GOP Says Dade County Recount Is 'Rigged'

By CATHERINE WILSON
.c The Associated Press

MIAMI (Nov. 21) - Al Gore picked up 46 votes on the first day of hand recounting in Florida's most populous county as Republicans turned up their attacks on the process, calling it ''rigged'' and accusing Democrats of ''manufacturing votes.''

GOP congressmen went further Monday than previous Republican criticisms of the manual recount as unfair or subject to tampering,

''This thing is rigged,'' said Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio. ''It is a joke on our democracy.''

Democrats said the accusations were dead wrong. The hand count made it through 67 of 614 precincts on Monday.

Miami-Dade County began mechanically sorting its 654,000 punchcard ballots on Sunday, separating those with clear punch holes from the ballots in question.

Those so-called ''undervotes,'' ballots on which no vote was registered by the machines, were being reviewed by the canvassing board because members didn't want the regular teams of counters to use their discretion in determining what constituted a vote. There were about 10,750 undervotes.

Republicans claimed board members were twisting and turning ballots to determine voter intent, looking for votes that weren't there.

''Unfortunately Miami-Dade has become ground zero for producing a manufactured vote,'' said Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., who called the elections officials roaming the counting room ''pit bosses.''

Kendall Coffey, a Democratic attorney, responded: ''I think any attempt to raise fraud or any other type of innuendo is nothing short of outrageous.''

Lawrence King, chairman of the Miami-Dade board, said he did not hear the comments from Hobson or Sweeney.

''I'm sure it was very entertaining, but this is not point-counterpoint,'' he said.

Republicans were planning to try and stop the recount through legal action Tuesday. A hearing was scheduled in circuit court, where GOP will argue the canvassing board erred in reversing its decision against a hand recount. On Sunday, a judge rejected a request by backers of George W. Bush to stop the recount.

AP-NY-11-21-00 0405EST
===============================================================================

Gore is already looking like the loser, say backers

By David Usborne in New York


21 November 2000

Anxiety is growing among senior Democrats that Al Gore may soon go past the point when he can realistically take Florida, and the White House, and that he risks making himself appear a loser.

Mr Gore will face intense pressure from within his own party to concede the presidential race if hand recounts now under way in three Florida counties are either declared void by the courts or if they fail to produce enough fresh votes to push him into the lead in the state.

Aides to the Vice-President continue to say he is ready to pursue further legal avenues in the event that the hand counts do not favour him. Action may include appealing to the US Supreme Court. But if he did, he would be abandoned evenby some of his most staunch supporters.

The Gore ranks are still far from broken, in part because opinion polls suggest a still tolerant American public. Some loyalists apparently believe the game is already lost. "It's over, finished," said Willie Brown, the Democratic Mayor of San Francisco. "That wasn't the case four days ago. Back then he was winning the public relations battle, but no more."

The blunt-speaking Mr Brown was giving voice to a concern now rippling through the party. Is it possible that after all the legal energy that has been put into making the manual recounts stand, they may not generate the extra votes Mr Gore needs? "He should wait out the count and then concede."

Not only elected Democrats are beginning to stir. Even some of the Vice-President's most generous donors are showing signs of turning sour, criticising him for bungling the election in the first place and then failing to play the statesman in the ensuing Florida mess.

No one has been more cutting than Peter Buttenwieser, the heir to a New York financial fortune, whose $1.3m in donations made him the number one donor to the Democrat campaign. "My own feeling is that Gore had a really terrific chance to win, and I think he squandered that chance," he told the Los Angeles Times. "We ran a bad campaign at virtually every level."

Another backer, Marvin Lender, a retired bagel magnate, also sent word that he did not want Mr Gore to fight for the last vote or the last judge. "I am supportive of what's happened so far in the process," said Mr Lender, who started filling Democrat coffers after Joseph Lieberman was called upon as running mate. "But I think at some point it has to come to an end, and it needs to be relatively soon."

The same message is coming from Democrat members of Congress, many of whom are beginning to see more fruit in four years of bashing Mr Bush as President than trying to support an enfeebled President Gore. Even Charles Rangel of New York, who is on the liberal wing of the party, urged the campaign to draw some line where the legal combat would end.

"I think Gore got pretty lucky picking the districts where he did pretty well for the recounts," Mr Rangel said. "I think he ought to take that and accept whatever comes out of it." There is no telling whether Mr Gore or Mr Lieberman is yet prepared to retreat.

The campaign manager, Bill Daley, and Warren Christopher, a former secretary of state,reportedly told Democrat leaders in Congress late last week that they would fold their tent if they lost the manual count battle. But they added that "the principals aren't there yet", meaning Messrs Gore and Lieberman.

Repeated assertions that the American public is despairing of the process and of both the main protagonists have yet to be borne out.

Offering encouragement to Mr Gore, a CNN-USA Today poll released yesterday showed 60 per cent of voters believed the results of the manual recounts should be included in the final tally for Florida.

As to whether the time has come for Mr Gore to bow out gracefully, the American citizenry is split evenly, 46 per cent to 46 per cent, according to the same poll. But that was how the voters went into the election two weeks ago – divided down the middle almost exactly.

=================================================================================

Disqualification of ballots by Democrats 'systematic'
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Visit our Election 2000 page
for daily election news and analysis

When vote counters arrived Friday in heavily Republican Duval County, five lawyers from the Al Gore camp stood poised to contest virtually every military ballot waiting to be opened. Top Stories
• Both sides have rough day
• Top Florida official urges military ballots' inclusion
• Sole Republican on Broward board quits
• Israel retaliates for bus bombing
• Europe pressures U.S. to cut emissions


During a 19-hour process that ended Saturday at 4:30 a.m., the Gore team challenged the authenticity of signatures, dates and addresses. They got one Navy lieutenant's ballot thrown out. The officer wrote on the envelope he could not get a postmark on his ship before sending it to Florida.
"The big story here is this was a systematic, heavy-handed effort by the Democrats to eliminate absentee military ballots," said Jim Post, a Republican attorney who fought the Gore challenges. "That was clear from the beginning of the day." Mr. Post said he has never seen such a concerted campaign to disqualify overseas ballots.
In the end, the Democrats succeeded in knocking out 64 military voters. This meant Texas Gov. George W. Bush likely lost 30 to 40 votes from Duval alone, based on the fact he took nearly 70 percent of the 542 military ballots approved by the three-member canvassing board.
Duval, home to a large Navy base in Jacksonville, was a microcosm for what went on in Florida's other 66 counties on Friday as Democratic lawyers successfully nullified hundreds of votes from sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines, Republicans charged. As proof, they cite their own experiences and a strategy memo written by a Democratic lawyer in Tallahassee.
But Doug Hattaway, a Gore spokesman, denied there was any such strategy.
"Both sides had observers there, and it's a very bipartisan process," Mr. Hattaway told the Associated Press.
"Bush didn't get what people expected," Mr. Hattaway said. "He got like 600, and we're happy about that." Mr. Bush netted 630 votes from the final overseas ballot count.
A Democratic lawyer who led the Gore effort in Duval County did not immediately return a phone call yesterday.
Mr. Bush's official 930-vote lead in Florida could have been hundreds of votes higher if not for the Gore challenges. Florida's counties tallied the last remaining overseas ballots Friday and reported them by Saturday's noon deadline.
The Gore legal offensive drew a sharp rebuke yesterday from the nation's two largest and best-known veterans groups, the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The final tally showed 1,527 overseas absentee ballots got tossed, while 2,199 survived, of which Mr. Bush garnered about 65 percent.
Mr. Post and another Republican lawyer in Duval, Tom Bishop, said they were amazed at the range of technicalities Democratic lawyers cited to discard military votes. At one point on Friday, the Democrats had the election board compare ballot signatures with signatures on file. The Democrats then claimed some signatures were fraudulent because every t was not crossed or every i dotted, Mr. Post said.
Democrats succeeded in getting a handful of ballots thrown out because they arrived one and two days after the election, he said, even though common sense said the form must have been filled out before Nov. 7, Election Day.
Democrats also tried to convince the Republican-controlled board to check computers to see if service members requested their ballots in the correct way. The board denied that request.
"The ballot would be examined front and back by the Democrats for any defect and they were raising things like inadequate addresses for attesting witnesses or that the address wasn't as detailed as they wanted it to be," said Mr. Bishop. "There was no question in any one's mind that with any defect they were going to raise an objection. Whoever was directing them truly wanted to disqualify military ballots."
Mr. Post said that when the canvassing board agreed to keep out ballots, "the Democrats squealed with joy."
The lawyers said federal and state laws give election boards the discretion to count a military ballot even when the envelope postmark is missing, provided the ballot is signed and dated. This is because military personnel are not always able to get mail postmarked at a small outpost or ship. But Democrats objected anyway and succeeded in getting some tossed out, the lawyers said. They said if the Democrats had not objected, the board likely would have accepted some of them.
Mr. Post said he did not challenge any military ballots in Duval nor did Republicans lawyers in other counties.
Before the overseas absentee counting began Friday, Gore spokesmen asserted that they would win the military vote. They said the vice president would attract votes from minorities in the enlisted ranks.
But at the same time, Democrats were orchestrating a statewide effort to knock out overseas votes, Republicans say. A Democratic lawyer in Tallahassee circulated a memo to lawyers beforehand listing all the technicalities on which service members' votes could be disqualified.

================================================================================
Republicans ready with 'doomsday scenario'
By Ben Fenton in Washington







Divided America holds its breath

REPUBLICAN leaders in Washington are preparing the ground for a bitter battle with Al Gore should he be declared the winner of the ballot in Florida and so win the state's crucial 25 electoral college votes.
Former senator Bob Dole, who lost to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election, has said he had even heard rumours of a boycott of a Gore inauguration by Republican members of Congress if the Democrat wins.

Tom DeLay, the chief whip of the party in the House of Representatives, has sent his colleagues a memo which reminds them that the constitution allows both houses of Congress to reject Florida's votes if majorities in the two chambers agree the ballot was tainted.

Nobody has yet suggested doing this, but it has been discussed at a high level in the Republican party and is referred to as the "doomsday scenario". Roy Blunt, Mr DeLay's deputy, said that if Mr Gore won in Florida "it would be difficult for people to believe that the process wasn't cynically manipulated at the end".

But Democrats have given warning that any attempt by their Republican rivals to challenge the Florida vote would badly affect the chances of bipartisan co-operation in Congress. "If Republicans try to invalidate electoral votes, that certainly would poison the well," Martin Frost, the chairman of the Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives, said.

The emerging picture is that Democrats would be far more willing to work with a George W Bush as President at the end of the fraught election process than Republicans would with Al Gore in the White House. "Mr Bush could walk into meetings with congressional leaders with no history or baggage, but Gore has a history," Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, said.

================================================================================

Jewish World ReviewNov. 21, 2000 / 23 Mar-Cheshvan, 5761
Thomas Sowell



Phony issues in Florida

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- INCESSANT CLAIMS by Vice President Al Gore and his spokesmen that they want "every vote to count" is belied by everything the Gore camp has done in Florida.

If the Democrats really wanted every vote to count, then they would have started a manual recount all over the state, not just in heavily Democratic areas. If Gore wants every vote to count, then why has one of his lawyers been sending instructions to other lawyers for the Democrats, throughout the state, on how to challenge absentee ballots from military people overseas?

Some countries where these military personnel are stationed do not follow American postmarking practices, so this technicality can be used to disqualify military absentee ballots, which are expected to be heavily for George W. Bush. According to the Associated Press, more than a thousand overseas absentee ballots were thrown out last Friday and one Florida county "rejected 117 of its 147 overseas ballots."

If Gore and his people want every vote to count, then what are they doing contacting Republican members of the electoral college, to try to get them to switch their vote to Gore, even though these electors' constituencies voted for Bush? The "quiet intelligence-gathering" by the Gore camp on these electors' backgrounds, reported in the November 16th Wall Street Journal, suggests implicit blackmail to force electors to betray their trust, in order to avoid having their personal embarrassments made public, as the Clinton/Gore administration has done with others.

The magic phrase "hand recount" has been thrown around as if these hand counts are more accurate than the machine counts. Machines may miss some ballots that were not properly punched, but at least they miss Republican and Democratic ballots impartially. But hand recounts are open not only to subjective and partisan "interpretation" but also to mishandling, both accidental and deliberate. A Democrat in Palm Beach County has had a ballot-punching machine confiscated. It was found in his car after he had denied having it.

Things like this are no doubt among the reasons why the Florida law does not provide for a hand count of ballots. It does not preclude them, but Florida's Secretary of State is given the discretion to allow deviations from the legally prescribed rules only in case of such unusual situations as floods, hurricanes, power outages and the like. She does not consider ballots spoiled by the voters to be in that category. Incidentally, despite all the noise made by the Gore camp about nearly 20,000 ballots being disqualified for this reason in heavily Democratic areas, even more ballots were disqualified for the same reason in heavily Republican areas.

But the facts will never stop the accusations that Secretary of State Katherine Harris is being "partisan" because she is a Republican. Practically every government official belongs to one party or the other, but that does not make all their actions partisan -- especially in the case of Ms. Harris, who is following legal advice from lawyers known for being Democrats. It has been reported on MSNBC that Gore operatives have threatened an investigation of Katherine Harris's life that would supposedly make the Whitewater investigation look like a tea party.

But such gross attempts at blackmailing a public official produce little notice, much less outrage, in the media.

Corruption of the legal processes, by blackmail or character assassination or other methods, has been standard procedure in the Clinton/Gore administration. Their worst legacy may be the notion that "everybody does it." Everybody does not do it. But more people will do it if Clinton and Gore continue to get away with it.

There are two very different questions that can too easily get confused with one another. One question is whether the present system of machine counting of votes is the best way. That is a question to be dealt with after this election is settled and before the next election takes place.

The other question is whether this election shall be conducted according to the rules laid out and agreed to in advance by both sides or according to new rules and procedures created by those who lost. If the latter, then all future elections will be challenged and dragged through the courts by whoever loses. For all practical purposes, we will no longer have election laws.

We will have tentative agreements that will not be worth the paper they are written on.


JWR contributor Thomas Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of several books, including his latest, A Personal Odyssey.

===============================================================================

Congressman Says House Will Decide Presidency
David M. Bresnahan
Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2000
PROVO, Utah – The final vote on the next president of the United States will be made in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to a former member of the House Impeachment Committee.
"It appears to me that there’s a very good possibility that the [Florida] Supreme Court will overturn the election process in Florida, and that the Congress may end up electing the next president," said Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, in an exclusive NewsMax.com interview.

Cannon was critical of the hearing held by the Florida court on Monday. He said the jurists were acting improperly.

"This Florida Supreme Court, who are supposed to be a bunch of impartial jurists, is grabbing the headlines by responding on their own. They issued an order staying [Secretary of State] Katherine Harris from acting. Then they held a circus for the whole world to watch as some of these relatively ignorant jurists – I thought, at least from the part I saw – asked silly questions and setup questions of the Democrat counsel," Cannon complained.

He said he believes the Democrats are doing everything possible to obstruct the election process in Florida. They will stop at nothing in an effort to steal the election through vote fraud, ballot manipulation and abuse of power.

"I think the point of the Democrats must be obstruction in this case to hold all of our institutions up to public ridicule and thereby weaken the influence of our institutions that keep us a great country. It’s amazing to me," said Cannon in the phone interview.

Cannon has been looking into instances of voter fraud that were reported to his office. He found that 120 Florida residents who attend Brigham Young University in Utah were prevented from voting by absentee ballot because of a paperwork technicality. He said he also discovered that a Florida National Guard unit was prevented from voting.

"A large unit in Florida of several hundred people were ordered out on maneuvers at the last minute, two days or so before the election. They couldn’t get absentee ballots because it was too late for that, and they couldn’t vote because they were out on maneuvers," said Cannon.

He said the Democrats are very clever in their efforts to eliminate the military vote. Other reports have surfaced of military units being shipped out just before the election without warning, absentee ballots that did not arrive in time for military in foreign countries to vote, and efforts to disqualify ballots that were received.

Cannon was pleased that a court decision on Monday would enable many disqualified military ballots to be counted that Democrats had previously objected to because they did not have a postmark.

"It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the College Republicans at BYU come up with 120 ballots, those people are going to vote for Bush," said Cannon. "It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the people in the military loathe this administration. They loathe Al Gore and they’re going to vote against him.

"What did this administration do? Everything it could think of, everything that every liberal wacko nut could imagine, was done to keep people from voting for George Bush in Florida," said Cannon.

Will the Democrats give up if the vote is certified for George W. Bush?

"No. They’re not going to give up," said Cannon. He added that he is very concerned about the efforts being made by Democrats to find members of the Electoral College who can be persuaded to change their vote from Bush to Gore.

"The concern here is that you might have people that are susceptible to a bribe or other kind of motivation," he explained.

He said the many problems with the election will lead to more problems in the Electoral College, and Congress will decide the results of the election.

"I think there’s a very good likelihood of that. It’s all obscure right now, but if you look at the various trails or threads of a path that you can come up with, frankly George W. Bush is the likely winner in virtually all those paths – including the recount now," said Cannon, who is confident that Bush will come out on top eventually.

A clerk with the Congressional Research Service (CRS) confirmed to NewsMax.com that CRS has prepared documents for members of Congress who asked for guidance on the procedures in the event the election is placed in their hands.

So many individually asked for the information that CRS sent the documents to every congressman. The clerk said members of Congress are acting as if it is inevitable that they will soon be voting for the next president in a very historic election.

================================================================================
The Florida Supreme Court's Six Options
Jack Thompson
Monday, Nov. 20, 2000
With the Florida Supreme Court possibly poised to pounce upon the United States Constitution like a cat eyeing a mouse, here is a summary for NewsMax.com readers of what could happen:
First off, don't look for a decision today. After what will probably be a hurly-burly hearing with more questions from the justices than uninterrupted debate by the two sides, the court will want to sleep on the hearing, research and write an opinion the next day, with the hammer falling in the form of a relatively short opinion Wednesday, just in time to ruin a lot of folks' Thanksgiving.

Today's transfixed viewers should not make much of questions from the bench. Judges often give the lawyer they agree with a hard time just to probe his position's weaknesses so they can, upon finding them, paper them over in their opinion. But sometimes they're annoyed with one side and let it show. You just don't know.

Now, what might they do? Here's a list:

1. Side with Gore and order the unfair and fraudulent hand recounts included in the state's total vote count. When the obscene chad dance is done, this will likely give the state and the presidency to Gore. The justices know that. For reasons stated by this writer previously, this would be a naked act of judicial activism that would turn the entire Republican Party into a force hell-bent to rein in the judiciary. However, these justices might just be craven and reckless enough to do it.

2. Side with Bush, Harris and Judge Lewis (the Democrat judge who looked at the law and applied the facts to it), finding that there is no statutory or other legal basis for a hand recount of any ballots, since there is no allegation by Team Gore, as required by the state election law, of any fraud or mechanical malfunction of the machines in these three counties. This gives the state and the presidency to Bush.

3. Do #2 above but also eviscerate in their opinion Secretary of State Katherine Harris and the rest of the Republicans, including Governor Bush. Although there would be no basis for judicially drawing and quartering the GOP, the high court's doing so would give a lot of Democrats what they could live with: a Bush presidency crippled significantly by a state Supreme Court opinion setting in stone, in their minds, the illegitimacy of it. This gambit might let the court have its judicial activism and eat it, too.

4. Order a statewide recount, even though Bush didn't ask for it, on the logic that Gore did and that general equity principles should allow a "more accurate and fair" determination of which man got the most votes. If that is what they order, they will also lay down rules as to what chads – pregnant, hanging, swinging, whatever – can be counted.

5. Ask the Florida legislature, pursuant to United States Code Title 3, Section 2 to decide who gets Florida's electoral votes. If this happens I'm going to see Jim Carrey in "Grinch" with my 8-year-old again, to see something closer to reality than this option. Won't happen. But it is something Harris should trigger if the Supreme Court tries to give it to Gore.

6. Finally, they may fashion a "solution" nobody has yet come up with – something that, because of its novelty, would appear to be "impartial" but which would ultimately give the presidency to the man they want to win. Judges love to appear Solomonic, especially when they aren't. The more clever the better. Don't be surprised by a ruling showcasing some bizarre approach that causes the liberal intelligentsia to marvel and Al Gore to kiss Tipper even deeper.

Such "extreme judicial activism" might be too tempting to resist. After all, why not incinerate the intent of the Constitution's Framers with a nuculear blast? It would be fun!

So, what WILL the Florida Supreme Court do? My guess: Let Bush win. He's already won. If they don't, kiss the Constitution bye-bye.

===============================================================================
Little-Known Bureaucrat
May Have Final Say
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
By Leonard Greene

As the presidential drama unfolds in Florida, the man with the keys to the White House is counting down his days in office.

AP/Wide World

Friday: The office of the presidential transition team welcome center remains empty as court battles rage in Florida.



Not Bill Clinton, but David Barram, director of the General Services Administration. And, unlike his lame-duck boss, this obscure bureaucrat might have a say in who wins.

Under the provisions of the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, the General Services Administration is responsible for coordinating transition logistics — and for dishing out the $4.2 million in transition funds to the winner.

The statute — which does not define the term "president-elect" precisely — said the agency's director has the latitude to identify "the apparent successful candidates" for president and vice president, a task that is usually done before the Electoral College votes on Dec. 18.

"Apparent is a pretty vague word," said Beth Newberger, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Since the law went into effect, that designation has always been anticlimactic, but it could take on more importance this year with the certification of every ballot.

At issue in a race so close is whether Barram can officially recognize one candidate if the other does not concede.

"That's a question we're looking at," Newberger said. "It makes it more apparent if one concedes and the other is declared a winner. We're waiting to see how it plays out."

Newberger said the funds, along with a suite of federal offices in Washington, are usually awarded before the Electoral College vote to aid in a smooth transition.

Barram, a Clinton appointee, was not available for comment. He is scheduled to leave his post Dec. 1.

"Mr. Barram has the honor of determining the apparent winner of the national election and authorizing the transfer of funds," Newberger said.

"Mr. Barram will determine the winner when it is apparent to everybody. The transition law does not supersede the Constitution."

The General Services Administration is the nuts-and-bolts arm of the federal government, responsible for managing government space and furnishing supplies.

=================================================================
Return to beginning of ejps
Return to beginning of this issue