I am catching up on the thread, so I son't know if this has been posted yet.
With Sunday deadline near, Gore's prospects look bleak
BY PETER WHORISKEY
pjwhoriskey@herald.com
With less than 48 hours to go before the vote tally deadline, an analysis of the manual recount so far suggests that Vice President Al Gore is unlikely to overcome the 930-vote machine-count lead held by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
In Broward County, where the recount has been completed except for 600 challenged ballots, Gore is headed toward a net gain of fewer than 500 votes.
In Palm Beach, where the recount in more than 210 of 637 precincts has been completed, Gore is on pace to pick up fewer than 340 votes.
The total of these projections leaves Gore 90 or more votes short of erasing the 930-vote margin.
``I think we can get the votes, but it's going to be really, really close,'' said Ben Kuehne, a Democratic Party attorney monitoring the recount.
While Gore advocates had begun the South Florida recount with high hopes, two critical decisions have diminished the Gore totals.
First, the Miami-Dade canvassing board on Wednesday abandoned its hand count, citing the Sunday deadline as an impossible barrier.
That decision took out of play 10,750 so-called ``undervote'' ballots, or those for which the machine recorded no presidential votes. The hand count likely would have found dimpled chads on some of those ballots, and those would have amounted to hundreds of new votes, most of them likely favoring Gore.
Before the hand count was abandoned Wednesday, about 1,800 of the 10,750 undervote ballots had been considered. The review had turned up 388 new votes at that point, yielding a net gain for Gore of 156 votes.
The other damper on the Gore campaign tally came from the Palm Beach canvassing board, which appears to have applied very strict standards when hand counting the ballots: So far, the Palm Beach canvassing board has deemed that only about five percent of the undervote ballots actually have markings clear enough to indicate a vote. At the current rate, the canvassing board will turn up less than 515 new votes.
To make up the margin left after the projected Broward gain, Gore would have to win a remarkable 91 percent of those 515 new votes. So far, Gore has gained only about 40 percent of the new votes turned up by the hand count in Palm Beach, and, overall, he is favored by only 59 percent of Palm Beach voters.
Projected trends in Palm Beach are based on results from 212 Palm Beach precincts, representing about 28 percent of the ballots cast. Those precincts generally favored Gore, as Palm Beach did, but by a slightly smaller margin than the county overall.
The projected trends in Broward are based on the results of all 609 precincts, with all but 600 of 1,800 challenged ballots still to be
`We believe we stand on both strong political and legal ground.'
-- RON KLAIN,
an advisor to Al Gore
reviewed. Late Friday, Gore had a net gain of 369 votes in Broward.
The Herald's analysis of the Palm Beach county precincts shows one unexpected phenomena: While the hand count is generally expected to find new votes where voter markings were unreadable by machine, some Palm Beach precincts showed fewer votes after the hand count. Exactly why this happened is not clear.
If Gore trails Bush when the hand count is completed Sunday, his campaign has indicated that they will push forward in court.
``We believe we stand on both strong political and legal ground for fighting beyond Sunday,'' said Ron Klain, a Gore advisor.
``There have been too many surprises during this election to say what Al Gore should do on Sunday,'' said Connecticut's democratic attorney general, Richard Blumenthal. ``Everything could have changed by that point . . . however, he should certainly explore all legal options that are credible.''
Herald Staff Writers Steve Harrison, Daniel De Vise, Shari Rudavsky, Don Finefrock and Herald Researcher Romann Weber contributed to this report.
credit drudgereport.com |
