Thanksgiving battle over recount in Miami county

2:00 PM

WASHINGTON - Lawyers for Vice-President Al Gore's presidential campaign have broken into the normally sacrosanct Thanksgiving holiday to lodge an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court of Florida over the recount in Miami-Dade county.

One of three counties to have embarked on hand recounts, Miami-Dade summarily abandoned its counting yesterday, saying that the process could not be completed in time.

With only four days remaining before Monday's 11am (NZ Time) deadline, Broward county was working through the holiday to complete its revised returns in time. Palm Beach county reckoned that it was far enough through to suspend the recount for the day.

In Miami-Dade, however, there was no counting at all. This is the most populous county in Florida and Democrats had hoped that the recount there would turn up sufficient additional votes to give Mr Gore victory.

The official reason given by the county canvassing board, which comprises one Democrat and two officers with no official party affiliation, was the impossibility of meeting the deadline.

Even after restricting the recount to some 10,000 ballots rejected by the machine-count, the board said, the number of votes that had to be examined, the restricted accommodation and the lack of counters over the holiday meant that the recount would be nowhere near finished on Sunday.

Rather than petition the court for more time, however, the board summarily abandoned the effort, leading Gore campaign officials to hint darkly of intimidation and sabotage.

A near-riot had broken out the previous day – "a Republican riot, now that's something new," said one Gore official – when the board tried to move the restricted recount to a smaller room where the scanning machines were located.

Both Republicans and reporters objected to the move for limiting their access.

Simultaneously, protesters threatened to rough up a Democratic lawyer whom they suspected of pocketing a ballot paper. The paper turned out to be a sample, but the incident had the hallmarks of a provocation designed to complicate the recount. The board held a brief hearing that afternoon and decided to submit the returns as certified after the first, machine-recount.

An immediate appeal by the Gore campaign was rejected by the local court, triggering the emergency appeal.

A rapid ruling, however, was threatened by holiday absences: by early afternoon, the clerk of the court was still trying to assemble a quorum (five) of the seven judges to rule on whether the case would even be heard.

The Gore campaign's efforts to have the Miami-Dade recount reinstated were widely interpreted as evidence that the recounts elsewhere, in Broward and Palm Beach, were not producing as many new votes as the Gore camp had hoped. Neither county has tackled the hundreds of votes classed as "questionable," on which the result could hang.

Additional Gore votes turned up so far have cut George W Bush's lead in Florida from 930 to 703, but Miami-Dade accounts for 157 of those and the county's new plan is to revert to the figures it filed originally.

With the Supreme Court in Washington adjourned for the holiday there was no advance on the two appeals lodged by the Bush campaign late last night.

One contests the Florida Supreme Court's extension of the filing deadline to accommodate the manual recounts; the other questions the constitutionality of having different vote-counting standards within Florida.

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