The US Supreme Court stepped squarely into the middle of the legal battle between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore yesterday in yet another stunning twist to a presidential election that threatens to go on for weeks.
The nation's highest court agreed to hear Bush's challenge to hand recounted ballots in Florida, the state whose 25 electoral votes will decide whether the Texas governor or Vice President Gore won the election 17 days ago.
Florida election officials faced a 5pm Sunday (6am tomorrow in Taiwan) deadline to certify all county votes including any recounts by hand. Toward that end, two major Democratic counties -- Palm Beach and Broward -- worked to get hundreds of disputed ballots decided.
PHOTO: AFP
The US Supreme Court's decision said nothing about the Sunday deadline. Its rare involvement in the state electoral process only set a 90-minute oral hearing on Dec. 1 to listen to one of Bush's challenges to the hand count.
Gore's legal team has said it will continue the fight past the Sunday deadline and the Supreme Court's action almost certainly will extend the fight over the Nov. 7 election outcome well into December.
Gore needed to pick up votes from hand counts to overtake Bush's official lead of 930 in Florida to win the White House.
The Democrat suffered a severe blow on Thursday when the state's highest court decided not to force Miami-Dade, Florida's most populous county, to resume its manual tallying. The Gore camp had hoped to pick up votes in that Democratic county.
As the legal battle swirled, supporters of both sides demonstrated in Florida and in Washington, Bush's vice presidential running mate Dick Cheney was released from a hospital after a minor heart attack. He said he was ready to get back to work next week.
In Broward County, after working through the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, the election panel plowed on with reviewing up to 2,000 ambiguous ballots where a machine did not pick up a result overall. It plans to do so at least until late on Saturday.
By late afternoon on Friday, the Broward officials had completed review of 802 of these ambiguous ballots. According to unofficial figures Gore had an overall net gain from the manual recount in Broward of 306 votes.
In Palm Beach, in the front line of the election battle since Gore supporters complained of irregularities and confusion on voting day, the electoral panel began examining more than 6,000 questionable ballots.
Republicans also continued in their efforts to get ballots mailed in by US military personnel overseas to be counted even though they carried no postmark to show they were cast by the Nov. 7 election day.
The Republican Party asked a Florida judge in Tallahassee yesterday to order elections officials to reconsider about 500 such disqualified ballots. Counts of other absentee military ballots have favored Bush.
The US Supreme Court action came just two days after lawyers for Bush had asked the justices to review a Florida Supreme Court ruling allowing hand recounts from three heavily Democratic counties to be included in the final tally.
Bush's lawyers said the Florida Supreme Court decision disregarded federal law and violated the US Constitution. The US Supreme Court agreed to hear those issues.
Another Bush request to stop the hand recounts on constitutional grounds was turned down although the case still remains before an appeals court in Atlanta.
"We are pleased that the US Supreme Court has agreed to review the decision of the Florida Supreme Court," said Bush attorney Ben Ginsberg. "The court will review whether it is fair to change the rules in the middle of the game."
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