Monday, reversing an earlier hard-line stance, Florida's Democratic attorney general urged canvassing boards to include ballots from overseas military personnel — even if the ballots were not correctly postmarked. "No man or woman in the military service of this nation should have his or her vote rejected solely due to the absence of a postmark," Bob Butterworth told reporters. Overseas military ballots are often mailed without postmarked or postmarked late because of geographic or security restraints.
Late Monday, state election officials dismissed Butterworth's plea, saying their refusal to count as many as 1,500 "disqualified" votes — many of which are from military personnel, who tend to vote Republican — is couched in election law.
Until Monday afternoon's announcement, Butterworth, who served as Gore's state chairman, was locked in a battle with Republican officials who argued all military ballots should be counted. It was a battle Butterworth couldn't afford to win. And considering his continued involvement with the vice president's campaign, it's probably safe to assume there's already been some relevant discussion within the Gore camp — perhaps Butterworth was dispatched to test the proverbial waters.
And those waters are roiling: As the word spread over the weekend that as many as 1,500 overseas votes (many of them military, and many presumably meant for George W. Bush) had been discarded due to bureaucratic fine print, protests erupted around the country. The outrage was fueled on two fronts. First, the procedural question: How, many dissidents demanded, could Florida Democrats demand such unerring precision from military personnel while simultaneously insisting they could infer the "intent" of a largely Democratic constituency just by staring intently at "pregnant" chads? Second, a sense of enraged patriotism: Congressional Republicans were up in arms over the Democrats' move to block the ballots, threatening everything from an inaugural boycott to a Capitol Hill stalemate if the obstruction led to a Gore presidency.
Vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman was among the first Democrats to take a conciliatory stance on the military ballot issue, saying on NBC's "Meet the Press" he thought vote counters should give those ballots "the benefit of the doubt." Nobody within the Gore campaign would comment on Lieberman's sentiment, or whether the vice president shared it. But when you take the senator's assertion in conjunction with Butterworths announcement, you have what looks very much like a change of heart. Now we'll just have to wait to see if beleaguered election officials are as susceptible to the peaks and valleys of public opinion.