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Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 15, 2000
Senator: Extend electoral deadline
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says he wants legislation extending the Dec. 18 date for the Electoral College meeting to allow a hand recount of Florida's votes.
Harkin emerged from a closed-door meeting Tuesday with William Daley, Vice President Al Gore's campaign manager, to say the 106th Congress can't end until the presidential election is resolved. He said the Electoral College meeting date might have to be changed to allow for recounts in Florida and other disputed states, which could take weeks.
"Congress can change the date (of the Electoral College meeting) by law," Harkin said. "It's going to be pretty tough to finish our business without this being resolved."
But Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, vowed to block any attempt to change the Electoral College meeting date. He charged Democrats with undermining faith in elections by not accepting the Florida outcome.
"Democracies can perish," he warned. "This is a very serious matter. We've had democracies that ceased to exist when the loser did not accept the results of an election. It is a scary matter to me."
WASHINGTON -- More than two of three voters think Texas Gov. George W. Bush should become president if he prevails in Florida, even by the slimmest of margins, a new poll says.
Should Bush be declared the winner in Florida after recounts of presidential ballots there, more than two-thirds of voters also say Vice President Al Gore should concede and not contest the outcome in court, says the poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
The survey did not ask the same question about Gore.
No matter what happens, six in 10 of those surveyed don't want voters in Palm Beach County -- who complained about an apparently confusing ballot -- to be allowed to vote again, compared with 36 percent who would be in favor of a revote.
The bottom line: "People want the Florida recount to be it," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.
Bush and Gore supporters are deeply divided on how to interpret the outcome after Florida's election is settled. If the recount favors Bush, 95 percent of Bush voters say he will have legitimately won. Among Gore voters, about four in 10 agree.
The telephone survey of voters was conducted Nov. 10-12 and has a 3 percentage point margin of error.
MIAMI -- Chalk up a small victory for state Rep. Elaine Bloom.
Miami-Dade County's three-member canvassing board voted unanimously Tuesday to recount by hand three precincts that Bloom hopes will give her an edge over U.S. House District 22 incumbent E. Clay Shaw Jr.
Last week's machine recount of the more than 210,000 ballots cast Nov. 7 in the district that stretches along the coast of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties gave the Republican Shaw a margin of fewer than 600 votes over Bloom, whose strongest showing was in Miami-Dade.
NEW YORK -- CBS appointed a three-member panel on Tuesday to investigate what went wrong on election night when TV networks twice incorrectly projected which presidential candidate would win Florida.
CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN and Fox News Channel all declared Al Gore the Florida winner, then rescinded these calls. Later, they all said George W. Bush won the state and the presidency, but took that back, too. The Associated Press called Florida for Gore early on and had to roll back but did not join in the later calls for Bush.
Linda Mason, vice president of public affairs at CBS News, will be the panel's chairwoman. Other members include Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys at CBS.
One of the things they will examine is the role of Voter News Service, a consortium formed by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and the Associated Press to conduct exit polls and tabulate election results.
PENSACOLA -- A group with Republican links sued TV networks Tuesday and accused them of discouraging voters from going to the polls in the Florida Panhandle, which is on Central Standard Time, by erroneously projecting Al Gore would carry the state.
However, elections officials in at least three counties in the Panhandle, which voted heavily for Bush, said they had no evidence of people not voting due to the networks calling Florida for Gore after polls had closed in the Eastern Time Zone. Polls closed at 7 p.m. local time in both time zones.
The Committee for Honest Politics sued in Shalimar on behalf of an Okaloosa County voter who cast his ballot but claimed its value was diminished by the networks' projection.
NEW YORK -- Fox News Channel is investigating whether an election night consultant related to George W. Bush provided his cousin's campaign with insider exit poll data.
Meanwhile, the network downplayed John Ellis' role in leading Fox News Channel at 2:16 a.m. Wednesday to become the first network to declare that Bush had won Florida, and hence the presidency.
Ellis was working on a temporary contract and his status is under review, said John Moody, Fox News Channel vice president for news and editorial quality.
Ellis, a first cousin to the Texas governor, was the director of Fox's decision team on election night. He was responsible for interpreting election data and helping Fox News Channel declare states for either Bush or Al Gore.
The New Yorker magazine reported that Ellis had frequent phone conversations with Bush and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, on election night, letting them know how the vote was going.