Rarebird,
good news...Gore set to gain as many as 1900 votes in recount. that should put him over the top:-))
Hopes Dim for Speedy Resolution of Election
Sunday, November 12, 2000
By Alan Elsner, Political Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hopes that the disputed U.S. presidential election might be resolved soon faded on Sunday as four Florida counties moved to recount the vote by hand while George W. Bush and Al Gore prepared to take the battle for the White House to court on Monday.
Florida's Palm Beach County early on Sunday ordered an extraordinary hand recount of all presidential ballots cast there after a sample retabulation of four precincts, representing around 1 percent of the vote, produced 19 more votes for Gore, the Democratic nominee.
According to at least one report, that reduced Bush's lead in the crucial state to below 300, raising fears in the Republican camp that the widening recount, if allowed to proceed, could move Gore into the lead and win the election.
A federal judge will hear on Monday a request by the Bush campaign to halt hand recounts in the four Florida counties and a state judge was to hear a case by Gore supporters requesting a new poll with a less confusing ballot in Palm Beach County.
Palm Beach officials said if 19 votes emerged from 1 percent of the vote, the complete recount could change the picture by hundreds of votes.
Three other mainly Democratic counties -- Volusia, Broward and Miami-Dade -- were also either conducting or preparing to conduct manual recounts, in which officials examine each ballot by hand to decide the voter's intention.
Election workers expected to finish Volusia's recount on Tuesday afternoon but said they would ask a court on Monday for an extension of Tuesday's 5 p.m. EST deadline to certify election results, just in case.
Florida's 25 electoral votes would give either man the 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. Following Tuesday's election, Gore has 255 votes, Bush has 246 and 37 are undecided, from Oregon and New Mexico as well as Florida.
Former Secretary of State James Baker, representing Bush in Florida, said the country was on a slippery slope. He vowed to vigorously fight the manual recounts in the courts.
COURT BATTLE TO BEGIN MONDAY
That process begins Monday at 9:30 a.m., when a federal judge in Miami will hear the Bush campaign's request for an injunction to halt the manual recounts. Whatever the ruling, the decision seems certain to be appealed to the next level, possibly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Democrats on Sunday urged the court to throw out the Republican suit, arguing that the Florida hand count is not unconstitutional as Bush and others claim and disputing that the matter should be considered by the federal court at all.
Asked if the Bush campaign would appeal if they lose, Baker replied on CNN: "We have said that we will vigorously contest the efforts for a manual recount in selective counties here in Florida. If that means going up, maybe that's what it would mean. On the other hand, maybe we won't."
The Bush campaign, which launched a fund-raising campaign to pay for recount-associated costs on Sunday, has held out the threat of calling for recounts in Iowa and Wisconsin, both narrowly won by the vice president, as well as Oregon and New Mexico, which remain contested. After the latest count in New Mexico, Bush, the Texas governor, leads by 17 votes.
Arizona's Republican Sen. John McCain expressed the growing concern of many Americans that the deadlock could paralyze the country. He said whoever emerged the victor would find himself extremely compromised.
"I think the nation is growing a little weary of this. We're not in a constitutional crisis, but the American people are growing weary. And whoever wins is having a rapidly diminishing mandate, to say the least," McCain said.
Polls found a majority expressing a willingness to wait for an accurate vote count. A Newsweek survey found that by a 72 percent to 25 percent margin, Americans said it was more important to make certain the presidential vote in Florida was fair and accurate than to resolve the election quickly.
A Time magazine survey of 1,154 adults on Friday found that only 27 percent believed Gore should concede before the results of an official Florida recount are released.
FEAR OF SPIRALING LAWSUITS
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli said: "My fear was that we would head to a downward spiral of retribution with lawsuits in different states and different bases ... Unfortunately we have now entered that spiral."
Baker said the presidential deadlock was a "black mark" on the U.S. election process and offered to drop the Bush suit if Democrats agreed to stop hand recounts and respect the result next Friday after Florida's overseas mail-in ballots are in.
"Whoever wins then, wins," Baker told NBC's "Meet the Press." "We will accept that result." There was no sign the Gore camp would agree.
Baker's counterpart on the Gore campaign, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, while not addressing the Baker comment directly, told "Meet the Press" he expected the outcome of the presidential race would be known in "a matter of days."
Former Sen. Alan Simpson said the recounts in Florida should be brought to an end. "At some point in time you have to draw the curtain on this tawdry mess," the Wyoming Republican said in a conference call with reporters.
But Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway said local officials were working hard to count the ballots. "We believe that the American people want to see this done right and that the local officials are doing their very best to do it right," he said.
At a raucous early-morning meeting on Sunday, surrounded by political operatives and reporters, Palm Beach County's Canvassing Board voted 2-to-1 for the new hand count.
After spending hours conducting a painstaking manual tally of 4,500 sample ballots, comprising 1 percent of votes cast in the county, the board found a net gain of 19 votes for Gore.
In arguing for the countywide count, board member Carol Roberts said that if the 19 votes Gore won on Saturday were 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 the White House.
The board plans to meet at 10 a.m. on Monday while the judge's hearing is under way to discuss logistics for the full countywide manual recount. The vote counting in Palm Beach County began on Saturday afternoon and the results were finally announced about 1:45 a.m. on Sunday.
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 nominee Patrick Buchanan. More than half of the ballots in which people voted for more than one candidate had holes punched for Gore and Buchanan.
At the Republicans' request, 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 -- a gain of 36 votes for Gore and a loss of three votes for Bush. That was a net gain of 39 votes for Gore since the last recount.
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.
It was the first request for court intervention by either side to settle the election in which both Bush and Gore polled 48.9 percent of the nearly 6 million votes cast in Florida. |
