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>Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from [log in to unmask]
>Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 01:23:18 -0500 (EST)
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>Gore Gets a Recount; Bush Appeals
>By Dan Balz
>Washington Post Staff Writer
>December 09, 2000
>
>
The Florida Supreme Court, splitting 4-3, yesterday ordered immediate manual
recounts of tens of thousands of ballots from Miami-Dade and many other
counties across the state, overruling a lower court and boosting Vice
President Gore's hopes of winning his battle for the presidency against
Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
>
The bitterly divided court also ruled that 383 votes – 215 from Palm
Beach County and 168 from Miami-Dade County – tabulated during an
earlier recount should be added to Gore's certified total, reducing Bush's
lead from 537 votes to a bare 154 votes as the new round of counting was set
to begin.
>
The decision, which came after Democrats lost two related cases involving
the handling of absentee ballot applications, stunned Republicans and
Democrats alike, many of whom believed that the month-long dispute over who
won Florida was winding toward a close this weekend.
>
The Bush campaign immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and to the
11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and sought an emergency injunction to
halt the manual recounts. The Florida high court said the hand count should
begin at once to complete the work by Tuesday's deadline for naming
Florida's 25 presidential electors.
>
The state Supreme Court ruling plunged the nation into unexplored territory,
legally and politically, with some experts predicting the presidential race
may not be decided until early next year when it reaches a Congress already
sharply divided along partisan lines. The decision also raised concerns that
the bitterness of the post-election battle will continue well after the next
president is sworn into office on Jan. 20, compounding the problems the new
chief executive may have in attempting to govern effectively.
>
The ruling put the Florida judiciary on a collision course with the
Republican-controlled Florida legislature, which convened a special session
yesterday for the purpose of naming a pro-Bush set of electors if the
election remains in doubt as of Tuesday.
>
Already exhausted and emotionally spent from the constantly shifting legal
terrain, advisers to Bush and Gore scrambled anew last night to prepare
fresh legal appeals and to put people in place to oversee an unprecedented
statewide recount.
>
Gore advisers quickly fanned out to key counties last night, with several
planeloads of observers ready to arrive early today. One Gore adviser said
the Democrats would have observers and lawyers in every county that
undertakes a new manual recount.
>
Bush advisers, who were readying plans for a victory celebration and a
series of White House staff and Cabinet announcements, quickly shifted gears
and implemented a plan prepared earlier as a contingency in the event of a
statewide recount. Two teams left Austin within three hours of the decision
and others were expected to head to Florida from other states today.
>
In the Supreme Court ruling, the four justices in the majority concluded
that Leon County Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls had made numerous
errors in his opinion on Monday, which rejected Gore's bid to reverse the
certification of Bush as the winner in Florida. Among the errors, the
justices said, was Sauls's reading of the law on whether Gore had to show
that he had a reasonable probability of winning the election through
additional manual recounts.
>
The justices also said Sauls had presented Gore "with the ultimate Catch-22"
in trying to prove that argument by allowing the 9,000 Miami-Dade
"undercount" ballots – which registered no presidential vote during
machine counting – to be submitted as evidence but then refusing to
examine those ballots.
>
The justices yesterday ordered those ballots to be counted. But the justices
also said that to guard against charges of selectivity in the recounts, any
county with undervote ballots that had not been examined by hand should now
arrange to count them. That involves an estimated 36,000 additional votes
around the state.
>
Noting that "time is desperately short, the justices wrote, "We must do
everything required by law to ensure that legal votes that have not been
counted are included in the final election results."
>
The majority opinion also ruled that Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris was wrong to exclude the results of the partial recount in Miami-Dade
County and figures filed after a court-established deadline on Nov. 26 from
Palm Beach County. It reversed Sauls's decision upholding her action and
ordered that those votes be included in Gore's tally.
>
"The deadline was never intended to prohibit legal votes identified after
that date [Nov. 26] through ongoing manual recounts to be excluded from the
statewide official results in the Election Canvassing Commission's
certification of the results of a recount of less than all of a county's
ballots," the opinion said. The justices added: "These votes must be
included in the certified vote totals."
>
The justices offered no clear guidance on how the undervote ballots should
be evaluated, given differing approaches in the several counties that have
completed such counts. They said only that the standard established by the
legislature is that votes should be counted if there is "clear indication of
the intent of the voter."
>
In a sharply worded dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells
warned that "chaos" could result from the majority decision and said he
feared that it would lead to even greater uncertainty about the outcome of
the election than already exists.
>
"I have a deep and abiding concern that the prolonging of judicial process
in this counting contest propels this country and this state into an
unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis," he wrote. "I have to
conclude that there is a real and present likelihood that this
constitutional crisis will do substantial damage to our country, our state
and to this court as an institution."
>
During Thursday's oral argument, Wells had made clear that he was concerned
about the U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday vacating the state court's Nov.
21 decision extending the deadline for certification. In his dissent, he
asserted that the majority opinion "cannot withstand the scrutiny which will
certainly immediately follow under the United States Constitution."
>
Wells also asserted that the decision created "an overflowing basket of
practical problems" for completing the count before Tuesday's deadline for
selecting presidential electors, warning that if the recounts are not
finished and certified by that deadline, Florida's place in the electoral
college could be jeopardized. He said this held out the prospect of
"creating the very real possibility of disenfranchising those nearly six
million voters who were able to correctly cast their ballots on election
day."
>
As Gore's lawyers pressed to start the recounting of the Miami-Dade County
ballots under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court, Sauls
announced that he had recused himself from the case. He was quickly replaced
by Judge Terry P. Lewis, who held a hearing last night to determine
procedures for complying with the Supreme court decision.
>
Democrats said the roughly 45,000 "undervote" ballots that have not been
manually counted are located in counties throughout the state, but
identified a handful of counties as ones with substantial numbers of those
ballots. Those included Duval, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, with
4,500 to 5,000 ballots in each of those counties.
>
Gore campaign chairman William Daley spoke to reporters outside of Gore's
vice presidential residence about 90 minutes after the court released its
decision. "Let the count begin," he said, "not just the votes yet to be
counted in Miami-Dade, but as the court wisely ruled, in every Florida
county where undervotes have yet to be counted. Then Florida and America
will know with certainty who has really won the presidency."
>
Gore and his advisers were obviously elated by the decision, after spending
much of the day anticipating that the court could rule against them. That,
aides said, likely would have ended Gore's pursuit of legal sanctioning of
additional recounts and produced a statement conceding the presidential race
to Bush.
>
Instead of a wake, the Gore team found themselves at a celebration of sorts,
sipping champagne with a vice president who found himself with one more
opportunity to prove what he has contended for weeks, which is that he
received more votes in Florida than Bush.
>
For Bush, the news was even more unsettling. He appeared at the governor's
mansion yesterday morning with top advisers Karen Hughes and Karl Rove and
said he would be ready to name the members of his senior White House staff
once the Florida dispute had been settled, barely attempting to conceal the
names. The Bush team has been chafing to move faster on the transition and
was hopeful that the Supreme Court would make that possible with yesterday's
ruling.
>
Instead, Bush found himself at a joyless holiday party at the governor's
mansion in Austin last night, as former Secretary of state James A. Baker
III, who heads the Bush team in Florida, spoke for the campaign in
Tallahassee.
>
"This is what happens when, for the first time in modern history, a
candidate resorts to lawsuits to try to overturn the outcome of an election
for president," he said. "It is sad for Florida. It is sad for the nation.
And it is sad for our democracy."
>
The Supreme Court ruling was even more unsettling to Republicans because of
the boost the Bush team received when Leon County Circuit Judges Lewis and
Nikki Ann Clark issued parallel rulings in the Seminole and Martin county
cases.
>
In both cases, Republican Party officials were allowed by county officials
to fill in missing voter identification numbers on several thousand absentee
ballot applications. The Democratic plaintiffs asked the court to throw out
all the absentee ballots, which would have cost Bush several thousand votes
and, by itself, shifted the election to Gore.
>
Clark and Lewis found that, while there were irregularities in the handling
of those applications, there was no violation of the "sanctity of the
absentee ballots" themselves and therefore no grounds to throw out the
ballots.
>
The Florida legislature convened its special session, then adjourned for the
weekend before learning of the state Supreme Court action. But Republican
legislators, who long have clashed with a court they regard as too liberal
and activist, expressed anger at the ruling and vowed to go forward with
their plan to name their own set of electors, setting up a clash between the
two branches of the Florida government.
>
"The court, once again, turned Florida law on its head," declared GOP House
Speaker Tom Feeney. "It validates my view that it is an absolute obligation
of the Florida legislature to act to preserve the election law as it existed
prior to this election, and to protect the legitimate participation of
Florida in the selection of the next president."
>
But Democrats there began preparing the ground for Gore to challenge any
electors named by the legislature, making it even more likely that the issue
will fall into the lap of Congress when it convenes in early January to
count the votes from the electoral college, whose members will cast those
votes on Dec. 18.
>
<em>Staff writers Mike Allen, Jo Becker, Ceci Connolly and Thomas B. Edsall
contributed to this report.</em>
>
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