Bush Holds Slim Lead; Gore Prepares for Further Court Action

Al Gore and George W. Bush continued their hand-to-hand fighting across Florida on Saturday as bleary-eyed election officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties raced against today’s deadline to complete their manual recounts of nearly 10,000 disputed ballots.

Bush still clung to a slender lead, but lawyers for the two candidates were already looking past tonight’s scheduled election certification to a new round of courtroom battles over who won the presidency.

The Texas governor was ahead of Gore by 497 votes, or 0.008% of the 6 million cast statewide. The figure does not account for the 90 or so votes the vice president gained in Palm Beach County, based on unofficial results. Palm Beach officials planned to work through the night to scrutinize as many ballots as physically possible.

If Bush is still ahead tonight, which both sides expect, he will likely be certified the winner of Florida and its 25 electoral votes, putting him just over the 270 needed to win the White House in the nation’s closest presidential election in well over a century.

Attorneys for Gore intend to contest the results, and the vice president was tentatively planning a speech Monday in which he may lay out the rationale for pressing his legal fight.

With an eye toward public opinion, the campaign Saturday also stepped up its use of senior party surrogates to allay any doubts that Democrats are united behind Gore’s decision.

“This may take time, but it is time well spent,” said former President Carter, in a statement released by the campaign. “We must not sacrifice accuracy for speed in deciding who has been chosen by the voters.”

Attorneys for Gore said that if the vice president is still trailing when the results are certified, they will pursue legal challenges in at least three counties: Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Nassau.

“We fully expect to file a contest . . . by the end of Monday at the latest,” said Doug Hattaway, a Gore spokesman in Tallahassee.

Attorneys for Gore planned to argue that a variety of irregularities--including alleged intimidation of election officials in Miami-Dade and a confusing “butterfly” ballot in Palm Beach--deprived the vice president of Florida’s decisive electoral votes.

Mandatory Recount Misses Ballots

In Nassau County, the campaign alleges local election officials improperly reverted to their election night vote count after a mandatory machine recount missed about 200 presidential ballots. The action resulted in a net gain of 52 votes for Bush. “That one’s a slam-dunk,” asserted one Gore advisor.

The Bush campaign, meantime, continued to pursue its own legal options. On Saturday, attorneys recalibrated their strategy on the disqualification of overseas absentee ballots, dropping a lawsuit that targeted 14 counties and filing instead a series of county-by-county lawsuits.

Senior advisors to Bush said they had not ruled out filing their own official contest against the election if the recounts put Gore ahead.

Such an action would likely argue that the standards used in the hand recounting of ballots, which differ in each locale, were “unreliable and subjective,” aides said. The campaign may also challenge the dismissal of overseas absentee ballots for assorted reasons, including lack of proper postmarks and other problems.

U.S. Supreme Court Set to Hear Arguments

Regardless, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Friday on Bush’s claim that the Florida Supreme Court violated federal law when it allowed the manual recounts to go forward.

The suit has been joined by the GOP-majority Florida Legislature, which has threatened to call a special session to award the state’s 25 electors to Bush if it appears Gore may win Florida.

As their proxies faced off Saturday in court papers and counting rooms across this soggy state, the two candidates stayed mostly out of sight.

Bush spent the better part of the day at his ranch outside Waco, Texas, before returning home to Austin. He was greeted by hundreds of supporters gathered outside the Governor’s Mansion, including one man carrying a sign that read, “Gore is a chad molester”--a reference to the hanging bits of paper off cardboard ballots.

Bush waved, gave a thumbs-up and held up three fingers in a “W” sign before entering the governor’s mansion. His campaign chairman, Don Evans, spoke briefly to reporters and refused to “answer any hypotheticals” about what Bush might say on Sunday. “We’re just going to have to wait till tomorrow night and see what the results are and then we’ll make a decision” Evans said.

Gore, meantime, stepped out for ice cream on a cold and blustery Washington day.

Accompanied by his wife, Tipper, their daughter Karenna, and son-in-law, Drew Schiff, Gore posed for snapshots and chatted up fellow customers at Max’s, a shop near the vice presidential mansion in northwest Washington.

Several questions shouted by reporters elicited only Gore’s suggestion they, too, get some ice cream. “I recommend the chocolate chip,” he said, holding a serving of just that in a large, waffle cone.

But there was no such break for the hard-pressed canvassing boards in Florida’s Broward and Palm Beach counties.

In Fort Lauderdale, the Broward board made steady progress winnowing its stack of about 1,800 disputed allots, putting itself in a good position to meet tonight’s 5 pm EST deadline.

Gore picked up votes throughout the day, netting even more than some Democrats had hoped. By Saturday night, Gore’s net gain stood at 534 votes.

Tensions flared throughout the day, with two partisan observers nearly getting into a fist fight outside the recount room at one point. Republican lawyer William Scherer, who was almost ejected from the recount room on Thanksgiving for disrupting the board, was asked to leave Saturday for interrupting again.

Outside the courthouse where the counting took place, hundreds of Republican activists gathered in the rain, chanting and waving signs ridiculing the process. “Are you going to steal Christmas too?” one sign read. “The Broward Board is corrupt,” read another.

A handful of Democrats gathered across a barricaded strip of asphalt to yell back, but they were mostly drowned out. Inside the counting room, though, Democrats couldn’t have been more pleased. “What a great run!” said Michael Moskowitz, one of the attorney’s representing Gore. “We’re doing better here than even we expected.”

But Gore fared less well in Palm Beach County, which was using a stricter standard than Broward in determining which imperfectly punched ballots to include in their final tally. Unofficial results had Gore gaining between 80 and 90 votes by Saturday night, according to Democratic and Republican observers in the counting room.

The canvassing board was racing to tally roughly 8,000 disputed ballots before tonight’s deadline.

A round-the-clock count-a-thon seemed highly likely as the increasingly fatigued board members squinted and held up ballots to the overhead light in the county’s Emergency Operations Center, trying to decipher voters’ intent.

A noisy crowd of demonstrators summoned by Republican operatives spilled onto the highway from the sidewalk outside. They shouted “No More Gore” and “Don’t Be Had by the Chads.”

An aide to Dick Cheney, the Republican candidate for vice president, passed out dozens of T-shirts saying “How to Steal an Election.”

In the two side’s unceasing efforts to sway public opinion, Democrats have portrayed the crowds outside the counting centers as unruly mobs. But Scott McClellan, a Bush spokesman, said the demonstrators were merely speaking out about a situation they find troublesome.

“The local Republican Party has been making calls to people--if they’re concerned about the flawed process, they can come out and express their First Amendment right over there,” he said, pointing toward the street protest.

McClellan called the Democrats’ criticism “something they’re raising to take away attention from the flawed process and the deliberate scheme to disqualify military ballots”--a reference to the GOP’s own public relations offensive.

Accusing Gore of an anti-military bias, Republicans have charged that Gore’s lawyers purposely targeted hundreds of ballots cast by service members abroad in an effort to cut Bush’s lead.

Bush Campaign Files Suit in Tallahassee

Earlier this week, the Bush campaign filed suit in Tallahassee circuit court, asking that 14 counties be forced to open more than 1,500 rejected ballots cast by Floridians overseas. But shortly before the judge was set to rule, the Bush team abandoned its suit. Later, lawyers began filing separate suits targeting five of the 14 counties after several of the others undertook recounts that turned up an additional 67 Bush votes.

The Texas governor hopes to pick up as many as 500 votes from the absentee overseas ballots, many cast by Republican-leaning members of the armed services, campaign officials said.

As part of its campaign to pressure local election officials, the Bush team brought out three medal-of-honor winners at a news conference in Tallahassee, where they argued that every single military ballot should be counted, even if they fail to comply with legal requirements.

“Last week across Florida many of these precious votes were discarded and abandoned, based on the principle of the letter of the law,” said Ron Ray, an Army captain in Vietnam. “We want fair treatment at the ballot box.”

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

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Dwindling Lead

How hand recount and revisions have chipped away at Bush’s lead in Florida.

930: Bush’s original lead

11/19: 831

Mon.: 764

Tue.: 664

Wed.: 807

Thu.: 719

Fri.: 675

Sat.: 464

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Source: Associated Press