Wow - If all the other shenanigans haven't proved that NBC is so liberally biased, this one surely does.
Even the paid Democratic shrills couldn't spin today's courtroom disaster like MSNBC did here:
msnbc.com
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 2 — George W. Bush’s lawyers slammed the brakes Saturday on Al Gore’s demand to recount ballots that he thinks could overturn Bush’s lead in Florida’s presidential election. Bush’s attorneys slowed a critical court hearing to a crawl, and the judge, who had hoped to wrap things up in a single day, was forced to recess for the night with more than a dozen witnesses yet to be heard. RACING AGAINST a Dec. 12 deadline to select the state’s presidential electors, Gore had hoped to win a speedy recount of 14,000 disputed ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, where a majority of voters supported him on Election Day.
But attorneys for Texas governor Bush ensured that Gore’s challenge to Florida’s certified returns would move slowly through a jumble of technical data on voting machines and statistics as an army of lawyers jammed a third-floor courtroom of the Leon County Courthouse.
State Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who convened the hearing to consider all of the claims the vice president is making in his contest to Florida’s certified election results, abandoned hope of finishing Saturday night and said the hearing would resume at 9 a.m. ET Sunday.
With time running out without a resolution, the Republican leaders of the Florida Legislature were debating whether they should convene a special session next week to consider naming the state’s 25 electors as a precaution in case the judge overturns Bush’s certified victory.
LEGAL AND ILLEGAL VOTES
At stake are Florida’s 25 votes in the Electoral College, which will be enough to crown a winner in the Nov. 7 presidential election.
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“The certified results reject a number of legal votes and include a number of illegal votes,” David Boies, Gore’s lead attorney, told Sauls on Saturday. “In an election contest, as long as they’re legal votes, they’ve got to be considered.”
But Republican attorneys said Gore could not “hand-pick” which ballots to recount — endlessly recounting them until they hit a winning number — and could not circumvent the certified results approved by county election canvassing boards.
“If we accept Mr. Boies’ premise, there is no reason for a tabulation on Election Night,” said Barry Richard, a member of Bush’s legal team.
SLOWING THINGS DOWN
When Sauls scheduled the hearing on Gore’s contest for Saturday, he said he intended to finish in one day so election officials would have enough time to count the 14,000 disputed ballots if he gave the go-ahead. Three times this week, he rejected Boies’ motions to start the count immediately.
But Saturday, Bush’s lawyers did their best to draw the hearing out as long as possible. Only four witnesses made it to the stand, making it impossible for Sauls to stick to his plan to complete the crucial hearing by day’s end.
Gore’s lawyers called only two witnesses Saturday, but detailed questioning by attorneys for Bush kept them on the stand for most of the day. It wasn’t until almost 5 p.m. ET that Republican lawyers called their first witness — the first of what could be as many as 20.
CONCESSIONS FOR BUSH
Bush attorney Phil Beck repeatedly questioned the qualifications of Gore’s first witness, Kimball Brace, president of a Virginia election consulting company, and maneuvered him into making an important concession for Bush’s side.
Under cross-examination, Brace acknowledged that “dimpled” chads — the tiny paper rectangles designed to be punched out from the ballots but left only indented — could result from simple handling of the ballots after the election.
“If I were to rub my finger across it, that could create an indentation, and that obviously should not be counted as intention to vote,” Brace said.
And in another concession that Beck later called crucial, Brace acknowledged that it is often not possible to discern voter intent from an indention on a ballot.
During the lunch recess, Beck said, “Even he agrees that you just cannot tell whether a dimple was left by someone who was intending to vote or by someone who was intending not to vote.”
JUDGE QUESTIONS WITNESS
Late Saturday, Sauls himself interjected to question Bush’s first witness, Judge Charles Burton, chairman of the canvassing board in Palm Beach County, which conducted a manual recount but didn’t finish in time for its results to be included in Florida’s certified total.
MSNBC legal analyst Ray Brown said that even though Bush’s team called Burton, he turned out to be a powerful witness for Gore.
Burton testified that the canvassing board decided to exclude ballots unless they showed a consistent pattern of incompletely punched-through “dimples” indicating a clear intention to vote.
Brown said Boies limited his cross-examination to two questions because he was satisfied that he had established that the Palm Beach County board disobeyed a judge’s order that it not start with a presumption to exclude certain types of ballots.
NEW DEMAND FROM BUSH
In addition to slowing down the hearing in Sauls’ courtroom, Bush’s legal team also introduced a new demand that the judge expand any recount he orders to include all of the votes cast in two counties where Gore benefited from recounts performed shortly after the election.
The complaint alleged that political bias had infected hand recounts in Volusia and Broward counties. Gore, who requested the recounts, gained more than 600 votes in Broward’s recount and 98 in Volusia.
The new Republican filing also effectively sought to bypass a lawsuit challenging the certified vote in Republican-leaning Seminole County by asking Sauls to certify totals reported there as “legal and proper.”
The filing added a new level of complexity to the contested election. Republicans’ first choice, however, was to have no further recounting.
“I, respectfully, do not think in the contest that there is a basis in Florida to have a recount for voter error, and surely do not believe that there was ever any intention that a judge be substituted for a canvassing board,” said Joseph Klock, a lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who declared Bush the winner last Sunday. |
