Florida decision may not come for days
BY MARK SILVA
msilva@herald.com
The presidential vote that was too close to count, Florida's unknown outcome holding an entire nation at bay, may not be final for several days.
The vote was so close as the day after Election Day dawned, that Florida's secretary of state cautioned she may not be able to immediately declare a winner.
''I don't think the election is lost,'' added Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, chairman of Gore's campaign in Florida, staging a pre-dawn news conference at his Hollywood home. ''All the votes haven't been counted.''
The problem: An unknown number of absentee ballots that will be returned from members of the military overseas. They have 10 days to return their votes, postmarked by Nov. 7.
While the state could not immediately say how many ballots there are, the state counted about 2,300 of these military ballots in the last presidential election in 1996.
And that is more than the apparent margin this morning in the closest contest ever.
With nearly 6 million votes cast in Florida's presidential election, the state's Division of Elections reported early this morning that only 1,210 votes separated Texas Gov. George W. Bush from Vice President Al Gore -- Bush holding this ever-so-small margin.
Katherine Harris, the secretary of state and chief elections officer, convened a hasty conference in her Capitol office, lawyers huddling over a medley of mysteries.
Harris said she was calling all the state's 67 election supervisors, county by county, getting them out of bed and checking to see if all the absentee ballots had been counted.
''We're calling supervisors, waking them up and getting them out of bed,'' Harris said. ''I'm going to sit down with my lawyers and decide what the policy issues are.''
It's possible that even with an automatic recount of Florida's vote statewide which will start today -- triggered by a state law requiring a new count when an election ends less than .5 percent dividing the candidates -- those results will not be conclusive without knowing the outcome of the outstanding military ballots.
''It's up to the secretary of state to say if the margin appears to be enough that she can say, 'Well, this is it,'' said Clay Roberts, director of the Division of Elections. |
