Miami-Dade Cancels Recount

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — George W. Bush inched closer to the White House on Wednesday after Miami-Dade County abruptly abandoned its hand counting of ballots, saying it would be impossible to meet Florida’s new Sunday deadline.

Then, in a second blow to rival Al Gore, a judge in Palm Beach County refused to force the tally of “dimpled” ballots, denying the vice president a potential gain of several hundred more votes.

Trailing Bush by 930 votes in the official statewide tally, the vice president hoped to make up the difference in the hand counting of ballots in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties. By the end of the day, however, Gore had picked up only 123 votes. When Miami-Dade abandoned its hand count, he even lost the 157 votes he had netted there.

Still, with circumstances changing almost hourly, Bush sought a legal backstop in case the hand counting goes against him by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hold a hearing next week on the disputed recount. “This is a case of the utmost national importance, involving the Constitution’s most fundamental rights as exercised in the nation’s most important election,” said Bush’s attorneys.

They urged the nine justices to overturn a Florida Supreme Court decision to let the hand counts continue until Sunday, with the results folded into the state’s certified tally. “The outcome of the election for the presidency of the United States may hang in the balance,” the lawyers said in court papers.

In Austin, the Texas governor offered his first public comments on the Florida high court decision at a brief news conference at the state Capitol.

Bush accused the Florida court of overreaching and Gore, at least indirectly, of trying to undermine the will of voters. “I believe [Dick] Cheney and I won the vote in Florida,” Bush said. “I believe some are determined to keep counting in an effort to change the legitimate result.”

He again spurned Gore’s proposal for a face-to-face meeting, suggesting the vice president instead join him in urging a fair count of all overseas absentee ballots.

Hours later, Bush’s campaign filed a lawsuit to force a recount of more than 1,500 disqualified overseas ballots, many of them cast by U.S. military personnel.

For his part, Gore steered clear of the election mess in his only public appearance of the day. Accompanied by his wife, Tipper, and their daughter Kristin, the casually dressed vice president spent about 15 minutes hauling boxes at Washington’s Project Harvest, a free food distribution center.

Gore ignored reporters’ shouted questions.

The Florida high court decision Tuesday night was an important victory for Gore, keeping alive his hopes of overtaking Bush in a state both need to claim the White House. But it proved short-lived.

In Miami, the three-member county election board capped a bizarre morning of pushing, shoving and vehement Republican-led protests by effectively throwing up their hands and abandoning the hand count that started Monday.

The decision--the second time the election board has reversed itself since the election--came after a riotous session in which local officials first decided to speed the hand counting by focusing solely on “undercounted” ballots. Those are ballots where tabulation machines read no presidential preference.

There were approximately 10,750 such ballots in Miami-Dade County, out of 654,000 cast.

Angry Reaction From GOP Protesters

The action--taken to meet the Sunday deadline set in the state Supreme Court’s decision--drew angry protests from Republican observers. But perhaps more upsetting was a fracas that resulted when election officials proposed moving the recount site to a venue nearer the machines needed to sort undercounted ballots.

Republicans protested that the area was too small to accommodate observers. Members of the news media chimed in. Police raced to the scene. Board members finally gave up and voted unanimously to quit counting.

“Those votes are weighing very heavily on my mind,” said board chairman Lawrence D. King, who choked up and apologized for halting the hand count. But, he said, “it became rather obvious to all of us that it was going to be a deadline that couldn’t be met.”

Attorneys for Gore immediately sought to reverse the action. “The Miami-Dade canvassing board decision today to halt its recount--for whatever reason--flies in the face of an unambiguous, unanimous Supreme Court decision of less than 24 hours ago,” Democrats argued.

But Wednesday night a state appeals court upheld the decision halting the recount. Democrats said they would take their case to the Florida Supreme Court.

In Broward, a Calmer Roller Coaster

Up the coast in Broward County, the scene was less histrionic. But the vote count there fluctuated even more wildly.

Gore ended the day with a net of 137 votes, but only after his numbers dipped to a low of 56 before he picked up nearly a vote a minute in a count of absentee ballots.

Democrats hope for even greater gains today, when the board meets to examine 1,800 or so contested ballots that have been set aside since the recount of the county’s 588,000 ballots began last week.

The way these ballots are reviewed is so crucial for Gore that David Boies, the vice president’s lead attorney, appeared Wednesday before the three-member election board to urge full consideration of dimpled ballots, despite Republican pressure to rule them out.

“Nothing in this life is 100% certain,” Boies told the board. “But if there’s an indentation . . . then it’s logical that that was the voter’s intent.”

Republican attorney William Scherer countered that such a standard would “put the board in a position to divine what voters were thinking more than two weeks ago.”

The Broward board adjourned for the day, implying that it would consider all dimpled ballots on a case-by-case basis.

Lacking any uniform standard, each county has chosen to apply its own criteria in deciding which disputed ballots should be tallied.

In Palm Beach County, Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga dealt a setback to Gore by only slightly modifying his instructions to election officials there on how to proceed.

The vice president had hoped to pick up as many as 1,100 votes in the Democratic enclave, where election day was a welter of confusion over “butterfly ballots” and other miscues.

Democratic attorneys spent a week building their case to allow dimpled and other disputed ballots to be counted, arguing election officials were ignoring an earlier order to do so.

Dimpled ballots are those in which voters fail to punch all the way through the tab next to a candidate’s name.

In all, the Democrats requested that 557 ballots be set aside, while Bush allies set aside 260 similar votes. An additional 11,000 ballots await the canvassing board’s more careful review.

By adopting a “wooden, restrictive” standard to determine what counts as a valid vote, the canvassing board has wrongfully thrown out hundreds of votes, Democrats argued Wednesday.

Republicans countered by calling Charles Burton, the Democratic chairman of the county’s canvassing board, to the witness stand. Burton said Palm Beach County is abiding by Labarga’s prior ruling in the case, urging careful consideration of each ballot.

The vast majority of dimpled ballots have been thrown out, Burton said, because “in all candor, determining intent from a ballot card is impossible.”

“The canvassing board does not have a per se bright-line rule that excludes any ballot?” Labarga asked Burton.

“I don’t believe we do,” Burton replied.

The board has said that dimpled ballots cannot be counted unless there is “clear and convincing” evidence that a dimple indicates a vote--not a mistake, or a change of heart or a flaw on the ballot.

In a seven-page ruling, Labarga reiterated that the canvassing board cannot automatically throw out those votes. And he said the board should use a slightly looser standard: that the votes should be counted if the board can “fairly and satisfactorily” determine the voter’s intent.

But Labarga stopped well short of requiring Palm Beach County to count dimples as votes, and afterward the three Democrats who make up the election canvassing board decided to do what they have done all along.

“They are going to continue in the manner they have,” said Denise Cote, a county spokeswoman. “They feel they have been doing it correctly.”

In Tallahassee, meanwhile, a state circuit judge ordered that about 1,520 overseas absentee ballots from military personnel be securely stored and preserved so officials can determine which, if any, should be included in Florida’s final vote totals.

Consistent Numbers of Disqualifications

Election officials say the number of overseas ballots disqualified for various reasons, such as missing postmarks or lack of a signature, is consistent with past presidential elections.

Still, the Bush campaign seized on the disqualifications to accuse Gore of an anti-military bias and Democrats agreed to support a recanvass of the votes.

State Lawmakers Hint at Helping Bush

As the litigation and hand counting ground on, lawmakers in Tallahassee opened still another avenue in the seemingly endless postelection controversy, suggesting they might intercede on Bush’s behalf if the hand counting should result in Gore winning Florida’s popular vote.

James A. Baker III, Bush’s lead man in Florida, suggested such intervention Tuesday night in his angry response to the Florida Supreme Court decision.

On Wednesday, Rep. Tom Feeney, Republican speaker of the state House, said he has prepared a two-page legal analysis justifying such a move.

“The court’s ruling indicated the tremendous lack of respect that the Florida Supreme Court has for the laws of the state of Florida and the Legislature,” Feeney said.

Florida Senate President John McCay, another Republican, agreed.

“The gravity of this situation may require consideration of legislative action at some point.”

Bush and Gore each stand just short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, making Florida’s 25-member slate pivotal in deciding the election.

A legislative move to appoint electors would drastically escalate the political stakes, forcing Congress to choose between competing sets of electors claiming to legitimately represent Florida.

On Capitol Hill, GOP lawmakers seemed to welcome a chance to enter the fight.

“There is total unanimity in my party,” said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), one of the party’s leading moderates, who nonetheless accused Gore of trying to steal the election.

Tying up one other loose end, the Bush campaign announced it would not pursue a recount in Wisconsin, which Gore carried by about 5,600 votes.

“The race there was indeed close, but Gov. Bush will do his part to help bring this election to a conclusion,” said Don Evans, the governor’s campaign chairman.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen, James Gerstenzang, Jeffrey Gettleman and Richard A. Serrano contributed to this story.

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Wednesday’s Events

6:15 am. EST

Miami-Dade County decides to recount only the 10,750 contested ballots, not all 654,000.

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7:30 a.m.

Republican Vice President nominee Dick Cheney undergoes surgery to insert a stent in a heart artery after entering a hospital complaining of chest pains.

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9 a.m.

Gov. George W. Bush speaks against allowing the three Florida counties to continue the recount, accusing the state Supreme Court of “overreaching its authority.”

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10:14 a.m.

Miami-Dade County election officials decide to halt their recount entirely.

11:30 a.m.

Bush goes to court to force 13 counties to count hundreds of previously disqualified overseas ballots, most filed by the military.

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11:45 a.m.

Bush appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court on recount.

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1:30 p.m.

A circuit judge refuses to order Palm Beach County to count dimpled ballots as votes in its manual recount.

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3 p.m.

Bush’s team appeals the Florida Supreme Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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6 p.m.

Appeals court denies Democrats’ bid to force resumption of the hand recount in Miami-Dade County.

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Florida Tally

Results of ongoing uncertified hand recounts:

Palm Beach: Bush +14 (NET GAIN)

Broward: Gore +137 (NET GAIN)

Gore Net Gain +123

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If these votes are included, Bush’s official lead of 930 narrows to 807.

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Source: Associated Press