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To: isopatch who wrote (79488)	11/19/2000 4:25:27 PM
From: Razorbak	Respond to of 95453

O/T - 39% of Received Absentee Ballots Were Rejected "Lieberman Says Dems Not Trying to Block Absentee Ballots" Vice Presidential Hopeful Says Disputed Votes Deserve 'Benefit of Doubt' November 19, 2000 Web posted at: 2:18 p.m. EST (1918 GMT) WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman made the rounds on the Sunday talk-show circuit, as charges escalated over military ballots excluded from the absentee vote total and both parties prepared for a legal showdown before the Florida Supreme Court. Both Lieberman and Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, who appeared on behalf of Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush, also refused to rule out further legal action if Florida's highest court rules against their respective camps. The nine-member panel will convene at 2 p.m. EST Monday to hear arguments on whether to include results of manual recounts in three heavily Democratic counties to the state's final tally. "I think you need to proceed as far as it takes to make certain that the truth is established," Racicot told Fox News Sunday. "There's never been any dispute about the fact that every vote that we can authentically determine was made ought to be counted." Bush took a 930-lead over Democrat Al Gore for the Sunshine State's 25 electoral votes after the count of absentee ballots from overseas was completed Saturday. But Republicans charged that Democrats moved to suppress a number of overseas ballots from military service personnel -- over, the GOP said, the smallest of technicalities. Lieberman, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," said: "The vice president and I would never authorize and would not tolerate a campaign that was aimed specifically at invalidating ballots from members of our armed services, and I've been assured that there were more absentee ballots from non-military voters that were ultimately disqualified." Canvassing boards in Florida's 67 counties approved 2,206 of the ballots and rejected 1,420 (39 percent) of them, according to an Associated Press survey. Democrats reportedly raised objections to ballots -- which traditionally favor Republicans -- due to problems with witness and voter signatures and missing postmarks. Lieberman said he was not aware of a Democratic statewide strategy to protest overseas absentee ballots. The Connecticut senator was questioned about a letter from a Democratic Tallahassee lawyer that was said to explain how to knock out overseas military ballots from the counting process. Lieberman said the letter simply detailed Florida law regarding overseas ballots and wasn't intended to be focused on military personnel. "In fact, we think that the ballots -- both the absentee ballots and the ones that are being hand counted in the three counties in South Florida now -- deserve the benefit of the doubt," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday." Former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, a World War II veteran, said Democrats must offer a more detailed explanation about the overseas ballot controversy. "I think it would be appropriate now for Gore/Lieberman to say something about the military ballots. I believe that if there is a technicality that their vote can't be counted, American people will want to know why," the former Kansas senator told "Meet the Press." Lieberman repeated Gore's proposal that both camps agree to a full hand recount in all of Florida's 67 counties and agree to abide by that result. He would not say if Democrats were prepared to accept the state Supreme Court ruling on hand recounts as final. "I'm sure that the campaign will look at where we are after the Supreme Court rules, and at this point take no options off of the table," he told CBS's "Face the Nation." Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County began a mechanical sorting of 654,000 punch-card ballots after a judge rejected a Republican request to keep the ballots out of a machine. The aim of machine sorting is to isolate ballots that don't indicate a clear selection so that election officials can then try, by examining the ballots, to determine the voters' intention. Officials hope to isolate the ballot in advance of Monday's planned hand recount, opposed by Republicans. In Palm Beach County, the county judge overseeing the process pleaded with the counters and observers for civility after a fracas broke out when a counter accidentally put a ballot in the wrong pile. Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tennessee, told ABC's "This Week" that the entire process is prone to human error and tainted by Democratic bias. "The dogs of war have been unleashed in Florida, and that's what happens when you deviate from the rule of law and go into this morass of subjective hand counting with no standards, changing standards all of the time," Thompson said. Gore's supporters said the tedious manual counting that could continue into next month is the only fair way to proceed. "I think we have to remember we've got to protect the integrity of the process so that people have confidence in the inevitable outcome at some point," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, told "This Week." Daschle said he is prepared to work closely with the eventual winner "to restore his credibility and authority." No matter who wins the election, President Clinton said, the American people may benefit from the closeness of the race. "It might be sobering for the country to realize that we are in a completely new era," Clinton said in a CNN interview. "It is still clear that about two-thirds of the people want a dynamic center that pulls the people together and moves us forward." The Associated Press contributed to this report. cnn.com

To: isopatch who wrote (79488)	11/19/2000 11:19:58 PM
From: JungleInvestor	Respond to of 95453

OT: "Voters decide nothing; people who count votes decide everything." Joseph Stalin Above quote is very pertinent to what is happening in Florida. Excerpt from NY Times article below shows if Gore cannot get enough votes, they'll make votes by changing to an off-the-wall standard: <<The Republicans again harshly criticized the process as unfair, pointing particularly to the decision this morning by the Broward County Canvassing Board to adopt a broader standard when determining what constitutes a vote. The board, made up of two Democrats and a Republican, voted unanimously to consider dimpled or one- corner chads, the tiny pieces of paper that are normally dislodged from punch cards when a voter makes a choice, as possible votes for either Vice President Al Gore or Gov. George W. Bush. Previously, the board had counted only chads with two or more corners punched through as votes. The change came at the request of Democrats, who are clearly discouraged that the hand recounts in Broward and Palm Beach Counties have yet to produce the huge surge of additional votes for Mr. Gore that they had hoped to see by the time the Florida Supreme Court convened on Monday afternoon to consider whether the hand recounts should be included in the official count. With 410 of Broward County's 609 precincts manually counted by tonight, Mr. Gore had a net gain of 107 votes over the official tallies sent to the secretary of state on Tuesday. In Palm Beach County, workers have completed 31 of the 531 precincts and have come up with a net gain of 12 votes for Mr. Bush.>> nytimes.com