Gore, Bush Speak Out

WASHINGTON – Al Gore spoke first last Wednesday, timing his address from the vice presidential residence in Washington to be carried live by the network nightly news broadcasts on the East Coast.

Flanked by running mate Joe Lieberman with American flags in the background, Gore said he would drop ongoing legal action and abide by the results of hand recounts in three Florida counties: Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade.

“If this happens, I will abide by the result,” Gore said. “I will take no legal action to challenge the result and I will not support any legal action to challenge the result.”

Alternately, Gore said, he would support a full recount of all of the state’s 67 counties if Bush preferred that.

Gore also suggested he meet immediately one-on-one with his Republican rival “to improve the tone of our dialogue in America,” as well as after a winner is declared.

Bush hastily returned to the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and issued his own response on live TV some three hours later, also flanked by American flags.

Bush rejected Gore’s offer, saying manual recounts would inject “human error and politics into the voting process.”

The way to conclude the election, Bush said, was to add the overseas absentee ballots — due by midnight Friday — to the votes already counted and certified.

“Not for Vice President Gore or me, but for America this process must have a point of conclusion. America and the world must know who will be the next president,” Bush said.

Bush said he would be willing to meet with Gore once the election result was known, implicitly spurning Gore’s offer to meet now.

In contrast to the often sniping tone of some of their representatives, both Gore and Bush spoke in a calm, measured tone. With the flags flying and the TV cameras broadcasting them live nationwide, both statements took on the air of a presidential address.

Florida Secretary of State Harris’ announcement Wednesday came several hours after she and the Bush campaign lost a joint appeal to the state Supreme Court to halt the manual ballot recounts completely. The judges — all chosen by Democratic governors — unanimously turned down the petition without a hearing.

The state Supreme Court did not address the many other election-related legal challenges making their way through Florida courts, including a filing earlier Wednesday by Gore’s campaign asking it to rule “whether hand counts are appropriate under Florida law and if so what is the deadline for their completions.”

In Atlanta, meanwhile, the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to consider the Bush campaign’s lawsuit seeking to end manual recounts in Florida. The lawsuit was rejected by a U.S. District Court judge in Miami earlier in the week. All 12 judges in the circuit said they would consider arguments, skipping intermediate steps in which a single judge or smaller panel of judges hears the case. They also decided to consider a separate but related case filed by three Brevard County, Fla., voters who claim their rights are being violated because their counties are not recanvassing votes by hand.

The four counties requesting a change to their vote totals are:

Palm Beach: Election officials still have not started a full manual recount of the county’s 430,000 ballots, but planned to meet Thursday afternoon to decide how to begin. The county’s canvassing board said Tuesday it expected that the recount would take until Sunday night.

Broward: Officials there reversed course Wednesday and granted the Gore campaign’s request for a hand recount of all of the county’s 588,000 ballots. As of Wednesday night, they had counted 45 of the 609 precincts, adding seven votes to Gore’s total and none to Bush’s.

Miami-Dade: While the county is not planning to do a full recount, it was one of the four counties which sought to amend its results. Six additional votes for Gore were discovered during a spot recheck of three precincts.

Collier: Recounts are not an issue in this county, which said in its filing that 25 ballots that were not previously counted were discovered in envelopes that were thought to be empty. The county was seeking to include those ballots in its vote totals. It was not immediately known which candidate benefited from the new ballots.

Two other counties are also still wrangling over their election results:

Volusia: The county completed a full manual recount on Tuesday in time to have the results included in Florida’s official vote tally, but nevertheless challenged a state judge’s ruling on Monday that said counties had to abide by the 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline. The county’s case is expected to pass immediately from a midlevel state appeals court to the state Supreme Court.

Gadsden: Despite a controversy over a hand count of more than 2,000 ballots, this county was not one of those who applied by Harris’ 2 p.m. Wednesday deadline to amend its results. The day after the Nov. 7 election, the county’s mostly Democratic canvassing board went into a back room and recounted all the ballots that machines had rejected, as members of the public watched through a window. When they were finished, Gore had 170 more votes than before the recount. Republicans had argued that the county officials had no authority to examine rejected ballots and add many of them to Gore’s column in the tight presidential race.