Gore’s tough fight getting tougher
By Roberto Suro and Jo Becker
THE WASHINGTON POST
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 26 — Moving to a new
battleground in their post-election struggle for
Florida’s 25 electoral votes, attorneys for Vice
President Gore will launch a broad court
challenge to the legitimacy of today’s new vote
count. But as Gore moves from county
canvassing boards to a courtroom here, he faces
an uphill battle, both mathematically and legally.
Republicans are
already
undertaking a
public relations
counteroffensive
that will portray
Gore as the
ultimate sore loser.
AS THE LOSER challenging the results, the burden is
on Gore to show that the election results were incorrect.
With the certified vote showing him 537 short of Texas
Gov. George W. Bush, Gore hopes he can make up the
difference in three counties, though some of those changes
may be easier to achieve than others, and lawyers from both
sides said the fight could well expand.
As Gore strategists see it, they could pick up 51 votes
from Nassau County,
where officials this
weekend suddenly
decided to throw out the
result of machine
recounts and stick with
the initial results.
Gore will also seek to convince the court to include
157 votes from Miami-Dade County that had already been
put in Gore’s column before that recount was abruptly
halted. In addition, Palm Beach could contribute about 210
votes — including those that had been counted and
submitted by the 5 p.m. deadline but were not included by
state officials because the recount was not complete, and
other votes that were counted after the deadline had
expired.
That would leave Gore with about 120 votes to go, at
which point his road becomes even tougher. To get to those
votes, Gore would have to convince the court either to
conduct a full recount of the 10,000 “undervotes” in
Miami-Dade that did not score a vote for president, or to
apply a more lenient standard to the “dimpled” ballots in
Palm Beach than did the county officials there.
Republicans don’t think he can do it. “As a legal
matter, it is impossible to overstate the importance of having
a certificate,” a Bush adviser said tonight. “The burden is
now on Gore to meet an almost impossible standard” of
proving that the certified results were wrong.
GOP FRAMES GORE LOSS
Republicans are already undertaking a public relations
counteroffensive that will portray Gore as the ultimate sore
loser. In court fights, they will argue that — however
chaotic the Florida recounts appeared — nothing happened
that would justify throwing out the work of canvassing
officials and substituting a judge’s vote tallies. And
Republican officials say they will fight back by challenging
the legality of votes that Gore gained through the counting of
indented or “dimpled” ballots.
The new phase of
legal wrangling comes
under a broadly worded
provision of Florida law
that allows any losing
candidate to challenge
the results if he thinks he
can show that he actually
won. The law gives
judges wide latitude to
fashion remedies, such
as throwing some votes
out or counting others
previously not included
in the tally.
Although court
contests are a regular
feature of local elections
across the country, there is no precedent for such a case in
the context of a presidential election. Officials in both
candidates’ camps admit that they are now venturing even
further than before into uncharted territory and that the
coming days will show how the two camps balance their
political needs with the take-no-prisoners logic of litigation.
“It seems apparent that the strategy is to use and abuse
the Florida election code to stall finality and engage in an
endless search for votes in a sea of dimpled, hanging and
other allegedly deficient chads,” said George Terwilliger, an
attorney for Bush.
Democrats contend that the legal challenges they will
file as early as Monday are intended to enhance the
legitimacy of the election. “All we’re trying to do is get the
votes counted,” said David Boies, a Gore attorney. “We’ve
said from the beginning that if they would just let the votes
get counted, however that worked out, that would
determine this election.”
U.S. SUPREME COURT’S ROLE
November 26, 2000
How might a ruling from
the nation’s highest court
change the Florida results?
NBC’s Pete Williams
reports.
Even as the contest proceeds, however, it will not be
the only action. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court will
consider whether the hand recounts that didn’t end up
getting Gore the votes he needed should have been included
in the final results at all.
How the justices fit into the complicated political and
legal picture is unclear because the argument has to some
extent moved beyond the question of whether the Florida
Supreme Court was right or wrong when it ordered the
secretary of state to include the results of the recount and
extend the deadline until tonight.
Another wild card is the role of the state legislature,
which is empowered under the U.S. Constitution to select
members of the electoral college “in such manner as [it] may
direct.” The leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature
have indicated that they are considering calling a special
session and possibly naming electors themselves.
Under Florida procedures, all of the legal challenges
will be filed in the circuit court for Leon County, where
Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. Boies said that it
might take until Tuesday to ship all the contested ballots and
other materials to Tallahassee, but he expressed confidence
that the process of trying the suits and hearing the inevitable
appeals before the Florida Supreme Court can be
completed in plenty of time for the electoral college
delegation to be named Dec. 12 as required under federal
law.
Although the hand recounts proved a laborious,
time-consuming process because the three members of each
canvassing board had to examine every ballot, Democrats
are confident that judges focusing only on disputed ballots
can move much faster.
“So we believe that the time is available to do the kind
of review that needs to be done,” Boies said.
EYE ON MIAMI-DADE
The fattest prize that Gore’s team will seek in the new
court suit lies in about 10,000 ballots cast in Miami-Dade
County that did not register a presidential vote when they
were put through tabulating machines. Democratic attorneys
argue that hundreds of those ballots are partially perforated
or indented punch cards that would be counted as Gore
votes when examined by human eyes.
“We’ll be asking the court to be sure that those votes
are at least counted once,” Boies said. “They were cast by
the voters, and no one has ever counted those, and no one,
at this point, can tell you who the voters voted those votes
for.”
With a full recount
in Miami-Dade,
said Gore senior
adviser Greg
Simon, ‘we would
easily have a net
gain to win the
election.’
Nonetheless, Gore advisers are confident the votes
would come their way. With a full recount in Miami-Dade,
said Gore senior adviser Greg Simon, “we would easily
have a net gain to win the election.”
A senior Republican attorney, however, noted that an
estimated 1.5 percent of the presidential vote nationwide fell
into the same category as the 10,000 “undervotes” in
Miami-Dade.
“Sizable numbers of undervotes are regrettable, but
they happened all over the place in every election and they
certainly are no basis for asking a judge to step in and
change the results,” the lawyer said.
Republicans will argue that the 157 ballots already
reviewed have no validity because they came in a hand
recount that never got off the ground, the attorney said.
The Democrats’ other major target, Palm Beach
County, may require a double-sided legal approach. On the
one hand, they will argue to have the state tally include the
gains for Gore from the hand recount. On the other hand,
Boies said they are considering whether to also argue that
the hand recount did not apply the proper standards for
counting dimpled ballots.
Latest MSNBC coverage of the dispute
Gore attorneys believe they would have picked up
more than 500 additional votes in Palm Beach - enough to
win the day — if the board there had used the same
standards as the canvassing board in Broward County,
where Gore picked up 367 votes on its recount of dimpled
ballots. Simon said the number could have been as high as
800.
The danger in this approach is that the Republicans
have already threatened in public that they will
counterchallenge the results in Broward if the Democrats
open the subject of dimpled ballots. The Democrats would
have to gamble their hard-won gains in Broward for the
chance of having a judge look at ballots from Palm Beach
that have already been examined and rejected by the
canvassing board there as having no discernible votes.
Staff writers Dana Milbank, Thomas B. Edsall, Ceci
Connolly and Susan Schmidt contributed to this report. |
