The War This Time

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Sixty-four recounts meant 64 county canvassing boards magically had to appear Saturday morning two weeks before Christmas. Some election officials were on vacation (Columbia County), or visiting a sister recuperating from hip-replacement surgery (Sarasota County), or just returning from Tallahassee and other court proceedings (Seminole County). Linda Howell, Madison County supervisor of elections, began the weekend thinking she would have to sift through her county's 6,642 ballots to find the 31 undervotes. As in most counties, Madison's undervotes had never been segregated. Some bigger counties — among them Duval and Hillsborough — were installing computer software to help the machines identify and separate the undercounted ballots. Duval County planned to spend 10 hours Saturday finding the 4,967 undervotes lurking amid 291,000 ballots. Then the Supreme Court ruled, and everyone was told to stop. "I am sick of this," Howell told TIME Saturday. "We're about 55 miles south of Georgia. I wish I was in Georgia."

Osceola County officials adopted a lighter attitude. On Saturday morning, when canvassing board member Mary Jane Arrington held up a completely unmarked punch card, she turned to a local judge on the board and said, "You'd think at least they would have voted for you, Judge." Later an MSNBC news crew covering the board informed Arrington and her colleagues that the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a stay. But the board waited for official word before standing down. "We don't have cable," Arrington noted.

Perhaps the only people in Florida not whipsawed by the competing state and federal Supreme Court rulings were the Republican leaders of the Florida legislature. Before the state supreme court ruled for Gore, Senate president John McKay and house speaker Tom Feeney — hard-liners closely allied to Jeb Bush — had already convened a special session to appoint presidential electors for Bush. Democrats, led by state representative Lois Frankel, have tried in vain to convince the majority that the rest of the country would see that as blatant, dangerous electoral meddling. She redoubled her efforts after the state supreme court ordered the manual recount, arguing that if the recounts showed that Gore had won while the legislature anointed Bush, the legislature's reputation would die in the resulting train wreck. But McKay told reporters that the legislature's approach "has not altered" — and of course it didn't change after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the hand count. While Feeney and McKay marched ahead with their plans to continue the selection process this week, Frankel could be found sitting on the steps of the Leon County library Saturday, giddy as a schoolgirl because judges inside were counting ballots. Later that day, as she walked back to her office in the state Capitol, she heard a Republican crowd chanting "We got a stay! We got a stay! Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey-hey-hey, good-bye!" But the bad news for Gore didn't plunge Frankel back into depression. "The word is numb," she says. "I'm not feeling anything." She wasn't alone.

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