III.

The Dispute Begins

Bush clung to a lead of just a few thousand votes out of 6 million ballots cast in Florida as state officials began a machine re-count. Both campaigns sent teams of high-powered lawyers to the state. Gore attorneys investigated reports of irregularities that seemed to raise questions about the fairness of the election. Many of the disputes revolved around arcane, but legally critical, technical flaws in the voting process.

In Palm Beach County, there was a confusing two-page “butterfly ballot” that had names down the left and right sides with punch holes in the middle. It resulted in about 19,000 people selecting more than one presidential candidate. It also gave ultraconservative presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan several thousand votes in an area that is generally liberal and likely to vote Democratic.

In other areas throughout Florida, reports emerged that some African Americans were denied the right to vote because their names were incorrectly removed from the official lists of eligible voters or their voter registration applications were not processed correctly. Others were discouraged from voting because of long lines or unhelpful election officials. In addition, some people claimed that many voting machines in predominately African American precincts were old and did not function properly. A computer analysis of the voting by the Washington Post newspaper indicated that percentages of spoiled ballots were higher in those African American precincts.

The Gore team also focused on heavily Democratic counties in south Florida where voters reported problems. Miami-Dade and Broward counties recorded thousands of so-called undervotes, where punch card ballots did not register a selection for president when they were run through the counting machines. Democrats suspected that when voters used the pointed stylus on the ballot, the perforation, or chad, did not fall away cleanly. It was left either dangling or merely dimpled. Democratic lawyers believed that re-counting those ballots by hand, a process known as a manual re-count, might reveal which candidate the voters intended to choose. They thought that it might show many voters who intended to choose Gore—possibly enough to change the election results.

The machine re-count cut Bush’s lead to 327 votes. On November 9, the Gore campaign asked election officials for hand re-counts in four counties—Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The Bush campaign asked a federal court in Miami to block the re-counts. The Bush team argued that manual re-counts were unfair because they used a subjective standard unlike the automated machine re-counts.

Although the court refused to block the re-counts, Bush still enjoyed a significant advantage. State law required that counties certify (declare official) election results within seven days of the election. It was clear that the manual re-counts would not be finished by the November 14 deadline. In Florida, the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, would oversee the certification process. A Republican and Bush supporter, Harris emerged as a key player in the re-count controversy. Harris refused to extend the certification deadline to include the results of the manual re-counts. She maintained that only machine malfunction or natural disaster, not voter error (that is, wrong holes punched or hanging or dimpled chads) could compel manual re-counts. Only overseas absentee ballots would be counted after November 14, but they had to be received by November 19.

Gore’s lawyers asked a state circuit judge to block Harris from requiring election results by November 14. The judge upheld Harris’s authority to certify on that date. However, he also said the four counties in question could file amended returns after the deadline and Harris could use her discretion to decide whether to accept or reject them. Again, Harris said she would reject late filings. On November 17, however, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in and ordered Harris not to certify the election results before a hearing on November 20.