Word: palmed
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...Wednesday morning resentment over the Palm Beach screwup was high. The state Democratic party set up a toll-free number to allow people to call in reports of voting irregularities. If the election was turning into a mystery, then all of Florida would be vacuumed for clues. Questions mounted: When poll workers turned away people with the explanation that there were not enough ballots, when they illegally asked seniors for a Social Security number, was it an innocent mistake or deliberate obstruction? Meanwhile, a statewide recount of the Florida vote was already assured, triggered by a law that requires...
...When Bill Daley, the Gore campaign chairman, went before the cameras on Thursday to emphasize that the Gore campaign was ready to challenge the Florida outcome, lawsuits challenging the ballot were sprouting all around Palm Beach County. Many were spearheaded by citizens with Democratic party connections, though none of them yet had the official involvement of the state or national party. Jim Green, an ACLU lawyer in Palm Beach, was collecting statements from anyone who called his office. "All five lines here were lit up nonstop," he says. With union activists rounding up Florida notaries to take affidavits from...
...Thursday night, Palm Beach County circuit-court judge Kathleen Kroll issued an injunction that barred the county from certifying the recount results until a hearing on Nov. 14. In this initial phase, Florida law gives lower-court judges considerable power to decide if a vote is valid and, if not, to rule on remedies. The initial thing to determine is whether the confusing Palm Beach ballot was illegal in the first place. Democrats contend that it violates a provision of state election law that requires each candidate's name to appear to the left of the corresponding punch hole. Republicans...
...Republicans also complained that samples of the ballot, which had been used before in Palm Beach without incident, had been published in the local paper and mailed to voters before the election. But Lillian Gaines, 67, a retired schoolteacher in West Palm Beach who is a plaintiff in one of the ballot lawsuits, says the sample did not show that the punch holes would not be aligned with the names. "This is what made it so confusing for people when they finally went into the booth," says her attorney, Harold Weiss...
...votes affected were sufficient to change the statewide outcome, since the central issue is which candidate will be awarded Florida's electoral votes. One of those methods is a statistical analysis of the kind that has shown that Buchanan's total of 3,407 votes in heavily Democratic Palm Beach was far higher than his tally elsewhere in the state. If a court decides that the election is invalid, it would still be necessary to rule on whether a new vote is the only remedy. Florida courts, like courts in most other states, have been reluctant to order new elections...