Blow dealt to Gore’s chances

David Espo

Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2000 | 11:12 a.m.

In a stunning turnabout, officials in Florida's Miami-Dade County abruptly called off a manual recount of presidential ballots today, dealing a sharp blow to Al Gore's efforts to overtake George W. Bush in the state's contested election.

"I do not believe we have the ability to conduct a full, accurate recount" under the Sunday deadline fixed by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday night, said Lawrence King, chairman of the three-member canvassing board.

The decision means Gore must look to Broward and Palm Beach counties, where the manual recounts are continuing, if he hopes to erase Bush's 930-vote lead.

The unexpected decision, on a vote of 3-0, came only a few hours after the same Democratic-controlled canvassing board ordered a speedup in the counting of disputed ballots -- which the Gore campaign hoped would boost his total.

The state high court's Tuesday night ruling that manual recounts could proceed had spread optimism through the Gore camp and anger, blended with near-despair, in the GOP ranks.

Bush told reporters the recounts, sought by Gore, invite "human error and mischief," and Bush supporters in and around the Miami-Dade County counting room protested furiously.

But after a chaotic morning of vote counting, King, the chairman of the canvassing board, said he concluded it was physically impossible to count all ballots that needed counting by the court's Sunday deadline. "I believe we should stop at this time," he said, expressing a fear that by counting some ballots but not all of them, officials would be disenfranchising some county voters.

Bush had said, "Make no mistake, the court rewrote the laws. It changed the rules and it did so after the election was over."

Bush spoke a few hours after William Daley, Gore's campaign manager, said on NBC's "Today" show that the court's ruling meant "we are on the road to finality on this." Gore himself said on Tuesday night that the court "has now spoken and we will move forward now with a full, fair and accurate count of the ballots in question."

Touching on yet another area of controversy, Bush urged Gore to join him in making sure that "all overseas military ballots that were signed and received in time count in this election."

More than a thousand overseas ballots were rejected last week as Democrats protested a lack or postmarks. The Gore campaign, under fire for the rejection of the ballots, has signaled a willingness to reconsider the issue.

The governor's campaign also was weighing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the state Supreme Court's ruling, according to several officials.

Bush holds a 930-vote lead in Florida, not counting the results of the manual recounts Gore has initiated in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties.

Those recounts had been proceeding precinct-by-precinct, with only modest gains for Gore. But members of the switched plans on Wednesday morning and announced they would turn their attention exclusively to an estimated 10,000 ballots that were not punched through cleanly on Election Day.

Both sides are operating under the assumption that those ballots will boost Gore's totals, and possibly allow him to overtake Bush's lead in the state that now means everything in the battle for the White House.

Bush spoke ominously of the recount process.

"Voters who clearly punched preferences in other races on the ballot but did not do so in the presidential race should not have their votes interpreted by local officials in a process that invites human error and mischief," he said.

Republicans responded with a protest and sit-in in the lobby of the county Elections Division. "Let us see the ballots," they shouted, and "Bush won twice," a reference to Election Day totals and a recount conducted in the first few days after Nov. 7.

Protesters yelled for police to arrest a Democratic attorney, Joe Geller, accusing him of walking out of the tabulation room with a ballot in his back pocket.

More than a dozen police officers surrounded Geller and led him inside the building to safety. He said later he had a "training ballot" used to show people how to count votes.

"It is clearly marked 'training ballot.' I wouldn't have taken something from elections officials that I wasn't supposed to have in front of a room full of screaming Republicans," he said.

In Washington, Cheney was taken to a hospital after being awakened by chest pains in the early morning.

Karen Hughes, a spokeswoman for Bush, said EKG tests on Cheney showed no abnormality and blood tests showed that his cardiac enzymes were normal. The 59-year-old former lawmaker and Cabinet official has had three heart attacks, the last one in 1988 as well as cardiac surgery the same year. But he was checked out thoroughly by his physicians before accepting Bush's offer to join him on the GOP ticket.

The chaotic situation in Miami stood in contrast to Palm Beach County, where local elections officials went to court to seek a ruling on whether to count ballots that were dimpled -- but not punched through -- by voters on Election Day.

"We would follow whatever your honor says, but we're trying to be at least consistent in how we're reviewing this," said Charles Burton, chairman of the county canvassing board.

The state Supreme Court ruling was a pivotal event in the post-election campaign, buoying the Gore team and infuriating the Bush campaign.