>From: <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from [log in to unmask] >Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 01:23:18 -0500 (EST) > >You have been sent this message from [log in to unmask] as a courtesy of the >Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com). >To stay on top of the latest political headlines, live discussions and >breaking news, register now for the OnPolitics email at >http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/email/email.htm. > >To view the entire article, go to >http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45987-2000Dec8.html > >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> > _____________________________________________________________________________________ Get more from the Web. 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