Supreme Court enters election fight

4:00 PM

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court stepped squarely into the middle of the legal battle between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in yet another stunning twist to a presidential election that threatens to go on for weeks.

The nation's highest court agreed to hear Bush's challenge to hand recounted ballots in Florida, the state whose 25 electoral votes will decide whether the Texas governor or Vice President Gore won the election 17 days ago.

Florida election officials faced a 5 pm deadline on Sunday (11am Monday NZ time) to certify all county votes including any recounts by hand. Toward that end, two major Democratic counties - Palm Beach and Broward - worked to get hundreds of disputed ballots decided.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision said nothing about the Sunday deadline. Its rare involvement in the state electoral process only set a 90-minute oral hearing on December 1 to listen to one of Bush's challenges to the hand count.

Gore's legal team has said it will continue the fight past the Sunday deadline and the Supreme Court's action almost certainly will extend the fight over the November 7 election outcome well into December.

Florida's Republican-dominated state Legislature, meanwhile, said on Friday it intended to participate in Bush's pending Supreme Court case. Newly appointed House speaker Tom Feeney told a news briefing he had discussed the issue with the state Senate leadership.

Gore needed to pick up votes from hand counts to overtake Bush's official lead of 930 in Florida to win the White House.

The Democrat suffered a severe blow on Thursday when the state's highest court decided not to force Miami-Dade, Florida's most populous county, to resume its manual tallying. The Gore camp had hoped to pick up votes in that Democratic county.

As the legal battle swirled, supporters of both sides demonstrated in Florida and in Washington, Bush's vice presidential running mate Dick Cheney was released from a hospital after a minor heart attack. He said he was ready to get back to work next week.

Outside both the Broward and Palm Beach counting centres on Friday, noisy crowds of Republican supporters urged the state elections board to certify the results and accused the Gore campaign of trying to steal the election through legal machinations.

"No more Gore," "Loser, loser," the crowd chanted outside the Broward County courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.

The noisy street demonstrations followed some earlier this week in Miami that Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman said were being orchestrated by those who wanted to thwart the democratic process.

"These demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate and to prevent a simple count of votes from going forward," Lieberman said in Washington.

Bush senior adviser Ari Fleischer dismissed Lieberman's criticism.

"I don't recall Joe Lieberman's opposition to organised protests put together by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the AFL-CIO in Palm Beach County," he said.

Fleischer called the demonstrations "a heartfelt and natural reaction to what is going on."

President Bill Clinton, who played golf in Maryland on Friday, said the courts have decided everyone who legally showed up to vote should have their votes counted "if we can tell who they voted for."

"And whenever that's done, then we'll be done," he added.

Five Democratic House of Representatives members wrote to Attorney General Jane Reno seeking an investigation of Miami-Dade County's abrupt decision on Wednesday after the demonstrations to halt its manual recount.

In Broward County, after working through the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, the election panel ploughed on with reviewing up to 2,000 ambiguous ballots where a machine did not pick up a result overall. It plans to do so at least until late on Saturday.

By late afternoon on Friday, the Broward officials had completed review of 802 of these ambiguous ballots. According to unofficial figures Gore had an overall net gain from the manual recount in Broward of 306 votes.

In Palm Beach, in the front line of the election battle since Gore supporters complained of irregularities and confusion on voting day, the electoral panel began examining more than 6,000 questionable ballots.

The three-member County Canvassing Board started its work after a one-hour hearing on whether to count all "dimpled," or partially indented, ballots. The board took no formal vote to change its method, which includes only some of the dimpled ballots, and began working on the ballots at a pace as slow as two ballots per minute.

All 462,000 ballots have already been looked over by counting teams, leaving the review of the questionable ballots to be completed by the board itself.

Republicans also continued in their efforts to get ballots mailed in by U.S. military personnel overseas to be counted even though they carried no post mark to show they were cast by the November 7 election day.

The Republican Party asked a Florida judge in Tallahassee on Friday to order elections officials to reconsider about 500 such disqualified ballots. Counts of other absentee military ballots have favoured Bush.

The U.S. Supreme Court action came just two days after lawyers for Bush asked the justices to review a Florida Supreme Court ruling allowing hand recounts from three heavily Democratic counties to be included in the final tally.

Bush's lawyers said the Florida Supreme Court decision disregarded federal law and violated the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear those issues.

Another Bush request to stop the hand recounts on constitutional grounds was turned down although the case still remains before an appeals court in Atlanta.

"We are pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the decision of the Florida Supreme Court," said Bush attorney Ben Ginsberg. "The court will review whether it is fair to change the rules in the middle of the game."

Gore attorney David Boies said in Tallahassee his legal team was prepared to argue its case and he thought the Supreme Court ultimately would rule in Gore's favour.

Bush was spending his weekend at his ranch near Crawford, Texas, with no public appearances planned. Gore remained behind closed doors at the vice presidential residence in Washington.

Cheney, accompanied by his wife Lynne and other family members, walked unaided out of George Washington University Hospital and told reporters, "I'm on my way home."

Doctors said Cheney, 59, who has had a history of heart trouble, had only a mild heart attack and was expected to make a full recovery and return to normal activity very shortly.

Cheney said he had talked with Bush by phone. Asked if he had at any time asked Bush to replace him on the Republican ticket, he said: "No, not yet," and chuckled.

- REUTERS

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