The campaign of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush issued a strong protest Sunday at the decision by a Florida county to order a full hand recount of election votes.
Bush special legal advisor James Baker, a former secretary of state, dismissed the call as unfair and unconstitutional and said the Bush camp would proceed with its legal challenge to have the hand count outlawed.
"We are in federal court right now with a constitutional challenge to selective hand counting in overwhelmingly Democratic counties and we have said we were going to vigorously oppose that," Baker said on the Fox News Sunday talk show.
"We don't like the idea of doing it. We regret that we have to do it but we really have no other choice," he said.
"We do not think the process is fair. We do not think it is constitutional. We have had a vote count and we have had a recount and we think that we ought to abide by those results."
Electoral officials in Palm Beach County called earlier Sunday for a manual recount of votes in the entire county after a partial hand recount of some 4,300 ballots had been undertaken.
The partial recount came up with 33 new votes cast for Democratic candidate Al Gore, and 14 for Bush, resulting in a net gain of 19 votes for Gore.
The electoral authorities considered this discrepancy was enough to put in doubt the result for Palm Beach, Florida and therefore the entire balance-tipping state -- a finding with which the US Democratic leaders concurred.
Whoever wins Florida will get 25 electoral votes, a winning margin in the presidential election, with Bush already holding 246 votes and Gore 262. A candidate needs 270 of the 538 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency.
Baker said a new hand count would only muddy the electoral waters and produce further complications.
"The potential for human error, or the potential for mischief, is so great in these hand counts that it skews the results and the last count is not necessarily the most accurate count, but the most recent count," he said – WASHINGTON (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
