Bush Appeals to U.S. Supreme Court
Palm Beach Must Consider Dimpled Ballots
By Jane Sutton
Reuters
MIAMI (Nov. 22) - Republican George W. Bush took his White House battle to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday as Democrat Al Gore suffered a blow in his presidential bid when a Florida county decided not to include votes recounted by hand.
In a turbulent day during which Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, the fight for the White House grew more rancorous by the hour over how and which votes should be recounted in Florida, which will decide who wins the Nov. 7 presidential election.
Gore, who trailed Republican George W. Bush by 930 votes following a statewide machine recount of nearly six million ballots cast on Nov. 7, had pinned his hopes on full hand recounts in Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties.
Broward County has been the only one to give Gore any votes, and the vice president picked up just 137 in the hand recount there. That number could change as 2,000 ''challenged'' ballots are reviewed in Broward.
Bush's campaign said it filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Florida high court ruling on Tuesday to include recounted votes from three Florida counties in the final vote if they are filed by a Sunday deadline.
Ted Olson, counsel for the Bush-Cheney recount effort, told a news conference in Washington the Texas governor's campaign would seek an expedited Supreme Court ruling by Dec. 12, the final deadline for Florida's 25 electoral votes to be certified.
In a stunning reversal earlier on Wednesday, Miami-Dade county in Florida announced it would not amend its original vote tally with ballots counted by hand, a decision Gore campaign chairman William Daley vowed to challenge in court.
A state appeals court in Miami refused late on Wednesday to order the counting restarted, according to Miami television station WSVN. The state Supreme Court had already said it would not reopen the election issue, so any further appeals would have to be in the federal courts.
Miami-Dade County election officials said they called off the hand recount of 700,000 votes because there was no time to meet the Sunday deadline and so the county would stick with its result from an earlier machine recount.
With the White House at stake, partisan bickering also reached fever pitch over whether so-called dimpled ballots -- when the holes in ballots are dented but not punched out -- should be included in the final tally.
A Florida judge told Palm Beach County it could accept dimpled ballots, but only if voter intent was clearly discernible -- a decision that fell short of meeting a Democrat bid for more such ballots to be counted.
The Democrats had hoped Judge Jorge LaBarga would set a more liberal standard and tell the county's election panel to accept all dimpled -- or indented -- ballots in the county's crucial manual recount of votes.
DOCTORS SAY CHENEY WILL RECOVER FULLY
In another dramatic development, Cheney, 59, was admitted to George Washington University hospital in Washington suffering from chest and shoulder pains and had a common two-hour medical procedure to widen a narrowed artery.
''I feel good and everything's looking good,'' Cheney told CNN's ''Larry King Live'' in a phone call from the hospital. ''I should be out in a day or two.''
Asked if the heart attack, his fourth, would impede his ability to serve as vice president, Cheney said there is ''no doubt about my serving. All we have to do now is get elected.''
Doctors initially said Cheney, who has a history of heart problems, had not suffered a heart attack, but later updated his condition.
Dr. Alan Wasserman, interim chair of the department of medicine at George Washington University Hospital, said a series of tests showed ''there was a very slight heart attack.''
Using tough language at a news conference in Austin, Texas, Bush said he believed the Florida Supreme Court had ''over-reached'' itself in its ruling on Tuesday to allow hand recounted votes to be included from three counties and that he still expected to win the state and hence the White House.
''I believe Secretary Cheney and I won the vote in Florida. I believe some are determined to keep counting in an effort to change the legitimate result,'' Bush said.
In a snipe at the Gore campaign, he urged the vice president to ensure overseas military ballots were counted in the election.
Gore, who hailed the Florida Supreme Court ruling as a victory for democracy when it was announced on Tuesday, spent Wednesday helping out at a food bank in southeast Washington, filling up boxes with groceries for the needy.
The vice president declined to comment on reporters questions about the latest legal maneuvers or Cheney's admission to the hospital.
The state Supreme Court ruling was felt in U.S. markets, where stocks fell due to indecision caused by the new deadline. The Nasdaq composite index reached a new low for the year hitting 2,758.47 in mid-morning trade.
23:08 11-22-00
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It's Down To Dimples
In Palm Beach, Dimples Are Votes
In Miami-Dade, The Vote's All Done
By CBSNews.com's Susan Walsh
NEW YORK, Nov, 22, 2000
CBS
CBS Dimples count.
Under a Florida court order, hand counters in Palm Beach County may use their discretion to interpret an impression on a paper ballot as a vote – a decision seen as a victory for Al Gore in his frantic hunt for stray votes. But Gore’s wiggle room is shrinking all the same thanks to a decision by Miami-Dade County to stop its manual recount altogether and default to its certified vote.
Democrats’ hopes for harvesting any new Gore votes among Florida's "undervotes" and "dimpled chads" have come down to a handful of election officials in Palm Beach and Broward counties.
Two thousand Broward County ballots and more than 1,000 Palm Beach County ballots have been set aside because counting teams could not tell, or could not agree, what the voter intended.
Under the order of Circuit Court Judge Jorge LaBarga, a three-person panel will decide the most difficult Palm Beach cases by majority rule.
At a Wednesday hearing, Democrats and Republicans asked LaBarga to rule on what standards should apply to so-called "dimpled" ballots, where the voter has made an impression, but not separated a chad from the card.
In his order, LaBarga instructed the canvassing board to review any ballots where counting teams could not determine the voter’s intent.
His ruling effectively replaces a standard observed in the county since 1990 that required at least one corner of a chad be dislodged for the vote to count.
Democrats wanted the state’s highest court to create a uniform standard that would be implemented in all counties. But Tuesday night's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court was silent on the question of how to treat different kinds of markings and perforations on uncertain ballots.
Republicans have complained that human counters' attempts to divine the voters' intent by looking at the ballots are subjective. Wednesday afternoon in Austin, George W. Bush said the hand count process "invites human error and mischief."
A total of 462,000 votes were cast in Palm Beach County, where the canvassing board began recounting all ballots seven days ago. Judge Charles Burton, the head of the county's canvassing board, said the board expects to be finished with the recount late Wednesday, except for the stack of disputed ballots. On Tuesday, 1,979 ballots, dimpled and otherwise, joined that category.
Questioned in LaBarga’s courtroom by lawyers for both sides, Burton explained how the Palm Beach counters have ascertained the voter's intent when the chad was not separated from the ballot, and emphasized that they've tried to be consistent.
Burton said the Palm Beach counters were more inclined to consider a dimple in the presidential column if other votes further down the ticket were dimpled as well. "If they consistently had the problem, we're acknowledging that shows intent."
Except to the extent that LaBarga’s order gives Palm Beach leave to count the dimples, it should not change the vote counting and decision-making procedures described by Burton.
Burton submitted some dummy ballots he had created himself as examples of "some of the different things we've been seeing." LaBarga removed his glasses to examine them, and shook his head at the one which was punched, sort of, with a ball point pen, in honor of one voter who punched inky pinholes through the chads to mark his choices.
After working for seven straight days, Palm Beach counters are taking Thanksgiving off. In Broward, they’ll be back at work starting at 9:00 a.m.
Copyright 2000, CBS Worldwide Inc., All Rights Reserved.
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Jeb Bush: Dems Out To 'Destroy' Fla.
Dubya's Brother Upset By Gore Supporters' Tactics
E-Mails Reveal Governor's Staff Considered Acting Against Democrats
Democrats Suggest Jeb Bush Broke Pledge To Stay Out Of Controversy
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 21, 2000
CBS
Florida Governor Jeb Bush
AP Angered by a Democratic phone campaign, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush fired off an e-mail saying supporters of Al Gore were trying to "destroy our state."
Bush's message a week ago prompted his staff to consider compiling a list of tactics being used by Gore's supporters in the battle against George W. Bush, according to the e-mail traffic obtained under the state's Sunshine Law. However, spokeswoman Katie Baur said the governor's office didn't take any further action.
Word filtered in to the governor from a Bush supporter on Nov. 13 that many voters were getting calls that their ballots had been discarded and that they should contact the Florida governor to find out why. In Palm Beach County, 19,000 ballots were disqualified and hundreds of voters said they mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan while trying to vote for Gore.
"Is there any way this can be stopped?" the Bush supporter wrote in an e-mail to the Bush campaign and the Florida governor, the presidential candidate's younger brother. "I keep getting phone" calls "saying 'your vote along with 19,000 others was thrown out.'"
"This is a concerted effort to divide and destroy our state," the governor wrote to Baur, his communications director, at 11 o'clock that night.
According to the e-mail records, Baur alerted the governor's chief of staff, Sally Bradshaw, early the next morning, assuring the governor that "I'm working on this."
"This is obscene. I hope we are getting this to the press," Bradshaw replied to Baur. "Shouldn't we give them a list of all the scare tactics the Gore campaign is using?"
"That is what I am gathering," Baur responded three minutes later.
Asked about the e-mails, Baur said: "I did not take any action whatsoever. As soon as I took a moment to think about it, I realized this would be an action more appropriate for the Republican Party and I didn't give it a further thought after writing that e-mail."
Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway said the e-mail exchange "certainly belies the official position that the Florida governor is staying at arm's length from the situation. If he is, it's a pretty short arm."
Baur replied that Bush "wasn't asking anyone to respond or share this information with anyone. He's human. The governor isn't living in a bubble. Who isn't frustrated by what we watch on TV and read in the newspaper?"
Last week, the governor's office told GOP stalwarts at the Republican Governors Association to stop sending computer messages.
"Please remove my e-mail address from your list immediately," Jeb Bush's press secretary, Elizabeth Hirst, wrote to the association. "As you are aware, I work for Governor Jeb Bush who has recused himself from this elections process. I cannot receive these messages or act upon them. Thank you."
Jeb Bush's office had been asked by the governors' association to call or send strong messages of support as soon as possible to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris who is trying to keep manually re-counted ballots in Democratic counties out of the vote totals.
Separately, another Florida official embroiled in the voting dispute, Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth, released correspondence showing he received unsolicited legal advice from lawyers around the country.
A few faxed letters from citizens to Butterworth were laced with obscenities because the attorney general had issued an advisory opinion saying Palm Beach County had a right to finish its recount. The state's chief elections supervisor had told the county it couldn't finish.
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Judge Will Hear Absentee Ballot Challenge
Democrat Sues To Throw Out All Absentee Votes In Seminole County
Claims Republicans Acted Illegally In Handling Ballot Requests
Discarding Those Votes Would Erase Governor Bush's Florida Lead
SANFORD, Florida, Nov. 21, 2000
AP
An overseas absentee ballot, sent from India to Florida.
CBS A Florida judge has set a hearing on charges seeking to discard all 15,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County, a move that could determine the result of the presidential election.
On Monday, Circuit Court Judge Debra Nelson agreed to hear the case on Nov. 27, saying she wanted to allow a week for the parties to gather evidence.
Republican George W. Bush won the east central Florida county, in part because he won 10,006 absentee votes to Gore's 5,209. Throwing out Seminole's absentee ballots would overturn Bush's lead of 930 votes out of 6 million cast in Florida, a state either man needs to win the presidency.
A Seminole County man, Democrat Harry Jacobs, sued to disqualify the absentee ballots. He alleged that the county's election supervisor, a Republican, broke the law by allowing Republican party volunteers to fill in missing data on about 4,700 absentee ballot requests that might otherwise would have been rejected as incomplete.
Applicants were supposed to list their voter identification numbers on the absentee ballot request forms, but many did not and the party workers filled them in at the election supervisor's office, Jacobs' lawsuit alleged.
Many of the requests resulted from a mass mailing by the Florida Republican Party, urging voters to use absentee ballots.
Jacobs insists that the fact that Republicans were allowed to fix the ballot applications violated state law. But he says he was more bothered by the fact that Goard didn't extend the same opportunity for Democratic requests that also contained mistakes.
Eight voters who cast absentee ballots joined the lawsuit, and their attorneys urged Nelson to dismiss the case during a brief hearing on Saturday. Nelson ruled on Monday that the case could proceed.
While it may seem unlikely that a judge would be willing to throw out 15,000 votes, the Los Angeles Times reports there is a precedent to the case. In 1998, a Miami judge threw out all 5,000 absentee ballots in the mayoral election following charges of vote tampering. Mayor Xavier Suarez was forced to step down, giving the position to his opponent Joe Carollo.
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Florida Court OKs End To Miami-Dade Recount
MIAMI (AP) - A state appeals court Wednesday night upheld a decision by an exhausted Miami-Dade election board to drop its manual recount, an attorney for the board said. Democrats promised a state high court appeal. The board decided to stop counting just hours after it agreed to examine just 10,750 disputed ballots among some 600,000 cast. Murray A. Greenberg, a lawyer for the election canvassing board, said a state appeals court turned down a bid by Democrats to force the board and vote counters to get back to work to meet a Sunday deadline.
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Florida legislators say law would allow them to name electors
By Donald Lambro
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Visit our Election 2000 page
for daily election news and analysis
Florida legislators said yesterday they are considering using a federal law that would let them name the state's 25 electors if the presidential election stalemate is not resolved before the Dec. 12 deadline to certify them. Top Stories
• Miami-Dade calls off its hand recount
• Bush takes center stage, says election is being stolen
• Recount down to Broward, Palm Beach
• Cheney gets angioplasty after 'slight' heart attack
• U.S. delegate gets a face full of protesters' wrath
• Russia will not honor Gore's secret arms deal
As the Republican-controlled Legislature was sworn in yesterday in the midst of the legal and political turmoil that has gripped the state since the Nov. 7 election, Republican leaders were studying a 1948 federal statute that permits them to appoint a slate of electors if one has not been chosen through the normal elections process.
"What is under consideration is calling a special session, appointing a set of electors prior to Dec. 12," said state Sen. Locke Burt, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over the issue.
Mr. Locke said Republican lawmakers were concerned that if the dispute over who won the popular vote is not settled soon and no electors are chosen by the deadline to cast their vote in the Electoral College, it "will result in disenfranchising the 6 million people [in Florida] who did vote."
"I think the most important issue is that Florida's 25 votes are cast at the Electoral College. We will make sure that that happens," said Sen. John McKay.
But some election strategists feared that if the law is used, it would be challenged in the courts and perhaps result in Florida's electors being thrown out by the joint session of Congress that will be held to count the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 and formally elect the next president.
The obscure statute has never been used or tested in the courts and there are questions about whether a legislature can supersede constitutional law, which gives the states' electorate the right to choose the candidate whose electors are then designated to vote for him.
But Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney has repeatedly threatened to use that authority if the electoral deadline draws near and the election dispute has not been settled.
"We're going to potentially ignore the state Supreme Court," Mr. Feeney said last week. "It is the state Legislature that determines the method of selecting electors."
Mr. Feeney has since softened his position somewhat on using the law, though his chief spokesman, Kim Stone, told The Washington Times yesterday that "we have sought outside legal advice to understand exactly what the law means."
"However, it's not something we are actively pursuing," she said.
"But if someone comes to us when the deadline is near and says this is what it comes down to, then we'd step up to the plate," she said.
Angered by the way its authority over election law is being challenged in a dozen or more lawsuits, the Legislature may be on a collision course with the state's highest court. The justices ruled against Secretary of State Katherine Harris last night, requiring her to accept amended returns as late as Monday — 13 days past the Nov. 14 deadline established by Florida law.
In a strong show of support yesterday for her legal battle in the courts, a joint session of the Legislature gave Mrs. Harris a standing ovation.
After the state Supreme Court prevented Mrs. Harris from declaring Mr. Bush the winner, as she had planned to do last Saturday, Mr. Feeney issued a warning that raised the threat of the Legislature acting on its own.
"It is my intention to monitor the discord between the judicial and executive branches, and the Florida Legislature will play a role should it become necessary," he said in a statement.
The key provision in the law that Mr. Feeney and his colleagues may use says that when a state "has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such state may direct."
Under one interpretation, the law would be triggered by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who would have to declare that the state has been unable to choose its electors, thus forcing him to call a special legislative session to name them.
If the Legislature's Republicans took this action, there is no doubt that they would have the votes to name a slate of electors committed to the Texas governor. Republicans have a 25-15 majority in the Senate and a 77-43 majority in the House.
But such action, if it comes, could ignite a major conflict between the courts and the Legislature and, perhaps, with Congress, said Norman Ornstein, a presidential elections analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
"The question becomes, if you do have electors selected because the court rules this is the election result or issues rules to find the intent of the voters, then is it appropriate for the Legislature to step in and overrule that judgment by the court?" Mr. Ornstein said.
"How you resolve that kind of dispute is an open question. That one ends up in the U.S. Supreme Court and it could end up in Congress. You could conceivably have two sets of electors coming up here," he said.
But if one of the candidates ends up winning Florida's 25 electoral votes outright at the end of a long, disputed hand count, that does not necessarily mean the end of Florida's electoral problems.
House Republican Whip Tom DeLay is circulating a memo reminding colleagues that it takes only two members, one from each house, to object to an elector or slate of electors and a majority vote to reject them.
Florida lawmakers yesterday were clearly concerned that media coverage of the contested election might hurt the state's image.
Mr. McKay urged creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the Florida election laws that have been the focus of legal challenges in the presidential election.
"That review must begin soon and must be conducted in a nonpartisan manner that will ensure the highest level of public confidence," the Republican state senator said.
In the House, Mr. Feeney told colleagues, "We have an opportunity to lead this great state forward and show the world that we are not the state currently being portrayed on the evening news."
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Bush Sues Over Military Ballots
Wednesday, November 22, 2000
By Sharon Kehnemui
WASHINGTON — Governor George W. Bush's campaign filed suit in Florida state court Wednesday in order to reinstate overseas military ballots that 13 counties had tossed out of the count because the ballots had been not properly postmarked.
The Bush camp is asking that a declaration be made by the court that overseas absentee ballots from the military be counted even if they bear an unreadable, smudged, or late U.S. postmark, or if they lack a written date.
Florida law required that the overseas ballots bear a postmark, but often military outposts send their mail to U.S. bases without any such markings.
Florida Attorney General — and Gore state campaign chairman — Bob Butterworth wrote an opinion Monday to the counties that military ballots should be included if they are signed with a date but bear no postmark. County boards rejected the opinion.
In its filing, Bush attorneys also asked that overseas ballots be counted, regardless of whether the voter requested a state absentee ballot, or whether there are minor differences in the signature on the request for the absentee ballot and the ballot itself.
Bush attorneys are also seeking a Writ of Mandamus from the court to force the canvassing boards to consider overseas ballots, and to send the results of the new ballot count to the secretary of state for certification. They want the courts to require the boards to implement security for all the ballots and envelopes.
Leon County Circuit Court Judge L. Ralph Smith received the request.
Of the 3,733 overseas votes sent to Florida, only 2,206 were included in the count. Bush was favored in the count over Gore 1380-750. 1,527 ballots were rejected by local elections officials because they were not postmarked by election day, Nov. 7, as specified by Florida law.
The majority of those 1,527 votes allegedly came from military personnel abroad, which set off a frenzy fueled by the Bush campaign that the Gore campaign was trying to disenfranchise the very people who spend their lives defending America's democracy, including the right to vote.
The Gore camp vehemently rejected those assertions.
Bush told reporters Wednesday that if Gore wants to discuss areas of agreement with Bush, as he repeated Tuesday night after the Florida Supreme Court ruled to allow hand recounts, they may have "common ground."
"He should join me in calling upon all appropriate authorities in Florida to make sure that overseas military ballots that were signed and received on time count in this election. Our men and women in uniform overseas should not lose their right to vote. I hope the vice president will personally support me in this call," Bush said.
Gore campaign manager William Daley said Wednesday that he is on the side of counting all "legally cast" military ballots.
"All of us agree that those legally cast ballots, whether they're military ballots or civilian ballots, should be counted. There's no question about that," Daley said. "And if that's what he's implying, that's what we agree with. Absolutely."
Daley said he hoped that the governor wasn't implying that illegal ballots should be counted too.
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