Gore getting heat from Democrats
James Kuhnhenn, Knight Ridder Newspapers
On the eve of a crucial Florida Supreme Court confrontation, Republican lawyers Sunday pressed for an end to tedious hand recounts in the state, while some Democrats warned Vice President Al Gore to be ready to concede the presidential election if the court rules against him.
As the post-election fight ended its 12th day, Gore gained little ground from partially completed recounts in two big Democratic counties and remained far short of erasing the unofficial 930-vote edge that Texas Gov. George W. Bush now holds in Florida.
Republicans filed legal papers and used television interviews to protest the hand-counting process that threatens to overturn Bush's fragile grip on Florida's 25 electoral votes, which will decide the closest presidential election in American history.
For Gore, mounting pressure from within his own party was potentially as serious a threat as the Republican legal challenges.
Democratic moderates Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana and former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia cautioned the Gore camp about continuing to litigate the election if the top Florida court rules against him after today's hearing.
"I would like to see that be the final decision," Breaux said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation. "It's called the Supreme Court for a reason."
Nunn, also on CBS, added, "In the final analysis, the candidates have to step up to the plate, I think, and basically be the clients that decide the case rather than the lawyers."
Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, appeared in several Sunday morning talk shows and declined to say whether the Gore camp would concede if the court ruled against them.
"That's not for me to say now," he said on ABC. "That's a decision to be made by the vice president and I, with others, together, including people in Florida who may have their own separate desire to go on."
The Supreme Court will be hearing arguments this afternoon over whether Florida's top elections official, Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, acted lawfully when she announced that she would not consider hand recounts submitted after an official deadline of 5 p.m. last Tuesday, one week after the election. A lower court judge upheld Harris' decision, which if sustained, would award the White House to Bush.
The recounts came under even greater scrutiny Sunday when the Broward County Canvassing Board voted unanimously to change its standards for hand counting votes. The new rules will allow election workers to consider indentations in the punch-card ballots to determine the intent of voters. At the same time, Miami-Dade County began sorting more than 650,000 ballots Sunday and was expected to identify more than 10,000 that would require special manual scrutiny.
When absentee ballots at the end of the week stretched Bush's lead from 300 to 930, Gore's supporters "changed the rules so that they could manufacture additional Gore votes," said Montana's Republican Gov. Marc Racicot. "It's wrong, it's flawed, and it is a process that is simply and honestly not worthy of our democracy."
Florida's senior senator, Democrat Bob Graham said he was "offended" by the Bush attacks on the recount effort. "This is being carried out largely by citizens who are doing this as a matter of civic duty and is being conducted in a very sunshine manner where there is full access to representatives of press," Graham said.
In Palm Beach County, election officials plodded on with their manual recount, generating few votes for Gore and prompting the vice president's camp to press the Supreme Court for the same liberalized standards adopted by Broward County.
In a reply to the Republican legal briefs, Gore's lawyers argued that "if a voter has marked a ballot in a manner that cannot be read by a machine, but the voter's intent can be discerned from the ballot, that ballot must be counted." Republicans have objected to that standard, saying it is too subjective and prone to abuse.
As Bush spokesmen tried to raise doubts about the fairness of the manual counts, they also complained about the handling of absentee ballots, particularly ballots from military personnel stationed overseas.
"Even after a concerted effort by Al Gore's campaign to reject the votes of as many members of the armed forces as they could, Governor Bush's margin of victory, in fact, increased," said Racicot.
In fact, several county canvassing boards did throw out absentee ballots that did not contain postmarks, witness signatures, or witness addresses --- all of which are required by state law. In many cases, the ballots were rejected by joint agreement of Democratic and Republican election officials.
But Lieberman, recognizing the potentially explosive notion of soldiers being disenfranchised, said on NBC Sunday that "I would give the benefit of the doubt to ballots coming in from military personnel."
"I'd urge them to go back and take another look," he said of election officials.
In their legal filing to the Supreme Court, Bush's lawyers urged the seven justices to prevent the recounts from being used to decide the Florida election. They argued that Harris had properly turned down manual counts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade because they missed the statutory deadline for final results.
But the Bush lawyers also seemed to suggest that a statewide recount might not be as objectionable as the three-county recount now underway.
"Allowing these three counties and only these three counties to include manual recounts will inevitably skew the results in a partisan manner that favors Democrats," the Bush legal brief said. "In a county election, no court would permit a recount in only four of 67 precincts, particularly if those precincts were selected by one political party and were composed predominantly of members of one party."
Last week, Bush rejected a proposal from Gore to accept a statewide recount in exchange for dropping all legal challenges to the election.
The new recounts, most of them relying on the stricter standards of reading ballots, were not generating substantial gains for Gore. With more than half of Broward county's 609 precincts counted, Gore had gained 90 votes. The ballots will now be examined under the broader standard. |
