Secretary of State rejects hand recount from Palm Beach County

"Unbelievable," says county elections supervisor Theresa LePore, as she watches Katherine Harris certify results from the last machine count.

© The Associated Press, published November 26, 2000

WEST PALM BEACH -- Secretary of State Katherine Harris rejected Palm Beach County's hand recount Sunday, throwing out 180 votes Al Gore would have picked up in his struggle against George W. Bush.

The partial returns counted by hand "fail to comply" with state law, Harris said before she certified Bush as the winner of Florida's drawn-out election. She instead accepted results from the last machine count, on Nov. 14.

"Unbelievable," Palm Beach County elections supervisor Theresa LePore said as she watched Harris on television. LePore designed the now-infamous "butterfly ballot" that some Democrats say was so confusing that it cost Gore thousands of votes in this heavily Democratic county.

The three-member board worked around the clock in hopes of completing its review before a 5 p.m. deadline. After Harris rejected their request for more time to finish counting 800 to 1,000 ballots, they faxed the incomplete results -- dozens of pages of raw, precinct-by-precinct figures, leaving the tedious math to the secretary of state.

That done, canvassers went back to work and finished their marathon review of questionable presidential ballots two hours later. Red-eyed and weary, election workers hugged each other and smiled when the counting was done. The county planned to submit amended totals.

"I don't know what another two and a half hours would have meant, but why not?" asked a frustrated Charles Burton, the head of canvassing board. "We all want to finish the job we started to do."

Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fla., said Democrats were not conceding Florida: "All that Vice President Gore has asked for, and the people of America have asked for, is a fair and accurate count of every vote."

The Palm Beach board met virtually nonstop through the weekend in hopes of completing a recanvass of some 14,000 questionable ballots. The board lost a crucial day when it took Thanksgiving off.

The board labored as Gore's lawyers served notice the campaign would "contest" the results of the county's recount -- the formal word under Florida state law for challenging the results of a certified election.

At a news conference in Tallahassee, Gore lawyer David Boies referred to the likelihood of an incomplete recount, as well as to the relatively tight standard canvassing officials used to determine how to count questionable votes.

Palm Beach was one of four Democratic-leaning counties where Gore asked for a manual recount as part of his effort to overtake Republican Bush in the state that stands to pick the president.

The developments unfolded as hundreds of demonstrators, some backing Gore, others Bush, milled noisily outside. A downpour interrupted the peaceful demonstrations, at almost exactly the same time Burton stepped to a microphone to announce the marathon recount was over.

"Count my vote!" about 200 Democrats chanted. "Don't hide my vote under a Bush" read one sign.

Nearby, some 500 Republican supporters waved signs in support of Bush and chanted: "Hey hey ho ho! Al Gore has gotta go!"

As board members scrambled to finish, they were accused by Democrats of ignoring clear votes for Gore. The complaint centers on methods used to judge voter intent on indented ballots: Gore supporters say Palm Beach canvassers should have used a more lenient standard in judging the so-called dimpled chads, pointing to results in Broward County, where the vice president picked up a net gain of 567 votes in unofficial returns.

"If they used the Broward or Texas standard for dimpled ballots, Gore would be up by hundreds of votes," said Jamal Simmons, a spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party.

The hand recounts in Palm Beach and two other densely populated and Democratic-leaning counties, Miami-Dade and Broward, were considered key to winning Florida's 25 electoral votes -- and the presidency.

But Miami-Dade officials suspended work last week, saying they couldn't meet Sunday's deadline.

Palm Beach board members have not counted dimpled votes for a presidential candidate if votes for other races on the ballot were clearly punched. Gore, hoping to pick up votes through the dimpled ballots, has argued that an indentation on the cardboard ballot indicates voter intent.

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