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Manual Recount Suspended In Florida By U.S. Supreme Court
by Patrick Moser
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AFP) - A manual recount of votes was suspended Saturday in Florida, following a U.S. Supreme Court injunction in favor of a request from Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to halt the recount.
The court, in a 5-4 split ruling, scheduled oral arguments for 11:00 am (1600 GMT) Monday in the Republican candidate's appeal against a Florida high court order that hand counts be carried out.
The injunction halts the recount in the meantime.
The clerk of Leon County Circuit Court said some 9,000 disputed Miami-Dade ballots were on their way back to the court under armed guard late Saturday, after about half of them were recounted.
Speaking in front of the library in Tallahassee where eight judges had gathered to count ballots, court clerk Dave Lang said: "I thought it was the smoothest operation I've seen in a long time. The judges were working on finishing tonight."
Terre Cass, court administrator, said she estimated that a full recount would have been achieved by 8:00 pm or 9:00 pm Saturday.
"I guess you could say we were about 60% done," she said.
Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis had set a target of 2:00 pm (1900 GMT) Sunday to complete the statewide count, asking each county to fax to him estimates of when the counting would be complete.
Counting by the judges was monitored by four observers from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, in line with a Florida Supreme Court ruling Friday - and a victory for Democrat Al Gore - that called for hand counts of some 45,000 ballots statewide cast in the November 7th election.
The Bush camp had its emergency injunction to block the count rejected earlier Saturday by the Florida high court, in a 4-3 split decision.
The Bush team asserted that Lewis's order to begin the recount in 64 of Florida's 67 counties and complete it by Sunday violated federal laws and the U.S. Constitution.
"What is about to transpire in counting rooms all across the state of Florida is chaos," the lawyers said.
Clerk Dave Lang, however, described the counting as "calm, deliberate, moving right ahead," adding that, "I don't think it's chaos; I think it's a state of suspended animation."
He confirmed that most of the ballots recounted were undervotes - ballots on which a machine reading had registered no vote for president.
Gore lawyer and adviser Ron Klain said that 13 counties, five of which are heavily Republican, had completely or partially completed their recounts. In those counties, Vice President Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman had gained a net of 58 votes, said Klain.
Republican New York Governor George Pataki slammed the Democrats, saying he was "stunned" at the Democrats' announcement, given the judge's instructions not to announce a partial result either officially or unofficially.
In a formal complaint to Judge Lewis, Republican lawyer Phil Beck urged the judge to admonish the Democrats and prevent any further disclosures.
"We have respected the court's order and have not reported on partial vote counts that we found very encouraging," he said.
Mitchell Berger, representing the Democrats, told the hearing that they had misunderstood the order.
"We did not understand it to be a gag order," he said.
Lewis, who was not present but presided over the hearing by conference telephone call, advised both sides not to disclose further count numbers.
Earlier comments from Barry Jackson, another Republican observer at the court, also indicated that George W. Bush had gained votes - some 92 votes in all compared with 50 for Gore.
There were 137 challenges, in which vote counters disagreed, and 3,236 ballots confirmed as no-votes, he added.
Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Florida's Leon County, where the count is being conducted, said some 4,000 votes had been recounted.
"We discovered a lot of changes in all directions," he said.
The ruling covers all Florida counties except Palm Beach and Broward, which have already completed manual recounts.
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