And now... the end is near... the final curtain...
Dade County and Gore from the Washington Post:
Fla. Votes Certified; Overseas Ballots Pending
By Charles Babington and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday , November 14, 2000
TALLAHASSEE, Nov. 14 – Florida's secretary of state said tonight the latest statewide election totals show Gov. George W. Bush leading Vice President Al Gore by 300 votes. But a state judge's midday order left open the possibility that counties later can add updated tallies from manual recounts – something that could prove crucial to Gore's hopes.
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Bush supporter, said she was requiring counties that plan recounts to provide to her by 2 p.m. Wednesday a written explanation of the "facts and circumstances" of why such recounts should be considered. She declined to answer questions from reporters after her brief announcement.
At about 9 p.m., Gore suffered a setback when Miami-Dade County officials voted 2-1 to drop plans for further hand counting of ballots in Florida's largest county. The officials said a sample manual recount of 1 percent of the county's ballots yielded only six new votes for Gore, not enough to indicate a significant problem with the standard tabulating process.
Gore's hopes now appear to lie mainly in Palm Beach County's manual recount – a tally that Harris may refuse to certify.
Whatever the current margin in the statewide vote count between the two candidates, it's certain to change again. An unknown number of overseas absentee ballots won't be counted until Friday.
Harris's comments came several hours after a Florida judge upheld her insistence on a 5 p.m. deadline for all 67 counties to report their presidential election tallies. But the judge also ruled that state officials cannot "arbitrarily" reject amended counts that arrive later.
The ruling, immediately appealed by three counties, was vague enough to ensure that the post-election battle for the White House will continue for several more days.
Harris had said earlier through a spokeswoman that if counties try to submit updated returns after today, the office "will evaluate that request on applicable facts and circumstances."
Leon County Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis's ruling on the deadline disappointed Gore's supporters. They wanted an extended deadline to allow time-consuming manual recounts of ballots in several Florida counties. Gore hopes workers will find enough previously undetected votes to let him overtake Bush's slim lead.
But the court ruling was not the total victory Bush sought, either. The Texas governor wanted an irrevocable deadline that would not allow counties to tally any votes detected after 5 p.m. today.
Only minutes before the deadline passed, Gore won a small but potentially important victory. Palm Beach County's canvassing board voted to notify Harris that it plans to hand count all 430,000 of its ballots, a task that could take four to seven days. Palm Beach met today's deadline by submitting its vote total as of Sunday, which included numbers from four sample precincts already recounted by hand.
A key question is whether Harris will accept the county's rationale for the recount and certify their updated numbers from a county-wide manual count set to start Wednesday morning.
Florida's machine counts of last week's election reported that tens of thousands of ballots had no vote for a presidential candidate. Manual recounts, conducted anywhere, typically turn up at least a few votes that counting machines miss, elections experts say. A few votes per precinct may be all Gore needs.
Florida's 25 electoral votes will determine the next president, barring an improbable turnabout of election results in several other states.
Gore's lawyers publicly expressed satisfaction with Lewis's ruling, but they still backed the counties appealing it. They urged large counties, such as Palm Beach, to continue manual handcounts even though they couldn't possibly have finished by tonight.
"The most important thing now is for the counties whose manual counts are in progress to continue and complete their work," said former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, representing Gore in Florida.
Judge Lewis ruled that the counties may file supplemental or corrected totals after today's deadline, and Harris may consider them if she employs "proper exercise of discretion." Lewis said Florida's secretary of state "may ignore such late-filed returns, but may not do so arbitrarily; rather only by the proper exercise of discretion after consideration of all appropriate facts and circumstances."
Bush allies fear that a leisurely, widespread manual recount of ballots in Florida would primarily benefit Gore. That's because predominantly Democratic counties reported the greatest number of ballots with no machine-detected presidential votes. Authorities see such ballots as the ripest area for newfound votes, especially when they involve punchcard voting systems. Unlike Gore, Bush did not request manual recounts, even in heavily Republican counties.
In other actions today:
• Officials in Miami-Dade began a late-afternoon hand recount of 5,871 ballots in three overwhelmingly Democratic precincts. The county's canvassing board agreed to the recount without any formal standard for deciding a voter's intent, the Associated Press reported. Earlier machine counts of those precincts found a high number of ballots with no apparent vote for president. Tonight's vote, however, scrapped those recount plans.
• In Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), the Democratic Party asked a Circuit Court to order a full hand count of all 588,000 ballots. The motion said the county's earlier decision not to conduct such a recount was based on an erroneous opinion by Harris. Harris had said manual recounts can be conducted only if the board finds a problem with the computer that counted the ballots. Meanwhile, Broward joined Volusia and Palm Beach counties in appealing Lewis's ruling in hopes of extending the 5 p.m. deadline.
• In Volusia County, where workers began hand counting 184,000 ballots Sunday, officials scrambled to finish the task by 5 today. They said Gore netted an additional 98 votes over the county's previous count.
• In Osceola County, Democrats withdrew their request for a manual recount.
• The Bush campaign, before Lewis announced his decision, challenged Gore to accept a 5 p.m. deadline today for all election counts, in exchange for Bush's pledge to accept the partial hand-count total at that hour. Gore's campaign rejected the offer.
• Bush's legal team today filed notice that it will appeal Monday's Federal Court ruling in Miami that allowed manual recounts to continue in Florida.
The day began with Palm Beach County officials unexpectedly suspending their plans for a county-wide manual recount of ballots. They said it was unclear whether they had the legal authority. The county's election canvassing board voted 2 to 1 to suspend the count after state elections director Clay Roberts sent a fax saying state law didn't authorize such a recount.
State Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, disagreed with Roberts' opinion. It is "clearly at variance with existing Florida statutes and case law," said Butterworth, who ran Gore's Florida campaign.
Palm Beach officials, who had assembled dozens of workers to start the recount early today, decided to seek clarification from a higher court. Palm Beach County Judge Charles Burton, a member of that county's canvassing board, said of the statements from Roberts and Butterworth: "We're in limbo. We have two opinions out there."
By late afternoon, the Palm Beach board voted 3 to 0 to resume the manual recounts Wednesday morning and to tell Harris of their plans.
Gore last week requested manual recounts in Volusia County (which includes Daytona), plus three big, predominantly Democratic counties: Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. Among those three counties, where punchcard ballots are used, counting machines recorded no presidential vote in tens of thousands of ballots.
In the case decided by Lewis today, Bush campaign lawyers had argued Monday in Leon County Circuit Court (Tallahassee) that Florida counties lack authority to grant the ballot-by-ballot recounts Democrats had requested. The lawyers maintained that Florida law permits recounts only in cases where there's evidence of ballot machine malfunctions or allegations of fraud.
"The Florida statute gives them no right," Bush lawyer Barry Richard told Lewis, during the hearing that focused mainly on the deadline matter.
The issue may turn on the word "tabulation." Florida's law is intricate and open to interpretation.
An initial recount, by machine, is automatic if the candidates are separated by a margin of less than half a percent. After that recount, a candidate may protest the returns. The county canvassing boards then examine the tabulation of paper ballots cast or, if voting machines were used, examine the machines' counters or software.
Next, a candidate may request a manual recount, but must state grounds for the request. Florida law says, "the county canvassing board may authorize a manual recount" that must include at least three precincts chosen by the protesting candidate. Democrats contend that the phrasing allows the recount to include immediately all precincts in a county, as Volusia County chose to do.
If the counties start with a sample of three precincts, the statute outlines what should happen next. It is here that the Republicans believe they have found reason to prevent the recounts. They emphasize the word "tabulation," which they construe to mean something in the mechanics of vote-counting.
The statute states that if the three-precinct manual recount indicates "an error in the vote tabulation" that could affect the election's outcome, the county canvassing board must correct the error, ask the state to verify the counting equipment or manually recount all the ballots.
Bush forces say there was no "error in vote tabulation." Democrats disagree.
The Democrats contend that the vote-counting system was faulty and could affect the election's outcome. Voters in the contested counties, they argue, cast ballots that were not recognized by the various machines – whether optical scanners or punch card readers.
A further reading of the statute seems to suggest that legislators contemplated the sort of challenge that Gore and the Florida Democratic Party are making. The section setting forth the procedure for manual recounts describes what to do, for instance, when a counting team is unable to determine a voter's intent in casting a ballot. That's precisely the issue cited by the Democrats in their challenges.
In Lewis's court yesterday, Volusia County Assistant Attorney Frank B. Gummey III argued that vote-counting machinery failed on election night, showing unexpected rises and falls, sometimes by thousands of votes, in the totals for various candidates.
"I would contend there was an error in tabulation," Gummey told Judge Lewis.
Babington reported from Washington. Staff writers Sue Anne Pressley in West Palm Beach, George Lardner Jr. in Volusia County and April Witt in Fort Lauderdale contributed to this report.
Best Regards, J.T. |
