On Saturday morning, the recount began at 8:00 a.m. at the Palm Beach County Emergency Operation Center. The recount would continue continuously until 7:20 p.m. on Sunday. At this point, the recount consisted only of the Canvassing Board and attorneys from each side reviewing ballots that observer teams had previously designated as questionable. You can imagine how tough this is on the three member Canvassing Board. They have to review every ballot themselves, while the attorney observers can rotate in and out. One difficulty is that the number of ballots that the observer teams deemed "questionable" was truly extraordinary. What became apparent was that the Republican observers had pulled out thousands of ballots containing Gore votes that were not questionable at all. The Board had to go through these one by one. By Sunday morning, the Board had come up with a strategy to hasten the pace. Precincts with large numbers of questionable ballots were pre-screened for a second time by other observer teams to try to weed out those ballots that contained clear votes. In one precinct that I reviewed as a Democratic observer, the prior team had designated 414 ballots as questionable. Two county workers, a Republican observer and I looked at those 414 ballots and we were able to agree on all but 32. Of the 382 that all four of us now agreed were not questionable, about 280 were clear votes for Gore and 45 were clear votes for Bush. The remainder were agreed upon undervotes and overvotes. This means that the Republican observer in the original group had pulled out those 280 votes for basically no reason. If the Board had to go through the entire group of 414, it would have taken them an extra hour and we were racing against the clock. There were many groups like this out of the 637 precincts reviewed. In one group that the Board actually reviewed, there were 99 ballots that the original Democratic or Republican observers had designated as questionable. The Republican and Democratic attorneys now reviewing those ballots with the Canvassing Board agreed that 98 were clear votes and only one was truly questionable. Of the 98, about 90 were votes for Gore that the original Republican observer had pulled out. The original observers had not performed this way in every precinct. In many precincts, they had designated only a few ballots for the Board's review. However, there was not a single precinct in which the ballots now agreed upon were Bush votes by a large margin. Overall, it was very clear that the Republican observers had raised literally thousands of frivilous objections to ballots in the initial round of review. This probably added a full day's work for the Canvassing Board. We also had a string of politicians arrive on Saturday and Sunday, most of whom took a turn in the "guest" chair we set up at the table. On Saturday afternoon we had Gov. Christie Whitman (R) of New Jersey, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) of the District of Columbia, Rep. Ed Markey (D) of Massachusetts and Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R) of Arkansas. Only Rep. Markey declined to sit in the hot seat. On Saturday evening, about 11:30 p.m., Gov. Pataki of New York arrived and stayed until 1:30 a.m.. The county staff wasn't planning to provide any food for the attorneys or staff from each party, but they did have food for themselves. Because Gov. Whitman was present, an invitation was extended to her and then to the rest of us. At about midnight on Saturday, several pizzas were delivered. Our deliberations were being broadcast live on the local government channel, and CNN, MSNBC et al. were taking this feed and showing us live all night. A lawyer in Boca Raton was watching and took it upon herself to treat us to Papa John's. We were all grateful and thanked her on the air. This also led to some suggestions that the Board announce an auction of sorts for the right to sit in the "guest" chair for 15 minutes. I suggested that the first person to have to steaks or other fare sent to us would win the right to sit in and be on worldwide television. As you know, the Florida Supreme Court ruled earlier in the week that the Secretary of State had to accept hand recount totals at least until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. We had lost several days of recounting in the two weeks before because the Secretary of State had stated that she would not accept any manual recount totals; it took the Supreme Court to order her to do so. By Saturday evening, we knew we had to rush to complete the count by 5:00 on Sunday. The hundreds of frivilous challenges from the original observer teams didn't help everyone's mood much. Throughout the night, there were some verbal exchanges between Board members and the attorneys. In order to speed up the process, the Board prohibited any comments from the lawyers other than bare objections. There were still plenty of admonitions when we disagreed with the Board's decisions. They were especially critical of Mark Wallace, the lead Republican attorney, whom they told to "stop whining" among things. Follow this link for a summary of some of the comments made during the night: http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/epaper/editions/monday/news_4.html After being there all day Saturday, Dennis Newman, our lead lawyer on site, suggested that I leave about 1:30 a.m. and return at 7:00 on Sunday morning. I was happy to get a break. On Sunday morning, our guests included Rep. Chris Shays (R) from Connecticut, Gov. Pataki again and Sen. Bill Frist (R) from Tennessee. I was sitting next to the guest seat. I had nice conversations with Shays and Frist. Shays made the appropriate comments about Wesleyan being a "great" school. You may recall that Frist is a cardiac surgeon who saved someone's life in the Capitol when he had a heart attack. Referring to this I said that we might need his help too because everyone was so tired that we may need to be revived. After this it was agreed that other politicians would have the opportunity to sit in the second row to observe, but could not sit at our table because it slowed everything down. Later in the day, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R) of Texas, Arlen Spector (R) of Pennsylvania, Tim Hutchinson (R) of Arkansas and Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana arrived to observe, as well as Reps. Sherrod Brown (D) of Ohio, Corrine Brown (D) of Florida, Peter Deutsch (D) of Florida and Sheila Jackson Lee (D) of Texas. Apparently the Governor of Virginia was also in the room, but I missed him. Rev. Al Sharpton was outside the building on Sunday, but did not come inside. Even at 7:00 a.m., there were a few Bush leaning protesters outside and by the afternoon the crowd outside had swelled to about 400. Because of the visiting politicians on Sunday, security was really tight. The protesters tried to move from the street up to the entrance to the building, but were thankfully barred. It was pretty tough to get in and out of the building, however, because one had to fight through the crowd. I did go out to our Winnebago once for some food and was met with a lot of rude comments, including one guy following me for a while shouting "Go back to Massachusetts" while walking a few feet behind me. This was a reference to the fact that some of our lawyers are from Massachusetts - a counterbalance to all of the lawyers from Texas present for the Bush campaign. By Sunday morning it was clear that we would not finish by 5:00, but would finish by Sunday evening. Judge Burton, Chairman of the Canvassing Board, faxed a letter to the Secretary of State asking her to give us until 9:00 a.m. on Monday to submit results. He followed up with phone calls in the afternoon, but as expected, Ms. Harris denied this request, even though we believe that this violated that the Florida Supreme Court's orders. At 4:20, the Board received official word that Ms. Harris insisted on receiving completed recount results by 5:00. By this time, we had reviewed the challenged ballots in all but 51 of the 637 precincts. The Board appropriately decided to send the results from those 586 precincts at that time and then to send the complete results later in the evening. At that time, the Vice President had received a net gain of 192 votes in the manual recount. Everything was finished about 7:20 p.m.. By then, the net gain was up to 215. At 8:30, Secretary Harris held a press conference to announce that she had rejected all of the Palm Beach County manual recount numbers, as well as recount numbers from some other counties in which Gore had obtained net gains. She had accepted recount numbers from some counties in which Bush had gained. This resulted in the 537 vote "official" lead that has been broadcasted since Sunday night. The truth is that among the votes that have already been counted, Al Gore is ahead. Yes, you heard it here first. Unfortunately, Ms. Harris, whom you will recall was the co-chairman for the Bush campaign in Florida, refuses to acknowledge it. Fortunately, we still have the courts. I also wanted to address this question of whether the ballots have all actually been counted. Mr. Gore says that some have still not been counted once. The Republican spin is that all votes have been counted by machine at least twice in every county. While the latter is true, the machines don't read every vote. It's much more than simply reading the dimpled ballots, which may or may not indicate a voter's intent to cast a vote in that race. In our hand recount, we found many, many ballots on which the voter had indicated a preference, but not punched the ballot in the prescribed way. On some ballots, the voter had darkened in the numbers in each race for the candidate he or she wanted. The machines would not count this ballot because they "count" by shining light through the space left by a missing chad that has been punched out. On other ballots, the voter punched out two different numbers, but wrote some notation like "Mistake" with an arrow pointing to one of the holes. This shows clear intent to cast a vote for the "hole" to which the arrow is not pointing. The tabulating machine counts this as an "overvote" because more than one candidate's number is punched, and the ballot is disqualified in the machine count. There are many, many examples such as this - several hundred ballots that we reviewed. In other counties, these are the votes to which the Vice President refers, that have not yet been counted even once. They are votes for both candidates, but they cannot be counted until someone actually looks at the ballots themselves. In addition, there are literally thousands of "dimpled" ballots, some of which are actual partially perforated chads. The standard the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board used was extremely "exclusive," not "inclusive" in regard to counting these ballots. Case law from several states is quite clear about the standard of review, but the Board did not follow it. This will be the next question for the courts. Keep your eyes also on the lawsuit pending in Seminole County, which seeks to exclude several thousand absentee ballots. The Republican Party there had sent out an absentee ballot request form to thousands of registered Republicans. The form, which was not the official form from the Supervisor of Elections, did not have space for all of the information required by law to be provided when requesting an absentee ballot. The Supervisor of Elections rejected 4,500 of the absentee ballot requests. Republican staffers found out about it and went to the Supervisor's office where they were given the request forms and they filled in missing information. This explicitly violates a state law enacted by the Republican controlled legislature in 1998 after there were myriad problems with absentee ballots in Miami-Dade County. The law states that no one other than the voter or a member of the voter's immediate family or the voter's legal guardian may fill in any information on an absentee ballot request form. Violation is a third degree felony. If these ballots are thrown out because of this, Gore will have a large net gain in this County. After we finished on Sunday evening, I went to our headquarters for a legal team meeting. We revised the complaint that was filed in Tallahassee on Monday morning that challenges the vote totals from several counties that Ms. harris certified. These include the 215 vote net gain for Gore in Palm Beach County that she refused to count. The Court in Tallahassee gave the Republican lawyers until Wednesday to file written responses. Meanwhile, the Court today ordered that ballots be transported from Palm Beach and other counties, to Tallahassee for judicial review. Gore still has a very good chance to win this if everyone follows the law and actually counts the votes. Let me add one more thought with which y'all may or may not agree. It really does come down to the simple situation of counting all of the votes that have already been cast, but which the machines are unable to count. Each side is certain that if all of the votes that were intended to be cast are counted as they were intended, Mr. Gore would have a decisive victory in Florida. Be that as it may, I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed, each side would be making the same arguments that its opposition presently makes. Each side claims legitimacy in its position, but the only legitimacy is one that the courts will confer. The various elections supervisors, their staff and hundreds of volunteers have handled the actual counting process in a deliberate and professional manner throughout the State, without really any of the reported "chaos" within the counting rooms. The people and governmental leaders and employees of Palm Beach County, for one, should be very proud of a job well done. Steven Meyer '86 Somos la misma familia, Doc ______________________________________________ FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup -------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. 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-- BEGIN included message
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 14:33:14 +0000
- From: daseidenberg@JTSA.EDU
- Subject: FW from Palm Beach: Detailed Update as of Tuesday
---------- From: StevenM820@aol.com Subject: Update as of Tuesday Date: Wed, Nov 29, 2000, 3:39 AM Here's a recap of the last few days. On Saturday morning, the recount began at 8:00 a.m. at the Palm Beach County Emergency Operation Center. The recount would continue continuously until 7:20 p.m. on Sunday. At this point, the recount consisted only of the Canvassing Board and attorneys from each side reviewing ballots that observer teams had previously designated as questionable. You can imagine how tough this is on the three member Canvassing Board. They have to review every ballot themselves, while the attorney observers can rotate in and out. One difficulty is that the number of ballots that the observer teams deemed "questionable" was truly extraordinary. What became apparent was that the Republican observers had pulled out thousands of ballots containing Gore votes that were not questionable at all. The Board had to go through these one by one. By Sunday morning, the Board had come up with a strategy to hasten the pace. Precincts with large numbers of questionable ballots were pre-screened for a second time by other observer teams to try to weed out those ballots that contained clear votes. In one precinct that I reviewed as a Democratic observer, the prior team had designated 414 ballots as questionable. Two county workers, a Republican observer and I looked at those 414 ballots and we were able to agree on all but 32. Of the 382 that all four of us now agreed were not questionable, about 280 were clear votes for Gore and 45 were clear votes for Bush. The remainder were agreed upon undervotes and overvotes. This means that the Republican observer in the original group had pulled out those 280 votes for basically no reason. If the Board had to go through the entire group of 414, it would have taken them an extra hour and we were racing against the clock. There were many groups like this out of the 637 precincts reviewed. In one group that the Board actually reviewed, there were 99 ballots that the original Democratic or Republican observers had designated as questionable. The Republican and Democratic attorneys now reviewing those ballots with the Canvassing Board agreed that 98 were clear votes and only one was truly questionable. Of the 98, about 90 were votes for Gore that the original Republican observer had pulled out. The original observers had not performed this way in every precinct. In many precincts, they had designated only a few ballots for the Board's review. However, there was not a single precinct in which the ballots now agreed upon were Bush votes by a large margin. Overall, it was very clear that the Republican observers had raised literally thousands of frivilous objections to ballots in the initial round of review. This probably added a full day's work for the Canvassing Board. We also had a string of politicians arrive on Saturday and Sunday, most of whom took a turn in the "guest" chair we set up at the table. On Saturday afternoon we had Gov. Christie Whitman (R) of New Jersey, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) of the District of Columbia, Rep. Ed Markey (D) of Massachusetts and Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R) of Arkansas. Only Rep. Markey declined to sit in the hot seat. On Saturday evening, about 11:30 p.m., Gov. Pataki of New York arrived and stayed until 1:30 a.m.. The county staff wasn't planning to provide any food for the attorneys or staff from each party, but they did have food for themselves. Because Gov. Whitman was present, an invitation was extended to her and then to the rest of us. At about midnight on Saturday, several pizzas were delivered. Our deliberations were being broadcast live on the local government channel, and CNN, MSNBC et al. were taking this feed and showing us live all night. A lawyer in Boca Raton was watching and took it upon herself to treat us to Papa John's. We were all grateful and thanked her on the air. This also led to some suggestions that the Board announce an auction of sorts for the right to sit in the "guest" chair for 15 minutes. I suggested that the first person to have to steaks or other fare sent to us would win the right to sit in and be on worldwide television. As you know, the Florida Supreme Court ruled earlier in the week that the Secretary of State had to accept hand recount totals at least until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. We had lost several days of recounting in the two weeks before because the Secretary of State had stated that she would not accept any manual recount totals; it took the Supreme Court to order her to do so. By Saturday evening, we knew we had to rush to complete the count by 5:00 on Sunday. The hundreds of frivilous challenges from the original observer teams didn't help everyone's mood much. Throughout the night, there were some verbal exchanges between Board members and the attorneys. In order to speed up the process, the Board prohibited any comments from the lawyers other than bare objections. There were still plenty of admonitions when we disagreed with the Board's decisions. They were especially critical of Mark Wallace, the lead Republican attorney, whom they told to "stop whining" among things. Follow this link for a summary of some of the comments made during the night: http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/epaper/editions/monday/news_4.html After being there all day Saturday, Dennis Newman, our lead lawyer on site, suggested that I leave about 1:30 a.m. and return at 7:00 on Sunday morning. I was happy to get a break. On Sunday morning, our guests included Rep. Chris Shays (R) from Connecticut, Gov. Pataki again and Sen. Bill Frist (R) from Tennessee. I was sitting next to the guest seat. I had nice conversations with Shays and Frist. Shays made the appropriate comments about Wesleyan being a "great" school. You may recall that Frist is a cardiac surgeon who saved someone's life in the Capitol when he had a heart attack. Referring to this I said that we might need his help too because everyone was so tired that we may need to be revived. After this it was agreed that other politicians would have the opportunity to sit in the second row to observe, but could not sit at our table because it slowed everything down. Later in the day, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R) of Texas, Arlen Spector (R) of Pennsylvania, Tim Hutchinson (R) of Arkansas and Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana arrived to observe, as well as Reps. Sherrod Brown (D) of Ohio, Corrine Brown (D) of Florida, Peter Deutsch (D) of Florida and Sheila Jackson Lee (D) of Texas. Apparently the Governor of Virginia was also in the room, but I missed him. Rev. Al Sharpton was outside the building on Sunday, but did not come inside. Even at 7:00 a.m., there were a few Bush leaning protesters outside and by the afternoon the crowd outside had swelled to about 400. Because of the visiting politicians on Sunday, security was really tight. The protesters tried to move from the street up to the entrance to the building, but were thankfully barred. It was pretty tough to get in and out of the building, however, because one had to fight through the crowd. I did go out to our Winnebago once for some food and was met with a lot of rude comments, including one guy following me for a while shouting "Go back to Massachusetts" while walking a few feet behind me. This was a reference to the fact that some of our lawyers are from Massachusetts - a counterbalance to all of the lawyers from Texas present for the Bush campaign. By Sunday morning it was clear that we would not finish by 5:00, but would finish by Sunday evening. Judge Burton, Chairman of the Canvassing Board, faxed a letter to the Secretary of State asking her to give us until 9:00 a.m. on Monday to submit results. He followed up with phone calls in the afternoon, but as expected, Ms. Harris denied this request, even though we believe that this violated that the Florida Supreme Court's orders. At 4:20, the Board received official word that Ms. Harris insisted on receiving completed recount results by 5:00. By this time, we had reviewed the challenged ballots in all but 51 of the 637 precincts. The Board appropriately decided to send the results from those 586 precincts at that time and then to send the complete results later in the evening. At that time, the Vice President had received a net gain of 192 votes in the manual recount. Everything was finished about 7:20 p.m.. By then, the net gain was up to 215. At 8:30, Secretary Harris held a press conference to announce that she had rejected all of the Palm Beach County manual recount numbers, as well as recount numbers from some other counties in which Gore had obtained net gains. She had accepted recount numbers from some counties in which Bush had gained. This resulted in the 537 vote "official" lead that has been broadcasted since Sunday night. The truth is that among the votes that have already been counted, Al Gore is ahead. Yes, you heard it here first. Unfortunately, Ms. Harris, whom you will recall was the co-chairman for the Bush campaign in Florida, refuses to acknowledge it. Fortunately, we still have the courts. I also wanted to address this question of whether the ballots have all actually been counted. Mr. Gore says that some have still not been counted once. The Republican spin is that all votes have been counted by machine at least twice in every county. While the latter is true, the machines don't read every vote. It's much more than simply reading the dimpled ballots, which may or may not indicate a voter's intent to cast a vote in that race. In our hand recount, we found many, many ballots on which the voter had indicated a preference, but not punched the ballot in the prescribed way. On some ballots, the voter had darkened in the numbers in each race for the candidate he or she wanted. The machines would not count this ballot because they "count" by shining light through the space left by a missing chad that has been punched out. On other ballots, the voter punched out two different numbers, but wrote some notation like "Mistake" with an arrow pointing to one of the holes. This shows clear intent to cast a vote for the "hole" to which the arrow is not pointing. The tabulating machine counts this as an "overvote" because more than one candidate's number is punched, and the ballot is disqualified in the machine count. There are many, many examples such as this - several hundred ballots that we reviewed. In other counties, these are the votes to which the Vice President refers, that have not yet been counted even once. They are votes for both candidates, but they cannot be counted until someone actually looks at the ballots themselves. In addition, there are literally thousands of "dimpled" ballots, some of which are actual partially perforated chads. The standard the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board used was extremely "exclusive," not "inclusive" in regard to counting these ballots. Case law from several states is quite clear about the standard of review, but the Board did not follow it. This will be the next question for the courts. Keep your eyes also on the lawsuit pending in Seminole County, which seeks to exclude several thousand absentee ballots. The Republican Party there had sent out an absentee ballot request form to thousands of registered Republicans. The form, which was not the official form from the Supervisor of Elections, did not have space for all of the information required by law to be provided when requesting an absentee ballot. The Supervisor of Elections rejected 4,500 of the absentee ballot requests. Republican staffers found out about it and went to the Supervisor's office where they were given the request forms and they filled in missing information. This explicitly violates a state law enacted by the Republican controlled legislature in 1998 after there were myriad problems with absentee ballots in Miami-Dade County. The law states that no one other than the voter or a member of the voter's immediate family or the voter's legal guardian may fill in any information on an absentee ballot request form. Violation is a third degree felony. If these ballots are thrown out because of this, Gore will have a large net gain in this County. After we finished on Sunday evening, I went to our headquarters for a legal team meeting. We revised the complaint that was filed in Tallahassee on Monday morning that challenges the vote totals from several counties that Ms. harris certified. These include the 215 vote net gain for Gore in Palm Beach County that she refused to count. The Court in Tallahassee gave the Republican lawyers until Wednesday to file written responses. Meanwhile, the Court today ordered that ballots be transported from Palm Beach and other counties, to Tallahassee for judicial review. Gore still has a very good chance to win this if everyone follows the law and actually counts the votes. Let me add one more thought with which y'all may or may not agree. It really does come down to the simple situation of counting all of the votes that have already been cast, but which the machines are unable to count. Each side is certain that if all of the votes that were intended to be cast are counted as they were intended, Mr. Gore would have a decisive victory in Florida. Be that as it may, I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed, each side would be making the same arguments that its opposition presently makes. Each side claims legitimacy in its position, but the only legitimacy is one that the courts will confer. The various elections supervisors, their staff and hundreds of volunteers have handled the actual counting process in a deliberate and professional manner throughout the State, without really any of the reported "chaos" within the counting rooms. The people and governmental leaders and employees of Palm Beach County, for one, should be very proud of a job well done. Steven Meyer '86 --------------------- pnai-or-rabbi@shamash.org --------------------+ Hosted by Shamash: The Jewish Network http://shamash.org --------------------- pnai-or-rabbi@shamash.org --------------------=
-- END included message