This's just in: Judge to Rule Tuesday Morning Whether Deadline Will Stand
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
November 13, 2000
(AP)
Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis questions lawyers for Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush in Tallahassee, Fla., over a deadline that could end hand counting on Tuesday.
Election officials in Florida hurried today to recount votes by hand in predominately Democratic counties after a federal judge denied a Republican attempt to stop them, but a judge said today he would decide on Tuesday morning whether the counts could be disqualified if they do not meet a 5 p.m. state deadline.
The campaign of Vice President Al Gore, hoping the recounts yield enough votes to win him Florida and the presidency, joined a legal suit by election officials from Volusia County seeking to force Florida's Secretary of State to extend the deadline beyond 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Katherine Harris, the secretary of state, said today the only votes that would be allowed after the deadline were absentee ballots mailed from overseas.
Judge Terry Lewis who is hearing the suit by Democrats seeking to extend the Tuesday deadline said he would issue a decision between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. about whether to uphold it. But he raised questions abnout Republican arguments in the Leon County Circuit Court today, reported David Firestone, a New York Times reporter covering the hearing.
The judge questioned lawyers for Ms. Harris' office and the campaign of George W. Bush, asking why the Florida legislature would have enacted a law allowing recounts by hand if it did not give large counties enough time to complete a manual count.
As the legal wrangling in Florida grew more intense today, Mr. Gore made his first public comments since the day after the election, telling reporters outside the White House that more was at stake than merely winning the presidency.
"What is at stake is our democracy; making sure the will of the American people is expressed and accurately received," Mr. Gore said. "That is why I have believed from the start while time is important it is even more important every vote is counted, and counted accurately. There is something very special about our process that depends totally on the American people having a chance to express their will," he said.
"Look, I would not want to win the presidency by a few votes cast in error, or misinterpreted or not counted," the vice president said.
"I don't think Governor Bush wants that either." He declined to answer questions during his brief appearance.
Karen P. Hughes, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bush, criticized Mr. Gore's comments, calling them troubling. She said his request for a hand count would break the deadline, thus violating the laws of Florida.
"The vice president essentially said we should ignore the law so he can overturn the results of this election," Ms Hughes said. "The people of Florida, as I said earlier, deserve to have their ballots counted fairly and accurately, not selectively or subjectively."
The Democrats had asked for the manual recounts in four counties: Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia. Democrats said they believed that irregularities had deprived Mr. Gore of numerous votes in those strongly Democratic counties. But lawyers for the Bush campaign had sought an injunction that would stop recounts by hand.
In a ruling early this afternoon, Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of the United States District Court in Miami denied the Bush campaign request. He said that any challenge to last Tuesday's results should be made in Florida state courts and not federal court, reported Kevin Sack, a New York Times correspondent who covered the hearing in Miami today.
Theodore B. Olson, a lawyer for the Republicans, said after the ruling that he had not decided whether today's decision would be appealed to the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, or, alternatively, whether he would file a lawsuit in state court, Mr. Sack reported.
The deadline announced by Ms. Harris, a Republican elected official who has campaigned for Mr. Bush, angered advisers for Mr. Gore.
Warren Christopher, Mr. Gore's representative in Florida, called her decision "arbitrary and unreasonable," and suggested she was acting out of partisan motives.
"Her plan, I am afraid, has the look of an effort to produce a particular result in the election rather than to ensure the voice of all citizens will be heard," Mr. Christopher told reporters in Tallahassee.
"It also looks like a move in the direction toward partisan politics and away from a non-partisan administration of the election laws."
Mr. Christopher, a former secretary of state, said the Gore campaign had joined the action in state court by Volusia County to extend the deadline. If the county met the deadline, he said, the campaign would make legal challenges in other counties. Palm Beach county, where officials have said it would be impossible to finish by Tuesday evening, also was given permission to join the lawsuit today by the judge assigned to the case.
Mr. Christopher and the Gore campaign chairman, William Daley, met with Ms. Harris and Bush campaign advisers, including former Secretary of State James A. Baker 3rd this morning to learn of her decision. He characterized the meeting -- in what he called "generous" terms -- as "brief and businesslike."
In one sense, the announcement by Ms. Harris was a recitation of her duties under the law, said Todd Purdum, a New York York Times correspondent reporting from Tallahassee. But in the politically charged atmosphere in the state, it also amounted to challenging the Democrats to finish whatever recounting they hope to do in less than 36 hours.
In all statewide tallies to date, Mr. Bush has held a small lead, ranging from several hundred votes to about 1,000 votes, depending on which tallies are used.
The Associated Press has compiled a running tally from all 67 counties that shows Mr. Bush leading by fewer than 400 votes. But the Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach is the sole county that has yet to report any official returns to the state, so the state's own tally has Mr. Bush with a bigger lead.
Palm Beach has not reported any results from its machine recount because a state judge issued an injunction against reporting any new results after voters filed suit contending that a confusing ballot in the county had caused them to vote for the wrong candidate.
A hearing over those suits was delayed today after lawyers for the plaintiffs accused Judge Stephen A. Rapp of making derogatory comments about voters who had trouble understanding the ballots. Judge Rapp denied the allegations but recused himself.
There was confusion today about just what would happen if a county's tallies were not finished by the deadline, and whether partial manual recounts of some contested precincts might be incorporated, Mr. Purdum reported. One section of the state election law governing the three-member state canvassing board stipulates that all counties with tallies missing by the deadline "shall be ignored," while the following section said such returns "may be ignored" by the Department of State "and the results on file at that time may be certified."
Ms. Harris dispatched workers from her office to election supervisors' offices in each of the states' 67 counties, so they would be on the scene and available to receive the latest returns by the Tuesday deadline, Mr. Purdum said
Ms. Harris said she would ask county election officials to certify by Saturday morning at the latest the results of an unknown number of outstanding overseas absentee ballots that are due on Friday.
"Therefore, I anticipate that the presidential election in Florida will be officially certified by Saturday afternoon, barring judicial intervention," she said. Ms. Harris said the law gave her no discretion to extend the deadline with the possible exception of natural disasters.
Officials of Volusia County said they filed their suit for an extension even though they expected to finish the manual count by Tuesday or even late tonight.
"One never knows what problems might come up," said Michael McDermott, the chairman of Volusia's canvassing committee, which is supervising the recount.
He noted that in one precinct last night, 320 ballots were found that had never been counted at all. "That was at least a 10 on the Richter Scale, as far as I was concerned," he said.
A county spokesman, David Byron, said the manual recount by this morning showed that Mr. Bush had picked up 229 more votes and Mr. Gore 208, for a net gain of 21 for the Republican candidate. Voters cast more than 180,000 ballots in Volusia, where Daytona Beach is located.
In Palm Beach, another county in which Democrats said there was sufficient evidence of irregularities to merit a hand count, county officials decided to proceed with counting the 425,000 votes despite Ms. Harris's decision. They expected the recount take six days, with workers logging two seven-hour shifts a day.
A manual recount began this afternoon in Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, while officials in Miami-Dade County were seeking consensus on whether and how to proceed with a manual recount there.
Palm Beach County is at the center of the wrangling because of disputes over the ballot format and several thousand punch-card ballots that may not have been perforated clearly enough to be counted accurately by machine.
After the latest round of counting in Palm Beach, Mr. Gore appeared to take a net gain of some 55 votes there, according to The Associated Press.
In Seminole County, officials said they would certify a recount result that granted a 98-vote net gain to Mr. Bush, according to Michael Moss, a New York Times correspondent reporting from West Palm Beach. That came despite a complaint filed by a Democratic lawyer that an election official allowed Republican officials to correct errors on thousands of absentee ballots for Republican voters.
In the federal court argument, Republicans pressed their claim that selective counts would be a violation of the constitutional guarantee to equal protection of the law.
Mr. Olson told reporters after the hearing that the recount was unfair because it would mean that votes in Democratic parts of the state would be treated differently than Republican sections.
"When votes are weighted differently depending on where you live, that is a dilution of an individual's right to vote," Mr. Olson said, reflecting arguments before Judge Middlebrooks, who is a Clinton appointee.
He said the hand counts would introduce human bias into the count, especially because the recounts in the four Florida counties were being overseen by Democratic officials.
"Counts by machinery are more fair, reliable, and predictable. A machine does not care who wins the election. People do," Mr. Olson said.
But Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor who is representing the Gore campaign, said any inequality was the Republicans' making because they had not asked for recounts in Republican-leaning counties.
"The basic principle is that states should do their best to make sure the actual will of the people is expressed in the vote for the president," he said "That is done in a different way in different states, but one way is to recount manually when it is terribly close and there is a reason to believe the machine screwed up."
The Bush camp seized on the tableau of the manual recount of sample precincts in Palm Beach, which stretched into the early morning hours Sunday and involved officials peering at paper punch cards to check for snagged perforations and then arguing about the results, as an example of the kind of chaos that could ensue.
Democrats said the hand counts should proceed because they were allowed under Florida law and would be more accurate than machine counts.
___
Ibexx |
