that's what it would mean. On the other hand, maybe we won't."
The Bush campaign has held out the threat of calling for recounts in Iowa and Wisconsin, both narrowly won by the vice president, as well as Oregon and New Mexico, which remain contested. After the latest count in New Mexico, Bush, the Texas governor, leads by four votes.
Arizona's Republican Sen. John McCain expressed the growing concern of many Americans that the deadlock could paralyses the country. He said whoever emerged the victor would find himself extremely compromised.
"I think the nation is growing a little weary of this. We're not in a constitutional crisis, but the American people are growing weary. And whoever wins is having a rapidly diminishing mandate, to say the least," McCain said.
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli said: "My fear was that we would head to a downward spiral of retribution with lawsuits in different states and different bases ... Unfortunately we have now entered that spiral."
Baker said the presidential deadlock was a "black mark" on the U.S. election process and offered to drop the Bush suit if Democrats agreed to stop hand recounts and respect the result in Florida that emerged next Friday after the overseas mail-in ballots are counted.
"Whoever wins then, wins," Baker told NBC's "Meet the Press." "We will accept that result." There was no sign the Gore camp would agree."
Baker's counterpart on the Gore campaign, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, while not addressing the Baker comment directly, told "Meet the Press" he expected the outcome of the presidential race would be known in "a matter of days."
At a raucous early-morning meeting on Sunday, surrounded by political operatives and reporters, Palm Beach County's Canvassing Board voted 2-to-1 for the new hand count.
After spending many hours conducting a painstaking manual tally of 4,500 sample ballots, amounting to 1 percent of the votes cast in the election in the county, the board found a net gain of 19 votes for Gore.
In arguing for the countywide count, board member Carol Roberts said that if the 19 votes Gore won on Saturday were extrapolated throughout the county, there would be as many as 1,900 additional votes for Gore. That could give him Florida's 25 electoral votes and the White House.
The board plans to meet at 10 a.m. on Monday while the judge's hearing is under way to discuss logistics for the full countywide manual recount.
The vote counting in Palm Beach County began on Saturday afternoon and the results were finally announced about 1:45 a.m. on Sunday.
The counters also checked a sample of the more than 19,100 ballots that were invalidated on Election Day because more than one hole was punched. Many voters say they were confused and voted for both Gore and Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan.
More than half of the ballots in which people voted for more than one candidate that had holes punched were both Gore and Buchanan.
At the request of Republicans, the canvassing board also ran a new mechanical count of all county ballots, the third so far. It found 269,732 votes for Gore and 152,951 for Bush. That was a gain of 36 votes for Gore and a loss of three votes for Bush, for a net gain of 39 votes for Gore since the last full recount.
SEVERAL COUNTIES INVOLVED
As the count was about to begin, the canvassing board was served with the Bush lawsuit, filed against the election boards of Miami-Dade, Volusia, Broward and Palm Beach.
Bush and Cheney argue in the lawsuit that the electoral law is so vague that it deprives Florida citizens of their constitutional rights.
"The question (of) whether to hold a manual recount and whether to count a ballot if such a recount is held is not guided by any standards much less standards that ensure fair and equal treatment of all votes," the suit states.
It was the first request for court intervention by either side to settle the presidential election in which both Bush and Gore polled 48.9 percent of the nearly 6 million votes cast in Florida.
The official statewide recount of 65 of Florida's 67 counties gave Bush a lead of 960. An unofficial survey of all 67 counties showed an even narrower Bush lead of 327 votes, according to media reports citing the Associated Press.
13:17 11-12-00
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