Recounts rejected

Florida's secretary of state says she won't accept results of hand recounts under way. Bush also rejects a deal proposed by Gore to accept recounts.

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By TIM NICKENS, SHELBY OPPEL and BILL ADAIR

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 16, 2000

For the first time in an eight-day drama, Al Gore and George W. Bush on Wednesday night tried to take personal control of the debate over who won the presidential election.

But before the two candidates could trade views on national television, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris jumped smack in the middle.

Harris, a co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, declared that the state would not accept hand recounts already under way in determining who wins the state's 25 electoral votes. She rejected requests by four counties to amend their vote totals, announced that the state canvassing commission had certified the results that show Bush leading Gore by 300 votes, and said only overseas ballots due by Friday would be added to the final count on Saturday.

"It is my duty under Florida law to exercise my discretion in denying these requested amendments," Harris said in Tallahassee in a decision that Gore's campaign manager vowed to fight in court. "I want to reassure the public that my decision in this process has been made carefully, consistently, independently, and, I believe, correctly."

Just three hours before Harris moved to end the vote-counting, Gore read a televised statement from his home in Washington and offered Bush a deal.

The vice president said he was willing to forgo all legal challenges if Bush would accept the results of a hand recount of three South Florida counties that Gore won -- or a hand recount of the state's nearly 6-million votes if the Texas governor preferred.

"We need a resolution that is fair and final," Gore said. "We need to move expeditiously to the most complete and accurate count that is possible."

When Bush responded four hours later from the Texas Governor's Mansion, he cited Harris' announcement as justification for rejecting Gore's offer.

"The votes of Florida have been counted. They have been recounted, and tonight they have been certified and we do not know yet who has won," Bush said. "The outcome of this election will not be the result of deals or efforts to mold public opinion. The outcome of this election will be determined by the votes and by the law."

Both men attempted to use their separate appearances to portray themselves as statesmen more interested in defending the rights of voters and democracy than in their own political futures. They asked for calm and for supporters of both men to embrace the eventual winner.

They didn't agree on when to meet. Gore suggested immediately; Bush prefers to wait until after a winner is declared.

But their principle disagreement is over the value of recounting votes by hand.

Gore said he would accept Florida results that include hand recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties along with the overseas ballots that are due by midnight Friday. He also defended the hand recounts that Bush officials have criticized as too subjective and prone to error.

"There is a simple reason that Florida law, and the law in many other states, calls for a careful check by real people of the machine results in elections like this one. The reason: Machines can sometimes misread or fail to detect the way ballots are cast," Gore said. "And when there are serious doubts, checking the machine count with a careful hand count is accepted far and wide as the best way to know the true intentions of the voters."

Bush summarily dismissed Gore's offer and said manual recounts are flawed.

"Unfortunately, what the vice president proposed is exactly what he has been proposing all along: continuing with selective hand recounts that are neither fair nor accurate, or compounding the error by extending a flawed process statewide," the Texas governor said.

Bush's remarks capped another remarkable night of high-stakes maneuvering by both candidates and Florida's top elections official.

Nothing that was said Wednesday night is expected to be the final word. Harris' bid to declare the election over except for the overseas ballots makes it even more likely that the courts will ultimately determine the outcome of the historic fight for the presidency.

Wednesday afternoon, the Florida Supreme Court refused to stop Broward and Palm Beach counties from recounting more than 1-million votes for president by hand.

The court also signaled it will wade deeper into the battle over the defining question: Are hand vote recounts allowable and fairer than mechanical recounts?

The justices ordered briefs to be submitted by noon today on whether Harris or Attorney General Bob Butterworth, Gore's state chairman, were right in their conflicting interpretations of how and when to recount votes by hand.

Harris' office, in an opinion requested by Florida Republican Party Chairman Al Cardenas, told counties this week that they could not pursue hand recounts merely because a mechanical count and a test recount of a few precincts by hand produced different totals. The opinion said that the failure of a mechanical system to read an "improperly marked markedsense or improperly punched punchcard ballot" is not an error in vote-counting that should trigger a recount.

Butterworth disagreed and issued an opinion that said differences between a mechanical count and a sample recount by hand should trigger a manual recount of the entire county.

As action continues in state courts, the Bush campaign still holds out hope that the federal courts will do what the state courts so far have refused to do. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Wednesday to hear the Republican's appeal of a Miami district court ruling that rejected Bush's request to stop the manual recounts.

While the court battles continued, Broward County officials began recounting by hand more than a half-million votes Wednesday afternoon. Before Harris' announcement, they planned to work 12-hour shifts and expect to complete the job late Monday.

A Democratic Party analysis of Broward voting patterns predicts that Gore could gain 472 votes. That could be enough to nudge the vice president ahead of the Texas governor -- at least temporarily.

Palm Beach County officials, who spent the day working out the rules for the hand recounts, also had been poised to start recounting votes this morning unless they decide to await direction from the courts.

Florida's 25 electoral votes are the key to determining who wins the presidency.

Gore still leads in the national popular vote and has won 262 electoral votes from 19 states and the District of Columbia. Bush has won 29 states and has 246 electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

New Mexico remains too close to call, although Gore holds a lead of 377 votes. But that state's five electoral votes are not enough to decide the presidency.

In the first mechanical count of Florida votes from the Nov. 7 election, Bush was ahead by 1,784 votes. That margin shrank to exactly 300 votes Tuesday night, when Harris certified the results from all 67 counties. Only overseas ballots remain to be counted.

That leaves the hand recounts at the center of the ongoing legal and public relations battles between Bush and Gore. With supporters of both men escalating their rhetoric, there is concern among members of Congress and political analysts that the next president will be seriously wounded before they take office.

"I think we need to find some way not to cripple this new president before he begins," said Joseph Cooper, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. "If you don't have something that most everybody agrees is fair, you are going to have a cloud over this president before he even begins, and I think that is very dangerous for the country."

The legal maneuvering began Wednesday before breakfast.

Harris' lawyers asked the Florida Supreme Court to send all pending lawsuits over the Florida election to Leon Circuit Court and to direct three South Florida counties to stop recounting votes by hand until the legal issues are resolved.

By Harris' count, there are 11 lawsuits in state courts and three lawsuits in federal courts filed by various counties, campaigns and voters.

"The court must make it clear that the election of the president and vice president is not a matter of local pleasure," her court filing said. "More importantly, if countywide manual recounts continue before this court decides whether such recounts are authorized and/or constitutional, the results will be broadcast to the nation, which will neither advance the process nor serve the interests of public policy."

The court did not reject Harris' request until the end of the day. But the Gore camp responded before noon.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who is monitoring the Florida returns for the vice president, said Gore would also ask the state Supreme Court for guidance. But the Democrat wants the state's highest court to take firm control of the vote-counting by ruling on how the recounts must be conducted, establishing the standards for evaluating the ballots and setting a reasonable deadline.

In the meantime, Gore's lawyers said, the hand recounts should continue.

"It's a little like playing a baseball game under protest," said Gore attorney David Boies. "The game should go on. If the game has to be replayed after the Florida Supreme Court clarified matters, we could replay a portion of it at that time."

Instead, Harris moved to call the game.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, four counties complied with her demand that they submit to her written reasons for seeking to change the vote counts they had submitted Tuesday night.

Collier County, which was won by Bush, reported that it had found 25 absentee ballots and asked that it be allowed to add them to its total. Miami-Dade County, which was won by Gore, asked to add the results of a hand recount of three precincts that would have given Gore six more votes.

Miami-Dade rejected Gore's request for a countywide recount Tuesday night, but Gore is contesting that decision in court.

Palm Beach County sought permission for its countywide recount by hand, arguing that the conflicting opinions from Harris and Butterworth made it impossible to finish by Tuesday night. Broward also sought approval for a countywide hand recount for similar reasons, contending that high voter turnout, conflicting legal opinions and a rash of lawsuits slowed their work.

Those counties also were won by Gore.

Six hours after the counties made their requests, Harris turned each of them down.

Joe Klock, chairman and managing partner for Steel, Hector & Davis, represents Harris and said she used the criteria that courts use to overturn elections: evidence of voter fraud that affected the outcome, reasonable doubt as to whether the results expressed the will of the voters and whether elections officials were prevented from meeting deadlines because of circumstances like hurricanes or power outages.

None of the counties met those criteria.

"The only ballots that matter at this point in time are the overseas ballots," Klock said.

In Broward, where Gore won by more than 200,000 votes, the manual recounts continued after Harris' announcement.

"Let her get a (court order) to make us stop," said County Judge Robert W. Lee, the canvassing board chairman. "She's not the final legal authority."

The impact of Harris' decision on Palm Beach County election officials probably won't be known until this afternoon when the canvassing board is scheduled to meet again.

"I expect this development and a lot of other issues will be addressed at the meeting," said Denise Cote, spokesman for Theresa LePore, the county's elections supervisor and a member of the canvassing board. "Whether this will have any impact on the intention to hand count will be up to the board and its attorneys."

- Staff writers Lucy Morgan, Diane Rado, Thomas C. Tobin and Jean Heller contributed to this report.

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