Palm Beach Orders Hand Recount of All Ballots
November 12, 2000 8:16 am EST
By David Lawsky
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) - Florida's Palm Beach County early on Sunday ordered an extraordinary hand recount of all presidential ballots cast in the county, which is likely to bring significant numbers of additional votes to Al Gore if a judge does not stop it.
At a raucous early-morning meeting surrounded by political operatives and reporters, the county's Canvassing Board voted two-to-one for the new hand count, after spending many hours painstakingly tallying manually a sample of more than 4,500 ballots. The sample amounted to one percent of the votes cast in the election and yielded a net gain of 19 votes for Gore.
Texas Governor George W. Bush and Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney have sued Palm Beach and several other counties in an attempt to halt the manual recounts. Their suit will be heard before a federal judge Monday at 9:30 a.m. (1430 GMT) in Miami.
The board plans to meet while the judge's hearing is underway, at 10 a.m. (1500 GMT) Monday, to discuss logistics for the full countywide manual recount.
In arguing for the countywide count, board member Carol Roberts said that if the 19 votes Gore won on Saturday are 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, if other states' electoral votes are unchanged, the White House.
"This clearly would affect the result of a national election," she said, noting that Bush holds a statewide lead over Gore of only a few hundred votes.
CHAOS AND CONFUSION PREDICTED
Minutes after the vote, Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew replied that "there's been a lot of talk about extrapolating the results from four precincts to the whole county. I suggest you think about extrapolating the chaos and confusion of this day which counted one percent of the votes and apply it to another 99 percent."
The vote counting began Saturday afternoon and the results were finally announced about 1:45 a.m. (0645 GMT) Sunday.
The board did two counts: A machine count requested by Republicans and the sample hand count of four precincts sought by Democrats.
The manual count found that Bush gained 14 votes and Gore gained 33, yielding the net of 19 votes for Gore.
Ballots were counted only if the hole was partially punched through. Those with a sole indentation for either candidate were not counted.
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 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.
Bruce Rogow, the lawyer representing Palm Beach, held up a copy of the lawsuit to reporters.
"It looks to me like they're trying to invalidate a Florida law that has been in place a long time and has been used successfully without challenge," he said. "Anybody can file a lawsuit."
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 six 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 of the nearly 6 million votes cast in the state, according to media reports citing the Associated Press.
These figures prompted Roberts' speculation that an extrapolation of Saturday's hand count results to the entire county could affect the result of the national election.
Gore spent the day at the vice presidential mansion in Washington, meeting with his advisors. He made no public appearances or public statement.
While acknowledging that the Florida recount was incomplete, Bush spent the day at his ranch near the central Texas town of Crawford planning "a potential administration."
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