Judge to Have Ballots Brought to Tallahassee Election Trial

A Florida state judge announced Tuesday he will order thousands of ballots driven from South Florida to the state capital here under the tight security of state police--setting up the possible final act in Vice President Al Gore’s struggle to capture Florida’s electoral votes and wrest the presidency from Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

“You want some ballots up here, well bring ‘em,” said Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls. “Let’s just bring ‘em.”

Getting the ballots to Tallahassee was a victory for Gore in his legal challenge of Florida’s certification of votes handing victory to Bush. But his lawyers did not fare as well when the judge put the trial off until Saturday morning and made no promises of ever counting those ballots.

“I have no idea what we’re going to do concerning ballots, counting or not counting ballots.” But, he added, “we need to have some ballots on hand.”

Even as Gore was contesting the vote in Florida, lawyers for both candidates were filing legal briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, where Bush wants the nation’s highest court to order all of the recounting and legal wrangling to come to a close now that election day is three weeks past.

In their legal papers, the Bush lawyers asked the Supreme Court justices to bring “legal finality” to the election by overturning the Florida courts and shutting down any further ballot recounts.

“By acting now,” the Bush lawyers said, “. . . this court will eliminate the potential for a constitutional crisis” over who picks the electors and how.

But the Gore legal team said the Republican arguments were “insubstantial” and that the Florida Supreme Court, which backed additional recounts of votes, “played a familiar and quintessentially judicial role” in interpreting state law.

And, they stressed, this is primarily a state matter.

“Principles of federalism counsel strongly against interference by this court,” the Gore lawyers said.

In other developments Tuesday, another Tallahassee Circuit Court judge set a trial date for next Wednesday in a lawsuit seeking to throw out all of Seminole County’s 15,000 absentee ballots. If successful, that would eliminate about 10,000 votes already counted for Bush, dwarfing the governor’s slim official margin of victory in Florida.

In the state Supreme Court, lawyers filed briefs in a longshot lawsuit demanding a new vote in Palm Beach County, whose controversial “butterfly ballot” allegedly confused Gore supporters and cost him thousands of votes.

And a special state legislative committee met for the first time as it became increasingly obvious that the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature will call a special session and appoint its own slate of electors--regardless of whether Gore or Bush is ahead on Dec. 12, the cutoff date for Florida to confirm its electors.

Every day now is precious for the Democratic vice president as time speeds toward that date. On Tuesday, he addressed the nation for the second day in a row, urging Bush not to unfairly slow him down.

He also asked the public to be patient with his latest appeal of the vote counts, particularly now that several nationwide polls show a growing number of people believe his protests have gone on long enough and that he should concede.

“This is not a time for delay, obstruction and procedural roadblocks,” the vice president said in a brief appearance in front of the vice presidential residence in Washington.

Gore Wants Review of 13,300 Ballots

The nation, he added, needs “to be able to say there is no legitimate question of who won this election.”

He trails the Republican governor by just 537 votes in the state. Last Sunday, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris declared Bush the winner of the 25 electoral votes here--just enough to hand the Texas governor the White House.

To push ahead of Bush, Gore now wants Sauls to review more than 13,300 ballots from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties that the vice president believes will boost his total beyond Bush.

But it remained unclear how or even whether Judge Sauls, or an assistant, will review the ballots. The judge, acknowledging the unique and unchartered legal ground surrounding this historic case, admitted that he was unsure how the matter will yet unfold.

He pointed out the complexities of the case--the kind that normally would take several months to try.

“We can’t have people just jumping on a horse and riding off in all directions,” he said. “And we can’t have people counting ballots until they’re slap-happy. . . . We’ll go just as long as we can on Saturday as long as everybody is still standing.”

Gore lead attorney David Boies pressed repeatedly Tuesday for an earlier trial date and an immediate decision by the court to review the ballots.

He proposed a schedule for a ruling by Sauls by Dec. 6 and then an appeal to the state Supreme Court by the losing side on Dec. 7. That would leave time, they hope, for a state Supreme Court ruling as early as Dec. 9.

“The central and indispensable witness to these proceedings is the ballots. They must be manually counted without further delay,” the Gore team said in their proposed scheduling order.

The Gore team said they plan only two expert witnesses: Ken Brace of Fairfax, Va., president of a consulting firm who would testify about “machine inaccuracies in voting results,” and Nicholas Hengartner, a Yale University associate professor of statistics.

The Democrats also listed 18 exhibits they proposed to present during the trial, including more than 12,000 ballots from South Florida and “records of maintenance schedules, complaints and problems with the voting machines in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.”

The Bush lawyers denied the claim by Gore supporters that they are trying to slow down his appeals. They said that any more counts or recounts are simply repetitive, given the machine and hand recounts of the last three weeks in which Gore has vigorously protested the Florida vote results.

“There is no reason for those ballots to be counted again,” said Barry Richard of Tallahassee, a Bush attorney. “And the reason we find ourselves in this position, under this truncated amount of time, is because of the route taken by the [Gore team] to protest the results right after the election and then to take this course now.”

The Bush team also questioned the wisdom of moving too hastily. They proposed a different schedule that would put off any trial until next week. “If needed,” they added.

Former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who is heading up the Bush effort in Florida, grew visibly disturbed with Gore’s continual contention that not all of the votes had been counted.

“It is wrong, simply wrong,” he told reporters. “ . . . They’ve been counted just like all of the other non-votes, not only in other counties in Florida but across the United States of America, have been counted.”

Bush lawyer Irv Terrell said the so-called 10,000 under-votes in Miami-Dade County, which the canvassing board there declined to reexamine, represent just “1.6% of the votes cast in that county.” But he said they have been machine counted twice and that, each time, “they’ve been found to not be votes.”

Fred Bartlit, also part of the Bush legal team, denied charges from the Gore camp that a “GOP mob” of protesters had intimidated the Miami-Dade officials into stopping their manual reexamination.

“There were no shouts, there was no pressure in the room” where the canvassers were meeting, he said. “There were many, many police there. There wasn’t a single arrest. No one ever asked the crowd to desist.”

Baker said Republicans are not worried about an effort underway in Seminole County to have 15,000 absentee ballots, most of them presumably Bush votes, to be thrown out because of irregularities over ballot applications.

“We’re not concerned about Seminole County,” he said. “We do not think that that claim really has merit.”

In Austin, Texas, Bush focused largely on transition matters. Later in the day, he visited his campaign headquarters, and thanked staff and volunteers.

He intends to continue working on a transition and may begin interviewing job candidates as early as this weekend, aides said.

Late in the afternoon, Karen Hughes, his communications director, criticized Gore’s continuing efforts in Florida.

She characterized the vice president’s remarks as tired rhetoric.

“Having failed to make his case with the American people last night, he apparently felt the need to restate his arguments,” Hughes said.

“The vice president said today that he wants the process to arrive at, and I quote, ‘a fair, expeditious and truly democratic conclusion.’ And people across America are realizing it already has.”

Having come up short, Hughes added, Gore now is proposing “to make yet another set of rules. He proposes yet another count, and yet another deadline. Common sense does not allow it. And the rights of the citizens of Florida to have their votes count do not allow it.”

Gore, grappling for ways to keep the public from accepting any final decision on who won, invited news cameras to capture a snippet of his luncheon meeting Tuesday with Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers--an unusual last-minute invitation that gave the image of Gore confidently sounding out a potential Cabinet pick.

But for the record, Gore disputed that notion, saying he only shared a meal and discussion of the economy with “a close friend and close advisor.”

His image in new opinion polls suggested that the public is of two minds: Most people would like the standoff to end, but are still willing to let Gore pursue his appeals.

Contradictory Answers From Public

Different questions thus produced apparently contradictory answers from the public.

When asked whether the controversy has gone on too long, 62% said “the situation has gone on too long already” and 37% said they were “willing to wait at least a little longer for a final resolution,” according to a CNN/USA Today poll administered by the Gallup organization.

But when the question was framed differently, as whether Gore should concede or continue pursuing legal actions, the public split down the middle, 49% to 49%, in an NBC News poll conducted by Peter D. Hart Research.

Asked whether Bush was right to claim victory, 51% said the Texas governor should have waited until the legal challenges were decided, while 44% said he was right to say he won.

“The bottom line is the public still has a lot to resolve,” Hart said. “There’s a willingness to take the time to look at it.”

In both polls, a majority said they believed Bush has won the presidency. But a majority also said they would accept Gore as a legitimate president if the ultimate result is in his favor.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Jeffrey Gettleman, Michael Finnegan, Doyle McManus and Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.