Election Attention Shifts to Florida Lawsuits

Eight days after polls have closed, America is no closer to finding a President-elect than it was last month.

After a flurry of court rulings, manual recounts continue in Florida, but it remains for the courts to decide whether revised numbers will be accepted. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris said she would not consider recounts certified after 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore '69 offered a compromise to Republicans last night, which they refused. If the Republicans accepted the hand recount in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties, he would accept the results without any legal challenges he said.

Or, Gore would accept a complete hand recount of the entire state.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush refused both proposals, calling the recounts now underway in Democratic countries "neither fair or accurate."

Hand recounts are "arbitrary and chaotic" and should not be included in any final count, he said.

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice continue to turn in state and federal courts.

Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Jorge Labarga ruled yesterday morning that the county can decide for itself whether "dimpled chad"--a ballot on which the punchcard was not perforated--counts. He set a 9:30 a.m. Friday hearing for demands by some voters to hold a new election in Palm Beach County.

Karilee H. Shames, a plaintiff in the class action lawsuit who recently moved to Palm Beach County, said she was amazed by what she saw in Florida on Election Day.

"Never have I seen anything going on around an election like [what I saw in Florida]," she said.

Shames said that some people, when they called the local elections office so as to ascertain their polling place, were asked whether they were Republican or Democrat.

"When [the caller] said 'Democrat,' [he was] put on hold and nobody ever came back," she said.

Shamas insists that, while there were many irregularities in the voting, the plaintiffs are trying to stick to nonpartisan issues.

"This is not a partisan issue. [This is] a civil rights issue," she said. "It's a matter of 20,000 to 30,000 people in one county feeling that their votes were not properly expressed."

The Florida Supreme Court yesterday denied Secretary of State Katherine Harris' request to stop manual recounts in progress in several counties. Bush had joined the lawsuit early yesterday.

But the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta agreed to hear a similar request by Bush, which was dismissed earlier in the week by a U.S. District Judge in Miami.

It also agreed to hear an appeal by Brevard County voters who claimed their rights were violated because votes in the county were not being recounted.

The Florida Supreme Court denied a request by Harris to transfer all lawsuits to Leon County, the county in which Tallahassee, the state capital, is located.

Harris made the request in order to establish one judicial authority for all Florida election cases and avoid conflicting rulings, she said.

"Without question, this court must make it clear that the election of the president and vice president is not a matter of local pleasure," the petition said. "It is, at the least, a statewide matter of concern."

"This court must assume control over this litigation to preserve its ability to establish standards and to protect the voters of the state," she said.

The state Supreme Court agreed to take briefs on a request by Palm Beach County that it clarify conflicting rulings on the recounts from Harris and from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat. Palm Beach County is suing both Harris and Butterworth.

Palm Beach County is one of four Democratic strongholds where the Gore camp requested additional recounts. The court also agreed to allow Vice President Al Gore's campaign and another of the four counties, Broward, to join the suit.

Broward began its hand count late yesterday afternoon, Palm Beach's recount is currently on hold pending legal resolution, and the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board voted 2-1 against a manual recount after a recount of three precincts only netted Gore an additional six votes. The commission sent a letter to Harris requesting that these six votes be included in the official totals.

In accordance with Tuesday's ruling by Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, Harris set a 2 p.m. Wednesday deadline for requests by counties that wished to pursue a hand count. Broward and Palm Beach counties, which are in the process of tabulating votes, and Miami-Dade county, which decided against a hand count, filed requests for the extension of Tuesday's 5 p.m. certification deadline with Harris.

Collier County, in southwest Florida, discovered 24 additional absentee ballots that had not been counted. Collier County officials hoped to get Harris' permission to count the ballots and amend their results.

But Harris last night said she would not waiver from her deadline.

"The reasons given in the requests are insufficient to warrant waiver of the unambiguous filing deadline imposed by the Florida Legislature," she said at a press conference at 9 p.m. last night, thus denying the counties' petitions.

Bill Daley, Gore Campaign Chair, called the decision "rash" in light of the pending legal matters.

"We will pursue legal action to ensure that notwithstanding this uncalled action the hand counts continue under the preexisting court decisions," he said.

Outside Florida, four other states, Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Oregon, also continued to count their ballots today. Gore is leading in all four states, though his margins vary from 377 in New Mexico to 5,805 in Wisconsin.

The Associated Press contributed to the reporting of this story.