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Palm Beach Ballots Arrive In Tallahassee Amid Media Crush
by Matthew Lee
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AFP) - The first batch of more than a million ballots that may determine the next president of the United States arrived at a court here Thursday in a yellow rental truck pursued by news helicopters.
As a horde of reporters and photographers looked on under a tight police watch, maintenance workers at the Leon County Circuit Court unloaded some 462,000 ballot papers from Palm Beach and moved them to a secure storage area.
On the order of Circuit Court Judge Sanders Sauls, who is presiding over Al Gore's challenge of the Florida vote, the Palm Beach ballots will be joined on Friday by some 653,000 from Miami-Dade County.
Sauls has set a hearing for Saturday at which he will listen arguments about whether some or all of the 1.1 million ballots should be manually recounted as Gore wants or left alone as George W. Bush wants.
The Gore camp contends that if only 3,300 disputed ballots from Palm Beach and 10,000 disputed from Miami-Dade are hand counted, Bush's razor-thin 537-vote margin of victory in Florida will evaporate and show that the vice president actually won the November 7th election in the state, giving him the White House.
Gore supporters held a ballot welcoming ceremony in front of the court as the Ryder truck approached the building's south loading dock in the middle of a police escort whose sirens were almost drowned out by the beating of helicopter rotors overhead.
U.S. television networks covered much of the truck's eight-hour journey from Palm Beach live, making for scenes reminiscent of former football star O.J. Simpson's famous 1994 white Bronco ride.
"This is abnormal, let's face it," said Circuit Court Clerk Dave Lang who received the ballots on behalf of Judge Sauls.
Lang's staff, normally putting up Christmas lights around the court at this time of year, were pressed into duty as ballot ferryers, rolling the locked metal boxes containing the cards on dollies into the building.
"It's a disruption, but really its a simple unloading of a truck," Lang told reporters. "It's not a complicated thing, but its just a matter of doing things right."
Both the Gore and Bush camps have expressed concern about security of the ballots, which Sauls has ordered held under 24-hour guard, and for that reason Lang would not say where in the court they would be stored.
With the heavy media presence outside the loading bay on South Calhoun Street, the Palm Beach County sheriffs escorting the truck had trouble following it into the entrance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, can I get through. Please, I have the key," one deputy implored, waving the key to the truck's storage compartment over his head.
Ryder, the national rental company that provided the truck for a nominal fee of one cent, basked in a day of free publicity that executives were sure to find a relief from the last time the firm hit the media spotlight.
The last noteworthy time a Ryder truck pulled up outside a government office was in April 1995 when Timothy McVeigh drove a slightly larger model packed with explosives up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and detonated it, killing 168 people and injuring 500.
Some gathered outside the courthouse here suggested Ryder adopt a new advertising slogan: "We helped [insert eventual winner here] move into the White House, we can help you move into your house."
Two unmarked county sheriff's cars, one in front and one behind, accompanied the truck that was driven by Tony Enos, the voting systems coordinator for Palm Beach.
Representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties rode along in the sheriff's cars. Completing the convoy was a small squadron of media vehicles as the helicopters hovered overhead.
Six years ago, choppers and police cars in Los Angeles similarly pursued Simpson during the investigation of the killing of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
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