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Florida Court Hears Gore Challenge Of Presidential Election Results
by Matt Lee
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AFP) - A Florida judge Saturday heard arguments in a trial that could determine the U.S. presidency, with lawyers for Al Gore seeking the recount of thousands of ballots, and the George W. Bush team arguing that would be unreasonable and illegal.
The lawyers squared off against each other before Leon County Circuit Court Judge Sanders Sauls, who must determine whether the disputed Florida ballots will be recounted.
Bush holds a razor-thin 537-vote lead in Florida, but the Democrats contend that if the contested ballots are manually recounted, the final tally will show Gore is the winner.
Gore's lead lawyer, David Boies, outlined the vice president's contest of the election results.
"We have alleged that the certified results reject a number of legal votes and include a number of illegal votes," he said.
Bush's chief lawyer Barry Richard claimed a recount would be "unreasonable and contrary to Florida law."
He pointed out that there already had been a statewide machine recount of the ballots, and manual recounts in some counties.
"Presumably, what Mr. Boies is saying is that the legislature intended to give the losing candidates three free shots at the basket," Richard said.
Lawyers representing electoral officials also delivered their arguments. The court then went on to hear testimony from an expert in voting systems, who discussed the use of punchcard ballots, which some voters in Palm Beach County said were confusing.
The Bush camp repeatedly objected to the testimony from the expert, Ken Brace of Election Data Services.
A handful of protesters, mainly Bush supporters, stood outside the court awaiting Sauls' decision, though it was not clear whether the judge would rule at the end of what seemed likely to be a long day of hearings.
The Florida Supreme Court on Friday refused to override Sauls' refusal to order an immediate recount.
Sauls had earlier ordered all the Palm Beach and Miami-Dade ballots, not just the disputed ones, delivered to his court.
Some 462,000 ballots from Palm Beach arrived Thursday and another 654,000 ballots from Miami-Dade were brought to the Tallahassee court on Friday in rental trucks under police escorts, with news helicopters in hot pursuit.
The Gore team contends that if only 3,300 disputed ballots from Palm Beach and 10,000 from Miami-Dade are hand counted, Bush will end up losing the election.
"There is sufficient evidence that those votes could change ... or at least place in doubt the results of the election sufficiently so that those votes have to be included in the vote tally," Boies told the court in a reference to the Miami-Dade ballots.
The contest also claims electoral officials in Nassau County wrongly failed to register the outcome of a manual recount.
The Bush team vehemently opposes any new tally of the ballots from Florida's Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, maintaining that the papers have already been twice counted and rejected as "non-votes" by machines.
They also are concerned that even if Sauls decides the recount is proper, the new tally might not be complete before the looming December 12th deadline to name Florida's Electoral College slate.
But, at the same time, the Bush camp has asked for, and received from the judge, an order that some 1.2 million ballots from three other counties be kept locked up and prepared for delivery to Tallahassee.
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