Palm Beach County officials yesterday ordered an extraordinary countywide recount by hand of the more than 425,000 votes cast in the presidential election for Al Gore and George W. Bush.
At stake is the presidency, since Florida will deliver 25 electoral votes -- enough to decide the race between Gore and Bush.
Earlier, a hand count of selected precincts turned up enough errors in the election night vote to prompt election officials to vote for a complete hand recount.
PHOTO: AFP PHOTO
Gore added 36 votes and Bush lost three in a machine recount of Palm Beach County in Florida's disputed presidential balloting.
Election officials said their exhaustive manual recount found numerous differences from the machine count.
Palm Beach County official Carol Roberts said the errors pointed to as many as 1,900 errors county wide -- more than the total margin between Bush and Gore statewide.
The machine tabulation, the third in this populous Democratic-leaning county, gave Gore 269,732 vote, or 36 votes more, and Bush 152,951, or three fewer.
But George W. Bush's Republican Party has sent the presidential race into the courts, requesting that a judge block the manual recount of the improbably close vote in Florida. A federal judge set a hearing for Monday in Miami.
Former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, said that with a manual recount, "human error, individual subjectivity, and decisions to, quote, `determine the voters' intent,' close quote, would replace precision machinery in tabulating millions of small marks and fragile hole punches."
Vice President Al Gore's Democratic Party responded forcefully a few hours later, calling for the withdrawal of the suit.
"The hand count can be completed expeditiously and it should be," said former US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, speaking on Gore's behalf. He added that Bush, as governor of Texas, had signed legislation in 1997 specifying that hand recounts be used to settle certain disputed elections -- a position at odds with the current stated Republican preferences.
County election officials in Palm Beach officials will meet again today to discuss further action. It was not clear when the laborious examination of ballots in all 531 precincts would begin.
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