Bush takes his case to highest court in land US Supreme Court ruling
By Mary Dejevsky in Tallahassee
23 November 2000
The fight for the American presidency headed for US Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, yesterday after lawyers for George W. Bush said they were appealing against the Florida Supreme Court's ruling on manual recounts. The decision by the Republican camp escalated the 15-day political and legal fracas into a full-blown constitutional stand-off.
Lawyers for the Bush campaign announced the decision just hours after Mr Bush'srunning mate, Dick Cheney, underwent an emergency operation in Washington following a recurrence of his heart trouble. He was said to be recovering well in hospital after angioplasty to clear an artery. But his doctors later revealed that, contrary to a statement by Mr Bush, he had indeed suffered a slight heart attack.
It was another day of helter-skelter events in which fortunes changed by the hour. No sooner had Vice-President Al Gore hailed his sweeping victory in the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday than the ruling was undercut, perhaps fatally, by local election officials in the south of the state.
The three-member panel overseeing the on-again, off-again recount in Miami-Dade county agreed unanimously to abandon the process and revert to the results they submitted two weeks before.
They would be unable to complete the count in Florida's most populous county within the five days set by the court, they said, so they would stop forthwith. They overturned an initial decision to count just those 10,000 or so votes rejected by the machine-count after a protest in the building degenerated into a near-riot.
With more than 650,000 votes, Miami-Dade county is the biggest of the three conducting a recount and had already added 157 votes to Mr Gore's total with only one-quarter of its precincts counted. Furious Democrats immediately appealed to a local court in an effort to have the count resumed.
There was some consolation for Democrats when a judge in Palm Beach county ruled that so-called "dimpled" ballots – those that were not fully punched through – could be included in the count.
The five-day deadline had been the only setback for the Gore campaign from the Florida Supreme Court's ruling. In every other respect, Mr Gore had got what he wanted. In their late-evening judgment on Tuesday, the seven judges had ruled that a person's right to have his vote counted took precedence over reporting deadlines set by state law and gave the go-ahead for the state's three county-level manual recounts.
Reversing two rulings by Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State, the court said there were financial sanctions for electoral officials who filed their county's results late, and there was no reason to punish the voters as well.
"To allow the Secretary to summarily disenfranchise innocent electors in an effort to punish dilatory board members misses the constitutional mark," the judges said in their unanimous ruling. "Disenfranchising electors," for this purpose, they said, "is unreasonable, unnecessary and violates long-standing law."
Mr Gore had immediately hailed the ruling as providing for a "full, fair and accurate count" that would allow "the will of the people to prevail".
Sensing that he had the advantage, he also offered a small olive branch to his rival, undertaking not to accept the support from any electoral college voters who were already pledged to Mr Bush. Rumours had circulated in Washington that Democrats were investigating the background of Republican electors with aview to "blackmailing" them into changing sides before the electoral college vote on 18 December.
Without dignifying Mr Gore's offer with a response, Mr Bush lambasted the Florida Supreme Court ruling yesterday in a televised statement from his Texas Governor's office in Austin.
Accusing the Florida Supreme Court of usurping the power of state election officials, he said the court "rewrote the law" in extending last Tuesday's deadline to accommodate the results of new manual recounts. "The court changed the result," Mr Bush said with barely concealed anger, "and it did so after the election was over."
As well as appealing to the US Supreme Court, the Bush campaign hinted that it could also encourage political intervention by the state's Republican majority legislature.
Mr Bush had a majority of 930 votes in Florida (out of more than 6 million cast) before the manual recounts that were requested by the Gore campaign and had hoped that this result would be confirmed last Saturday. Mr Gore wants to add sufficient votes in the recount to snatch Florida, and the presidency, from his rival.
Mr Bush had words of support for his running mate, Mr Cheney, whom he described as "really strong", and he expressed full confidence in his capacity to serve as vice-president.