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US Supreme Court halts Florida recount
The US Supreme Court, divided 5-4, intervened once again on Saturday in the deadlocked presidential race, granting George W Bush`s plea to halt the Florida vote count on which Al Gore had pinned his best hopes of winning the White House.
In Tallahassee, the state court held its ground, refusing Bush`s appeal to stop the count to give federal courts time to rule. The court split 4-3 in ordering a new look at about 45,000 so-called undervotes. Bush also took his case to a federal appeals court in Atlanta.
Thirty-two days after the election, there was plenty of uncertainty in a race that had seemed likely to end Friday with a Bush victory. The court-ordered count resurrected Gore`s hopes and threw the race into uncharted political and legal territory that could make Congress the final arbiter of who will be the nation`s 43rd president.
Bush spent Saturday at his Texas ranch; Gore was at the vice president`s mansion. Democrats and Republicans flooded into Florida to monitor the count and President Bill Clinton, at the White House, applauded the Florida Supreme Court`s ruling.
"The more people feel there was an accurate count, the more legitimacy will be conferred on whoever the eventual winner is," he said.
Gore spoke to three dozen Democratic supporters and, according to an aide, he said, "a vote is not just a piece of paper, a punched card or a chad.
It is a human voice and we must not let those voices be silenced - not for today, not for tomorrow, not for as long as this country stands for the principle that the people must be heard and heeded."
At the start of the day, Bush led Gore by 193 votes statewide out of 6 million ballots cast. There were 9,000 undervotes in Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade, offering Gore his best chance to leapfrog ahead. The Republicans said the only way to avoid double counting of votes in Miami-Dade would be to conduct a full manual recount of all 600,000 ballots there.
In Duval County, where nearly 5,000 ballots were to be counted, officials awaited a shipment of computer hardware and software to help them sort through roughly 265,000 votes and find the ones needed to be recounted.
In Washington, Bush and Gore flooded the Supreme Court with motions. Bush`s lawyers filed an appeal Friday to stop the count, and Gore`s attorneys responded Saturday morning. Bush lawyers returned to the court to answer Gore`s team.
"If this confusing, inconsistent and largely standardless process is not stayed pending this court`s review, the integrity of this presidential election could be seriously undermined," Bush argued.
"Whatever tabulations result from his process will be incurable in the public consciousness and, once announced, cannot be retracted," no matter how flawed, Bush lawyers said.
In reply, Gore`s lawyers said, "Their surprising assertion is that a candidate for public office can be irreparably harmed by the process of discerning and tabulating the will of the voters."
Bureau Report