Lawyers go to bat for Bush and Gore

12:30 PM

TALLAHASSEE - Al Gore's lawyers have fought for a quick recount of contested votes in Florida, but Republican lawmakers acted to outflank them, voting to call a special legislative session to help propel George W. Bush into the White House.

It was another day of bewildering political and legal manoeuvring in the struggle for the presidency between Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, that has raged since the disputed November 7 election.

The main developments included:

* Gore lawyer David Boies filed an emergency appeal with the Florida Supreme Court to issue an order to start counting contested ballots immediately. He said Gore effectively faced a December 12 deadline to complete any recounts that might overturn Bush's 537-vote lead in Florida.

* A committee of Florida's Republican-led Legislature voted 8-5 along party lines to recommend that state lawmakers hold a special session to choose the state's 25 presidential electors, a slate virtually certain to back Bush.

* Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Lieberman, reacting to that move, said the Republicans in Florida were trying to thwart the will of the people. "I do think this action by Florida Legislature really threatens the credibility and legitimacy of the ultimate choice of electors in Florida. It threatens to put us into a constitutional crisis," Lieberman said.

* A rental truck carrying nearly 463,000 ballots left Palm Beach County under police escort on Thursday and arrived in the state capital, Tallahassee, where a judge will hear arguments on Saturday on whether some or all of them should be recounted. A further 650,000 ballots from Miami-Dade will be transported on Friday.

* Gore submitted written briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of arguments to be heard on Friday. Lawyer Laurence Tribe accused Bush of seeking to "turn back the clock so that he can declare the game over" and urged the justices to uphold the Florida Supreme Court ruling that extended the deadline to include hand-counted votes.

* Bush's lawyer fired back in his last court papers, saying the Florida Supreme Court erred by allowing the hand counts and by extending the counting deadline. He blamed the ruling for creating "turmoil" and "post-election chaos."

* Retired Gen. Colin Powell, widely expected to be secretary of state in a possible Bush administration, met the Texas governor at his ranch but said he had not been offered any jobs by Bush.

Bush said he was confident the legal wrangling would soon end in his favour. "One of these days all of this is going to stop and Dick Cheney and I will be the president and the vice president," he said.

In the midst of all these complications, one date loomed large - the December 12 cutoff for Florida and other states to select members to the Electoral College which will meet on Dec. 18 to pick the next president.

"The Florida Supreme Court has said, and I believe the Florida Supreme Court is right about this, that this is going to come to an end on Dec. 12," said Boies.

"I believe it can be done within that time period and I think that is when it is going to end," he said.

Gore's last hope lies in the votes he says have never been counted properly in Florida. Television networks showed helicopter shots of a truck making its way north - images reminiscent for some viewers of former football star O.J. Simpson's slow-speed chase along Los Angeles freeways in 1994 before he was arrested on charges of murdering his ex-wife and another man.

Bush legal adviser Barry Richard said there were no uncounted ballots - only ballots rejected by machines because they were improperly marked. He said no-one was under any legal obligation to examine them.

"There may be thousands of people in this state - I'm sure there are - whose votes were not counted because the machine determined based to the parameters that it's been set to determine that those ballots were improperly marked," he said.

The Texas governor seems to have the upper hand after Florida's secretary of state last Sunday certified the state's electoral votes in his favour, leading Gore to challenge what has become a fait accompli unless overturned by a judge.

As a second line of defence for Bush, a committee of eight Republicans and five Democrats from the Republican-led Florida Legislature voted on Thursday along party lines to recommend holding a special session, probably next week, to choose the state's electors.

This course would ensure Florida's voice was heard in the Electoral College even if the vote count was still tangled in the courts. The Gore campaign intends to challenge the right of the Legislature to do so.

On yet another front in the legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday will hear arguments on Bush's motion to suppress all hand recounts in Florida. That would boost Bush's margin of victory in the state by several hundred votes.

Gore, who leads in the national popular vote in the Nov. 7 election and says he would have won Florida if all its ballots had been counted, launched a media offensive on Wednesday, appearing on three major networks' evening news programs to argue his case.

The judge handling the Gore lawsuit in Florida, Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, granted a request from Bush's lawyers for all 1.16 million ballots cast in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties to be shipped to the state capital for possible recounting, not just the nearly 14,000 disputed ballots requested by the Democrats.

Sauls said the ballots should all be transferred to Tallahassee under police escort to await his ruling on Saturday on whether a count - and how big a one - is necessary.

Gore aides said they were concerned that delays in the circuit court would "defeat the rights of the people of Florida to have their votes counted."

After a slew of polls this week showed that up to 60 percent of Americans believed that Gore should concede the election, CBS News and The New York Times issued a poll on Wednesday showing that only 42 percent wanted the Democrat to give up now.

Forty-eight percent said that it was too soon for any concession. The poll of 1,012 adults was taken on Monday and Tuesday after Gore began appealing directly to the American public for what he described as a full and accurate count of all votes cast.

- REUTERS

Herald Online feature: America votes

The US Electoral College

Florida Dept. of State Division of Elections

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