In Miami-Dade, there were numerous reports of ballots being distributed in Haitian immigrant precincts that were pre-punched for Bush. In Duval County, which includes the city of Jacksonville, nearly half the "spoiled" ballots came in four of the county's 14 districts--those which were largely black and had gone heavily for Gore. In some black precincts the rate of supposed spoilage rose to 31 percent.
The first recount of voting machines, required by Florida law, cut Bush's supposed margin from 1,725 to 327 votes, but there were tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted, concentrated in four major metropolitan counties--Miami-Dade, Broward, Volusia and Palm Beach--where there was a substantial Democratic majority. Local officials began hand recounts in each of these areas.
The Republican-controlled state government stepped in to block this vote counting. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida and a Bush elector, first ordered the counting stopped. When reversed in court, she said she would not extend the November 14 deadline for reporting final totals, even though her own actions, in initially halting the count, made it impossible for three of the four counties to finish their recounts in time.
This arrogant opposition to demands that all votes be counted typified the stand of the Bush camp from the beginning. It was combined with misinformation and lies. The chief of the Bush recount team, former secretary of state James Baker, declared that machine counts were more reliable than hand counts, although hand counts are accepted as the highest standard in most states, and Bush had signed a Texas state law to that effect.
Bush spokesmen continually declared that the votes in Florida had been counted multiple times, each time showing the Republican the winner, although there were tens of thousands of ballots that were never counted at any time. The purpose of such lies was to cover up the basic fact that a Bush election victory required the suppression of votes cast in Florida.
The response of the Democratic Party and the Gore campaign to this procedural coup d'Ã �tat was belated and halfhearted. The Gore campaign went to court against Harris's decision, but sought a recount only in the four large metropolitan counties rather than statewide. In contrast to the ferocious partisanship and aggressiveness of the Bush campaign, Gore put his Florida recount effort under the direction of former secretary of state Warren Christopher, a corporate lawyer who was hostile to a court fight and rejected making any appeal to the democratic sentiments of the American population.
The issue of the right to voteOn Friday, November 17 the issue came to a head when a local judge in Tallahassee, Florida ordered a halt to all vote recounts, only to be overturned hours later by the Florida state Supreme Court, which barred Harris from declaring Bush the winner of the state's electoral votes and reinstated the vote counting in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, although for a limited period.
Four days later, the court issued a decision compelling state officials to accept and certify the hand recounts, based on the right of Florida citizens to vote and to have their votes counted. Citing the Florida state constitution, the seven justices wrote, "The right of suffrage is the preeminent right contained in the Declaration of Rights, for without this basic freedom all others would be diminished."
The purpose of election laws was not to arbitrarily exclude voters who failed some technical requirement, but to "facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy."
The Bush campaign responded with a vitriolic denunciation of the court, a legal appeal to the US Supreme Court, and frenzied efforts to counter the state court's decision by any means necessary, including violence.
There were calls for the Republican-controlled state legislature to intervene with legislation that would award Florida's 25 electoral votes to Bush, regardless of the will of the voters. Florida state legislators began preparations for such action, using as a pretext the December 12 deadline for states to submit the list of electors to Washington. In the US capital, leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress suggested they would refuse to accept Democratic electors from Florida when the electoral votes were officially tabulated in January.
The Bush campaign also made an open appeal to the military to intervene. They claimed that the Gore campaign and the Florida Democratic Party were seeking to exclude absentee ballots cast by military personnel overseas. Bush spokesman Marc Racicot declared, "I am very sorry to say but the vice president's lawyers have gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces."
The day after the court ruling, a mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami-Dade County board of canvassers, grabbing a Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those involved in manually recounting the ballots. A few hours later the Democratic-controlled board announced it was abandoning its recount, effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes were not registered in the original machine tally.
The result of the recounts in Palm Beach and Broward cut Bush's statewide lead to only 537 votes. It was more than likely that if Miami-Dade, the state's largest county, and heavily Democratic, had conducted a similar recount, the tiny Bush lead would have been erased. As it was, the capitulation of the Democrats in Miami-Dade enabled Katherine Harris to certify Bush as the winner of the state's electoral votes on November 26.
The Supreme Court steps inA federal appeals court, with a top-heavy majority of Republican appointees, refused to take jurisdiction over the Florida recount, as demanded by the Bush campaign, citing the right of the Florida state Supreme Court to interpret and make final rulings on state law. The Bush campaign appealed to the US Supreme Court, which scheduled a hearing on Friday, December 1.
The three most right-wing justices, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, took the lead in the hearing, suggesting that the Florida state Supreme Court, by elevating the right to vote as the highest principle, was violating Article II of the US Constitution, which delegates to state legislatures the decision on how to choose electors. There was no constitutional right to vote for president, Scalia said.
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