Word: weeks
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...most striking thing about the legal battles in Florida is just how quickly the briefs are flying. By late last week, 24-hour news channels were announcing new filings and rulings at the same breathless clip they were calling states for Bush and Gore on election night. A Palm Beach County judge rules that local officials have the option of counting dimpled chads. A Broward County judge rules the same. A suit is filed challenging absentee ballots in Seminole. "I used to leave the house to pick up the newspaper," says Bush lawyer Barry Richard. "Now I leave to pick...
...week's end, the legal endgame was focused on two sets of lawsuits proceeding on parallel tracks. The Bush campaign had pinned its hopes on a federal challenge to hand counts that now seems to have sputtered to a halt. And the Gore camp was relying on the Florida state courts to force a reluctant Katherine Harris, the secretary of state, to accept votes from hand recounts that it hoped might provide its margin of victory...
Which is one reason why when Republicans went to federal court last week, they led with a more subtle claim. A problem with the Florida hand recounts, they said, was that by conducting them in some counties and not others, the state was depriving voters in counties that were not being recounted of equal protection of the law. It was an odd claim--the G.O.P. doesn't usually ask the federal courts to intrude in state elections--and an unconvincing one. As the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals noted in rejecting it, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution expressly...
Depending on who was speaking last week, Florida's secretary of state is either a hero or a villain of the Sunshine State's postelection madness--ready to bring an end to our long national nightmare or to abrogate the God-given rights of the American voter. Florida's senate minority leader, Buddy Dyer, a Democrat, says she "had an extraordinary chance to go down in history in a more honorable way and didn't take it." Not surprisingly, the other side disagrees. "She has had no choice but to follow the law," says former state Republican Party chairman...
...detriment. She bounded onto George W. Bush's campaign as his hard-charging Florida co-chair. Watchdog groups objected when she used the secretary of state's office--and taxpayer money--to produce get-out-the-vote TV ads starring Bush boosters like General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Thus last week, when Harris unloaded decision after decision that appeared to be in lockstep with Bush strategy, cries of partisanship sprang up immediately. Harris, 43, insisted that her rulings were "independent," but many Floridians say otherwise...