msnbc.com
Overseas votes stretch Bush’s lead
Democrats, GOP argue over recounts, international ballots; Republicans denounce manual tallies as ‘untrustworthy’
Nov. 18 — Republican George W. Bush more than tripled his lead Saturday in Florida, thanks to absentee ballots from Americans abroad. With manual recounts under way that Democrat Al Gore hopes can overcome Bush’s 930-vote advantage, Bush’s top spokeswoman turned up the heat in the GOP’s public relations effort to undermine the hand counts, denouncing them as “distorting, reinventing and miscounting” Florida’s votes.
epublicans alleged that Democrats were systematically trying to invalidate as many absentee ballots as they could from members of the military, who both parties presume favor Republican candidates.
More than 1,400 foreign ballots were disqualified. In some counties, half or nearly all of the foreign votes were rejected, many of them military ballots that apparently didn’t have postmarks.
At a midafternoon news conference Saturday in Austin, Texas, Karen Hughes, Bush’s communications director, complained of a “targeted effort by the Democratic Party to throw out as many as a third of the overseas ballots received since Election Day, many of them from the men and women of our armed services who are serving the cause of freedom throughout the world.” |
