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To: steve harris who wrote (128574)	11/14/2000 11:09:46 PM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1583407

Steve, Here is one: cnn.com (CNN) -- Attorneys for the Broward County Democratic Party filed Tuesday morning for an emergency hearing to challenge the county's decision not to manually count all of the election ballots. A party volunteer accompanying the attorneys said Democrats were "very hopeful" the judge would rule in their favor. Attorney Charles Lichtman said the reason for filing was that "every vote should count." Republicans at the Broward County courthouse criticized the Democrats for filing the suit. "I guess if you don't like the result, you just keep the ball in the air," said Ed Povvuoli, chairman of the Broward Republican Party. Broward County election canvassers decided Monday 2-to-1 not to proceed with the manual recount after a sample of about 1 per cent of the county's voters found a difference of only four votes -- in Gore's favor. The Democratic lawsuit is directed against the members of the canvassing commission. The county canvassers voted to reject the full manual recount after receiving an advisory opinion from the state elections division, within the office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris, which had been requested by the state Republican party. The advisory said, "The inability of a voting system to read an improperly punched card ballot is not an error in the vote tabulation and would not trigger the requirement for the canvassing board to hold a manual recount for the whole county." In the filing, the Democrats cite Attorney General Bob Butterworth's advisory opinion disagreeing with Harris' views as to what should constitute a need for manual recount. Lichtman said the advisory missed the point, and that the issue did not concern improperly punched ballot cards. "We had properly punched ballots that weren't being counted by the ballots. All we were asking was ballots that were properly punched be counted." Lichtman said the advisory contained several other flaws. For example, he said, Florida law holds that the Republican Party can seek advisory opinions only about its own conduct. "It cannot seek an advisory opinion about the conduct of any other institution," he said. Lichtman also cited a Florida statute he said makes advisory opinions binding only on the person seeking the opinion. "Clearly, the canvassing board did not seek the opinion," he said. The secretary of state's office in Florida "is a Republican-held body controlled by Mr. [Jeb] Bush," Lichtman said of GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush's brother. Lichtman said he was not sure whether the four votes that had been found in Al Gore's favor would be added to the Democrat's official tally.

To: steve harris who wrote (128574)	11/14/2000 11:17:38 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583407

Steve, Here is a summary: washingtonpost.com In Palm Beach County, officials halted the hand counting after an order from Harris's office early in the day, then agreed after an outdoor meeting late in the day to come back today and begin counting all 430,000 ballots manually. Palm Beach officials also decided to join an appeal to the ruling leaving it to Harris's discretion whether to accept a corrected county vote total based on hand-counted ballots. In Miami-Dade County, a three-member canvassing board handed the Democrats a significant setback tonight by voting 2 to 1 to deny their lawyers' request that all ballots cast in Dade County in the presidential election be manually recounted or that the 10,750 so-called undercounted votes be tallied by hand. officials decided to start hand counting ballots today in three selected precincts as a prelude to a decision about whether to recount all the ballots by hand in the county's 614 precincts. The three precincts are heavily Democratic and after the manual recount, Gore had picked up six votes. Bush officials protested that Miami-Dade officials set no uniform standards for hand counting the ballots. In Broward County, officials planned to meet again today to decide whether to go ahead with hand counting of all ballots after an initial decision to forgo such a step. The events in Broward caused confusion throughout the day, as Democrats challenged in court the decision of county officials not to hand count all the ballots, modified their request and eventually won a ruling that still left the decision to local officials' discretion. In Volusia County, officials completed its manual recount by the deadline. But officials nonetheless went ahead with a planned appeal of Lewis's ruling. Joe