Florida Circuit Court judge N Sanders Sauls has dismissed Al Gore’s legal challenge to the state’s certified result of the presidential election. The result gave a slight margin of victory to George W Bush. The judge dismissed the Democrat candidate’s bid for a recount of thousands of disputed ballots saying he had failed to carry their requisite burden of proof. Mr Gore’s legal team has appealed the decision to Florida’s Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the Florida Supreme Court justice will meet later tonight to decide what steps to take after being asked by the US Supreme Court to clarify their ruling in November to allow results of manual recounts from the US presidential election. Earlier today the US Supreme Court upheld an appeal by the Republican candidate George W Bush on the hand counts of votes in Florida. Following the ruling Florida state judge N Sanders Sauls postponed giving a ruling on whether his court should order hand counts of some ballots requested by Al Gore’s lawyers. The Democratic candidate said that he would hope and expect Democrat supporters to unite behind whoever eventually became President.
George W Bush claims that he has already won the 7 November presidential election. Judge Sanders Sauls’ ruling follows a marathon second day of hearings in Gore's contest of the results in Florida. On Sunday, the Bush team launched a concerted attack on Vice President Gore's challenge. They aimed to shoot down his petition for the recounts and urged him to concede defeat.
However, Mr Gore insisted that the battle was far from over. He believes that a manual recount of more than 12,000 votes from Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties would give him a Florida victory and the keys to the White House. Speaking on US television late yesterday, Mr Gore declared that he would abandon his attempts to contest the outcome of the presidential election if he loses upcoming court decisions.
Attorneys for Bush systematically targeted every argument brought by the Democrats before the Leon County Circuit Court in the Florida capital Tallahassee. In his closing arguments, Barry Richard said that the Gore camp had failed to demonstrate anything was wrong with the vote count that gave Bush a 537-vote lead in the southeastern state.
However, Gore lawyer David Boies said that it was imperative that the court tally votes he said were improperly rejected. "There are many hundreds, possibly thousands and that is more than enough to make a difference in this case," he said. He also scored points when one of the key witnesses for Mr Bush testified that manual recounts in close elections were desirable. Should Judge Sauls grant the request, George W Bush's lawyers want him to order new tallies in two other counties, where they claim vote counters used arbitrary standards in counting ballots.
In a separate development, the US agency charged with investigating civil rights violations will examine whether minority voters were intimidated from casting ballots in Florida. The US Civil Rights Commission said in a statement yesterday that it would examine allegations of voter intimidation and other voting rights improprieties. The statement came one day after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced that they were to launch a lawsuit on the matter. The NAACP alleged on Saturday that widespread irregularities in the Florida election denied African-American, Jewish and immigrant voters the right to vote.
