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Broward County has adopted a looser standard. Its board is counting dimpled chads even when the rest of the ballot contains clean holes, and is even taking into consideration which party the voter supported in other races.
MIAMI-DADE'S FIASCO
--After the state supreme court approved the hand recounts, Miami-Dade abandoned its recount because it saw no way to complete it. Did Miami-Dade have that right?
Democrats believe a hand recount there could have provided Gore's margin of victory. They argue that once the canvassing board found a tabulation error, it was required to conduct a full manual recount. Last Thursday the Florida Supreme Court refused to order Miami-Dade to keep counting. But it ruled without prejudice, meaning it can still revisit the issue and Democrats intend to contest that decision this week. Democrats charge that the county board stopped because of intimidation from a boisterous Republican protest at its offices, and a board member said at one point the protests played a role in the decision to stop counting. Six Democratic Congressmen have written to the Justice Department charging that this intimidation was a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Before Miami-Dade stopped counting, the board had found 156 additional votes for Gore. When it halted the count, the board said it would not be adding those votes to its previous tallies. The Democrats have challenged this decision, arguing that once a canvassing board has identified legal votes, it has no discretion to toss them aside.
SEPARATION OF POWERS
--Did the Florida Supreme Court usurp the executive power of the secretary of state and the legislative power of the legislature?
Katherine Harris argued that Florida election law gave her discretion, as the state's chief election official, to reject amended vote totals submitted by counties after the seven-day deadline set by statute. The Florida Supreme Court agreed that Harris had discretion to reject the new totals, but it ruled that she had abused it. Harris had the right to reject the recounts, the court held, only if they were submitted so late that including them would prevent a candidate from contesting the results or preclude Florida from qualifying its electors in time. This standard does not quite make Harris' function merely "ministerial," as the Democrats argued in the supreme court, but Republicans argue that it breaches her powers as an elected official.
The U.S. Constitution gives each state's legislature the power to determine how presidential electors will be chosen, and the Republicans argue that the state court usurped that role in deciding that the seven-day deadline for certification was not binding. "The court rewrote the law," Bush said last week.