After a marathon weekend of testimony about statistics and voting devices, a Florida judge said he would decide Monday morning whether to examine thousands of disputed ballots or to leave the state’s certified presidential results alone. His ruling will affect who becomes the next president.
During a two-day trial that ended Sunday night, lawyers for Vice President Al Gore pressed Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls to study 13,000 questioned ballots from two South Florida counties and include additional Gore votes from a third county. Lawyers for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who is ahead by 537 votes in the state’s certified totals, argued that a recount is needless and illegal.
At stake are Florida’s crucial 25 electoral votes, which both men need to secure the White House. The rare weekend trial emphasized the importance of those votes, with a Dec. 12 deadline approaching to choose delegates to the Electoral College.
Even as the trial plodded along, Republicans called for an end to the presidential election standoff, while Democrats urged patience.
During a television appearance Sunday morning, Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney said “it’s time” for Gore to concede, and called for a resolution in “the next few days” to avoid “damage to the nation.”
In an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Gore said, “Whatever happens [in the Tallahassee trial], both sides know that it’s going to end up in the Florida Supreme Court.”
Still, he said, no matter who wins, the loser should immediately pledge to work for national unity.
Bush and Gore also await decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, which deliberated this weekend on whether the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its authority when it said counties could go past a state deadline with recounts, and from Florida’s Legislature, which is weighing a special session to choose the electors itself.
The session before Sauls in Courtroom 3D stretched into the late evening with closing arguments from the Bush and Gore camps. What had been meant to be a 12-hour trial ran more than 20 hours.
“The critical thing is this: There are ballots that the machines cannot read, but from which the voter intent can be discerned by manual review,” Gore lawyer David Boies told the judge, asking him to examine the boxes of disputed ballots now stored in the Leon County courthouse.
“It’s not hundreds of thousands,” Boies said. “It’s not tens of thousands. It may not even be many thousands. But it is certainly many, many hundred and perhaps thousands, and that is far more than enough to make a difference in this race.”
Bush lawyers countered that Florida’s election, with its counts and recounts, is complete. “There’s no proof of any problems,” Bush attorney Barry Richard said. “There’s no evidence–no evidence which is sufficient to overturn the count.”
Richard left Sauls with one final question: “Whether Florida is prepared to tell the American people that it will disqualify its electors and possibly hinge the election of the presidency on the only two witnesses presented by the plaintiffs.”
Sunday morning, under chilly, gray skies in Tallahassee, dozens of lawyers jammed the courthouse in an otherwise empty, shuttered downtown. Most of the day was spent with witnesses for the Bush team. The Gore team had called just two witnesses a day earlier.
The central debate was this: Did the voters who generated more than 13,000 disputed ballots in Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties intend to vote?
The punch card-style ballots in question each registered no vote in the presidential race when they were sent through vote-reading machines.
Gore’s side attempted to prove that citizens tried to vote in the presidential race, but had difficulty punching complete holes in the ballots and instead left dents and dimples in the cards that machines couldn’t detect. The Bush team said those voters chose not to vote in the presidential race. They said Gore’s side was trying to “turn non-votes into votes.”
For Gore, the most important ballots were the ones from Miami-Dade County. There, some 9,000 questioned ballots were never examined in a manual recount because that county stopped its hand count when the canvassing board decided it couldn’t complete the task in the time allowed by the Florida Supreme Court.
The other county Gore has contested is Nassau, in northeast Florida.
In Nassau, Gore picked up 51 votes during a recount. That county’s canvassing board chose, however, to certify to the state its initial count after it discovered an error in the recount. Gore attorneys said Nassau’s recount should stand as the final vote, adding the 51 votes for Gore.
In Palm Beach County, Gore’s lawyers hoped to include results of that county’s hand recount, which would give Gore about 200 extra votes, though the exact number remains in dispute. Palm Beach County’s canvassing board finished its recount Nov. 26, two hours after the state Supreme Court’s deadline, so the Florida secretary of state chose to exclude those recount results.
Gore attorneys claimed they are entitled to those extra votes, as well as to a new hand recount by the judge of 3,300 disputed Palm Beach ballots. The lawyers said Palm Beach’s canvassing board used too rigid a standard for counting marks and dents in ballots.
In testimony Sunday from an engineer who designed voting devices, Bush lawyers attempted to show that ballots with marks and dents might not signify votes at all.
John Ahmann, who designed the devices for more than three decades, said “dimpled” ballots can be caused by a wide variety of causes: humidity in storage, manufacturing problems, election workers’ handling, and even voters’ pointy fingernails.
“If they’re not handled properly, there can be nicks and dings or fingerprints,” Ahmann said. “You can dimple the ballot and have no intention of voting.”
But, in one of the most dramatic moments of the day, Ahmann acknowledged during cross-examination that manual recounts are superior to machine counts in “very close” elections. The testimony contradicted the position of Bush attorneys.
As Ahmann completed more than an hour of testimony, Sauls asked about those remarks. “You need either reinspection or manual recounts where you have that situation,” he told the judge, “where you have a very close election.”
The importance of Miami-Dade County’s ballots to Gore became increasingly clear on Sunday, as the Bush lawyers presented a string of Republican observers from that county’s aborted recount efforts. The Bush team attempted to show that the recount had been flawed and had physically changed the ballots, making a recount worthless and bogus.
Thomas Spencer, a lawyer from Miami who observed the recount efforts for the Republican Party, described workers flipping through the vote cards, and even dropping a tray of them on the floor. What’s more, he said, canvassing board members counted dimpled and dented ballots with no consistent standard.
Thomas Spargo, a New York state Republican Party member who also observed Miami’s recount, told the judge he had seen mounds of fallen “chad”–the tiny bits of paper from punched vote cards–pile up on the floor.
Holding up a photograph of Spargo sitting, clapping, on the floor of Miami-Dade County’s counting center floor with other protesting Republicans, Gore’s attorneys tried to convince the judge that Spargo was too biased to be believed.
Both sides presented clashing testimony from statisticians to bolster their claims. On Sunday, among the statistical claims to back up its case, the Bush team adopted an ironic argument: the “butterfly” ballot.
It had been the center of the Democrats’ ire since Election Day in Palm Beach County. Democrats there complained that the ballot confused them, and led them to vote for Pat Buchanan or for both Buchanan and Gore. In weeks past, Republicans there have downplayed any confusion and suggested that the ballot was clear.
But on Sunday, the Bush lawyers incorporated the controversial “butterfly” ballot into their argument that some ballots were simply left blank. They suggested that the ballot may have been so misunderstood by voters that the voters there simply opted against voting for president.
Although most people viewed the Tallahassee trial as the vice president’s best hope of overtaking Bush, others say it’s not Gore’s only remaining shot.
Several other cases brought by Democrat-leaning voters, not by Gore, could gain importance this week. Suits about absentee voting in Martin and Seminole Counties are scheduled for trial Wednesday in Tallahassee.
A third case brought by voters challenges 1,500 overseas absentee ballots that arrived after Election Day in 10 Florida counties. The suit alleges that Florida law includes no provision for ballots to arrive late, despite a state practice of accepting them as late as 10 days after Election Day.
