But she will. Because next week, Clark plans to rule whether or not to toss out a very big stack of absentee ballots from Seminole County after Republican operatives filled out missing information on absentee ballot applications. Local Democratic activists charge that the extra help — mostly with voter ID numbers left off the form — constitutes improper conduct and discrimination against Democratic applicants, whose similarly incomplete forms were presumably rejected.
At stake: 5,000 net votes for Al Gore if the county's absentee ballots — which the plaintiffs deem "tainted" — are all tossed out.
The Gore camp, realizing that any legal attack on absentee ballots tends not to jibe p.r.-wise with its call for "every vote be counted," has distanced itself from the suit. But Gore himself, pressed Wednesday by CNN's John King, allowed that "if the ballots for one party were illegally changed and fixed, and the ballots from the other party that didn't have that information were rejected and thrown away, that doesn't seem fair to me."
Meanwhile, Bush's lawyers have had to scramble to get a handle on a case that some legal analysts have predicted could be Gore's strongest chance of winning the election. On Tuesday, James Baker introduced four new lawyers without assigning one to the Seminole issue. "We're not concerned about Seminole County," he said when asked about it by a reporter. "We do not think that that claim really has merit."
Now the Bush lawyers are fighting hard to keep it under control. First, they asked that Clark recuse herself, having recently been turned down for a promotion in the judicial ranks by Gov. Jeb Bush. No dice. Then they asked Clark to consolidate the case with the Gore contest before Judge Sauls, as a way of tying all their fortunes to a case they have an excellent chance of slowing to a crawl. No dice again. The Bush camp appealed to the Florida apeeals court, and was denied.
The case, still in Clark's care, is now on a fast track for a ruling next week. It might go away. Or it might turn out to be the 5,000-vote bombshell that opens yet another front in this all-out legal war. Whatever happens, there's an nearly identical case in Martin County right on its heels.