2:45 p.m. November 26, 2000: Florida Secretary of State Refuses Deadline Extension; Almost 2,000 Ballots Go Uncounted

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), rejects a request by Palm Beach County election officials to give them a brief extension on turning in their recount tallies (see 3:00 p.m., November 16, 2000). This morning, Republican lawyers successfully disrupted the recounting for an hour by arguing about the order in which precincts should be handled (see 4:00 a.m. November 26, 2000). The county misses the 5:00 p.m. deadline by less than three hours, and thusly leaves almost 2,000 ballots unrecounted, though officials continue to count the remaining ballots. Harris decides to reject Palm Beach’s request after conferring with Mac Stipanovich, a Florida Republican lobbyist serving as her political “handler” (see Mid-Morning, November 8, 2000). [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008] Some media reports say that Democrat Al Gore picked up some 46 votes in the Palm Beach recount, though these votes are not added to the tally; Harris dubs Palm Beach’s entire recount null and void. [Guardian, 11/27/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Steven Meyer, an election observer for the Democratic Party, writes that when the 5:00 deadline arrived, election officials “had reviewed the challenged ballots in all but 51 of the 637 precincts and Gore had received a net gain of 192 votes in the manual recount.” The entire recount is finished by 7:20 p.m., and Gore’s net gain is 215 votes. Meyer learns that though Harris refused to accept the recount votes from Palm Beach County because it missed the deadline, she had accepted recounts from counties where Bush showed slight gains. Meyer writes, “This resulted in the 537 vote ‘official’ lead that the media is reporting.” Of the recount process itself, Meyer writes: “The Republican spin is that all votes have been counted by machine at least twice in every county. The only trouble is the machines don’t read every vote. The counting includes much more than simply reading the dimpled ballots. In our hand recount, we found many, many ballots on which the voter had indicated a preference, but not punched the ballot in the prescribed way. On some ballots, the voter had darkened in the numbers in each race for the candidate he or she wanted. On others, the voter punched out two different numbers, but wrote ‘Mistake’ or something equally as clear, with an arrow pointing to one of the holes. This shows clear intent to cast a vote for one candidate. The tabulating machine records this as an ‘overvote’ because more than one candidate’s number is punched, and the ballot is disqualified in the machine count.” [American Prospect, 12/14/2000]