Battling Over Absentees, Hand to Hand

Democrats and Republicans fought vote by vote, postmark by postmark Friday as Florida’s 67 county canvassing boards tallied overseas ballots that appeared to be padding Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s microscopic lead over Vice President Al Gore.

With Democrats contesting ballots cast by American military personnel stationed abroad and Republicans challenging those sent by State Department employees in foreign missions, county canvassing commissions painstakingly reviewed the overseas absentee votes that were mailed before the Nov. 7 election but received after it.

A survey of 65 of 67 counties found that the absentee votes from overseas had extended Bush’s lead to 760.

State law required that the votes be received by midnight Friday, and that each county send a new, certified vote total to Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Under a federal consent decree signed in 1980, Florida allows 10 days after an election for overseas ballots to trickle in.

Ordinarily, they are scarcely an asterisk to an election, a formality that is more a tribute to the civic-mindedness of expatriates than a meaningful factor in the outcome of a contest.

But this time, with the razor-thin margin between the candidates and the fate of manual recounts in several Florida counties being fought out in court, the ballots from overseas could determine who occupies the White House on Jan. 21.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties sent legions of lawyers, volunteers and staff to the canvassing board hearings across the state, where they were joined, in many cases, by even greater numbers of reporters, photographers and TV camera crews.

More than 1,100 overseas absentee ballots were thrown out, many of them from the military, and Republicans alleged that Democrats had waged a coordinated campaign to have ballots from the armed services rejected. Democrats denied the charge.

In few spots were the stakes as great as in Duval County, home to two of Florida’s biggest Navy bases and, hence, a raft of late-arriving votes from military personnel stationed overseas. Since election day, more than 600 ballots had poured into the country from foreign soil.

Duval Favors Bush by 2-1 Margin

Duval presumably was among the biggest reasons that Bush’s lead widened as the overseas ballots were tallied: Republican returns there outnumbered those of Democrats 2 to 1, and the biggest bunch came in the red-lettered envelopes the county reserved for the military.

But the task of figuring what to count proved daunting. Top election officials spent the day locked away in a windowless room at the election headquarters in Jacksonville, the county seat. They were joined by Democratic and Republican party officials and attorneys, three per side.

By midmorning, frustrations were already beginning to show.

“I wish these people would get . . . out of here and let us just count,” growled Dick Carlberg, assistant election supervisor in Duval County. “It’s horrible.” Outside, locals were also grumbling. Nedra Bradley, a Gore supporter, waved a placard castigating the county election chief and screamed until she was hoarse.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “And I’ll be back in the morning.”

Betty Holzendorf, a Democratic state senator from northeast Florida and a prominent leader of Jacksonville’s large black community, complained about being denied entry to watch.

She sees trouble ahead, whoever wins the White House.

“We’ll be a state divided,” she said. “We’re sitting on a time bomb. We really are. And anything could set it off.”

In sparsely populated Okeechobee County, elections supervisor Gwen Chandler described the scene at her tiny office, which usually receives little or no attention: “We have a matchbox of an office, and there for the count were two party executive chairs, local representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, lawyers from both sides, spouses, and the press. . . . It was a very unusual picture.”

For all that, her canvassing board reviewed all of two overseas ballots. One was rejected for having no witness’ signature; the other was a vote for Gore.

In Calhoun County, where Bush led comfortably in the initial vote count, a Democratic Party representative challenged the lone ballot received from overseas, according to election board spokeswoman Jana Whitworth. He lost--and then won when the ballot turned out to be a vote for Gore.

In Tallahassee, the seat of Leon County as well as the state capital, a wooden box filled with rubber stamps sat on the table in the courtroom where the county’s three-member canvassing board met Friday. But it was no rubber-stamp procedure.

Eight Republican and three Democratic lawyers or operatives stood in the first two rows of the courtroom, craning to see as the board in the predominantly Democratic county reviewed the 49 overseas absentee ballots it had received since the Nov. 7 election. In all, nearly half the ballots were challenged for violating some aspect of state election law, and ultimately, 19 were tossed out.

Party lawyers battled for any advantage. Democratic lawyer Natalie Zellner challenged one set of ballots sent to military APO addresses, saying there was no guarantee they had actually come from overseas. She challenged another military ballot on the grounds it had no postmark.

Republican lawyer Jason Unger urged the board to accept the ballots. “If there are military ballots, I’d like to give them all the leeway possible, since they are overseas fighting for their country,” he said.

But he urged no such leeway for U.S. diplomats, who are more likely to vote Democratic. He successfully challenged two ballots apparently sent from U.S. embassy personnel in India to someone in the United States, and postmarked in Maryland.

Another ballot from India--apparently from an American doctor working there--prompted a fight over its lack of a postmark. The ballot had arrived in Tallahassee on Nov. 13, six days after the election. Deputy Elections Supt. Janet Olin said postal officials told her it is unlikely that a piece of mail could have arrived from India in fewer than seven days.

Unger argued that the ballot should be counted; Democrats said the board couldn’t be sure it had been mailed on time and should reject it.

“I tell you, you’re on a very slippery slope here,” said Jon Ausman, vice chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. The board agreed and rejected the ballot.

An Hour Needed to Certify 30 Votes

After more than an hour of deliberations, the board was able to certify 30 ballots, of which 17 were for Gore, 11 for Bush and two for Green Party nominee Ralph Nader. Olin planned to be at the post office at midnight in case any last-minute ballots were received.

Despite the stakes, the hearing in Leon County had its moments of humor. When Olin began to feed ballots into a counting machine, TV crews bolted into action. “Can you stand in such a way that we could more clearly see you?” one camera operator shouted.

Olin stood to the side of the machine, awkwardly reaching around to the front to feed the ballots. She looked thoroughly unnatural.

“Now could you look a little more like Vanna?” Ausman yelled.

“Not without surgery,” she replied.

In Palm Beach County, where Gore picked up 22 votes and Bush 13 through the overseas absentee ballots, the count was a contentious affair.

From a ballot proclaimed “soaking wet” but counted anyway to a ballot cast by a military worker that was invalidated by a missing postmark, it took the county two hours to count 52 ballots.

The ballots were reviewed and then announced, one by one, by the three members of the county’s election canvassing board--all of them Democrats. They sat at a folding table in the bowl of an amphitheater-style room in the county’s Emergency Operations Center, normally reserved for hurricane preparation. An attorney from each party looked over their shoulders as eight other lawyers stood nearby, whispering in each other’s ears.

“I certainly want to give you guys an opportunity to look, but we can’t spend 20 minutes on each ballot,” Charles Burton, the Palm Beach County judge who is the chairman of the county election canvassing board, told the lawyers at one point.

Overseas ballots are notoriously problematic, and just 36 of the 52 were allowed.

“This one’s from Las Vegas,” Burton said with a grin. “That’s in this country, isn’t it?”

One ballot from Israel, which is presumed to be a stronghold of Gore voters, was thrown out, over Democrats’ protests, because it was not postmarked.

Republicans similarly objected when the board threw out a military ballot because it did not have a proper postmark. The GOP attorneys produced a letter from an officer saying that military ballots are routinely missing proper postmarks.

The final word perhaps belonged to election supervisor Kay Clem in tiny Indian River County on the state’s Atlantic coast, known more for its grapefruit than its politics.

The board there surveyed eight ballots, rejected three, and counted four for Bush and one for Gore. Like most counties, it was then faxing the result to Secretary of State Harris and following up by mail.

Clem’s plaintive summation: “Is this over yet?”

*

Times staff writer Scott Gold also contributed to this story.

* WITNESSES TO HISTORY

In the name of speed, officials are drafting workers of all stripes to help in recounts. A16

* WEIGHING MORE RECOUNTS

The Bush camp looks at New Mexico and Wisconsin, where Al Gore holds slim leads. A17

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Tallying Overseas Ballots

According to the latest unofficial count of overseas ballots in the presidential race in Florida, Republican George W. Bush leads Democrat Al Gore by 760 in the overall vote, which includes totals already certified by the state plus the overseas ballots.

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County Gore Bush ALACHUA 15 11 BAKER 0 1 BAY 18 38 BRADFORD 0 2 BREVARD 17 54 BROWARD 53 37 CALHOUN 1 0 CHARLOTTE 1 2 CITRUS 6 34 CLAY 35 154 COLLIER 11 9 COLUMBIA 2 0 DESOTO 1 0 DIXIE 1 0 DUVAL - - ESCAMBIA 38 109 FLAGLER 0 5 FRANKLIN 1 0 GADSDEN 1 3 GILCHRIST 0 0 GLADES 0 0 GULF 1 3 HAMILTON 1 1 HARDEE 3 0 HENDRY 0 0 HERNANDO 4 12 HIGHLANDS 2 1 HILLSBOROUGH 19 34 HOLMES 0 1 INDIAN RIVER 1 4 JACKSON - - JEFFERSON 0 0 LAFAYETTE 0 0 LAKE 0 0 LEE 11 10 LEON 17 11 LEVY 0 5 LIBERTY 0 0 MADISON 1 0 MANATEE 37 55 MARION 9 5 MARTIN 1 2 MIAMI-DADE 59 41 MONROE 4 4 NASSAU 3 3 OKALOOSA 40 91 OKEECHOBEE 1 0 ORANGE 16 14 OSCEOLA 6 21 PALM BEACH 22 13 PASCO 6 13 PINELLAS 27 24 POLK 4 11 PUTNAM 5 10 ST. JOHNS 7 18 ST. LUCIE 1 0 SANTA ROSA 8 36 SARASOTA 16 17 SEMINOLE 53 113 SUMTER 0 0 SUWANNEE 1 3 TAYLOR 0 2 UNION 0 0 VOLUSIA 9 11 WAKULLA 0 0 WALTON 1 4 WASHINGTON 0 1 Total Gore 2,910,789 Total Bush 2,911,549

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Sources: County election offices, Associated Press.

Compiled by Times researchers Lianne Hart,

Massie Ritsch, Edith Stanley and Anna M. Virtue.