The nation has a new president, but as a tumultuous political conflict plays out, Americans won’t know his name until Florida’s ballots are recounted and its 25 electoral votes are awarded to Texas Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore.
As the fog of Tuesday’s hotly contested presidential election cleared a bit Wednesday, Gore appeared to be the winner of the national popular vote by a slim margin, while Bush needed only a formal endorsement of his unofficial 1,700-vote margin in Florida to become the nation’s president-elect.
The recount of Florida’s votes began Wednesday as both political camps sent teams of attorneys, headed by former Secretaries of State Warren Christopher for the Democrats and James A. Baker III for the Republicans, to Florida to oversee the process.
Bush’s younger brother Jeb, governor of Florida, removed himself from the recount process to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. The recount was scheduled to be completed Thursday but could take longer as the state waits for thousands of ballots to arrive from Floridians who live or travel overseas but retain their right to vote.
A cautious Bush, aware that the nation had already seen too many shifts since Tuesday’s election results fueled a confusing, conflicting media performance full of bold predictions, declarations and embarrassing rollbacks, appeared before supporters in Austin, Texas, and declared he was the victor. But Gore warned against “any rush to judgment” on the Florida recount.
“It’s going to be resolved in a quick way,” Bush said. “I’m confident that [running mate Dick Cheney] and I will be the president-elect and the vice president-elect.”
Gore offered a civics lesson to the American people, emphasizing that the Constitution awards the presidency to the Electoral College winner, not necessarily the winner of the popular vote. He called the struggle “an extraordinary moment in our democracy” and said he would abide by the results.
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Gore’s aides argued that his strong performance Tuesday, when he collected more Democratic votes than any candidate in history, gave him standing to challenge any irregularities identified during the recount. Democratic partisans and attorneys were closely reviewing the Florida vote and said a legal challenge to the results was an option.
“I can’t say with certainty when this will be over,” said Gore campaign chairman William Daley. “This is the beginning of the process, not the end of the process.”
With 32 of Florida’s 67 counties recounted, Gore had closed the gap with Bush by 843 votes.
The nature of any legal challenge to the election results was unclear. In Washington, President Clinton said he had talked to both Gore and Bush to congratulate them on a hard-fought campaign.
“The American people have spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine what they said,” Clinton said. “If ever there was any doubt about the importance of exercising democracy’s most fundamental right, the right to vote, [Tuesday] put it to rest. No American will ever be able to seriously say again, `My vote doesn’t count.'”
Jesse Jackson flew to Florida to hold a rally in Miami. He said he received calls on Tuesday that African-Americans were having difficulty voting in Florida and other Southern states and was piecing together a coalition of ministers, NAACP officials and community leaders to craft an “action plan” on how to respond to the alleged problems.
“We want the democratic process to work,” said Bishop Victor Curry, pastor of the New Birth Baptist Church and president of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP. “We’re not talking about whether Bush or Gore comes out a winner. What we want is a fair process. We’re not just talking about black voters; we’re talking about Jewish voters, Haitian voters, labor voters, elderly voters who weren’t given due process. This doesn’t just have Florida implications; the world is watching what is happening here.”
In Florida and elsewhere, Democrats complained about long lines and various voting irregularities. In Palm Beach County, for example, Democrats charged the design of the ballot was so confusing they may have unintentionally cast their votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.
Supporting those claims, Buchanan got an unlikely 3,407 votes in that heavily Democratic area, a full 20 percent of the votes Buchanan collected in the entire state.
The stunningly close margin of the presidential contest, in which some 100 million votes were cast, has come down to a handful of contested votes in Florida. It was a development no one expected as Election Day dawned on Tuesday. As of Wednesday night, Gore had 260 electoral votes and Bush had 246. Gore got 48.2 percent of the popular vote. Bush got 48.1 percent.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting in unofficial results, Gore had 48,707,413 votes and Bush had 48,609,640 votes, separated by 97,773 votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to become president. In addition to Florida, Oregon, with seven votes, was still too close to call.
The results were so confusing that some media outlets declared Bush the winner early Wednesday morning. Even Gore called Bush to concede the election, then called the Texas governor again to retract that when his staff realized the Bush lead in Florida had shrunk to a few hundred votes out of the 6 million votes cast.
Apparently, it was not a pleasant call. “Let me make sure I understand,” protested Bush, his victory speech in hand. “You’re calling me back to retract your concession?”
“You don’t have to get snippy about this,” Gore is said to have replied.
Exit polling results indicated the close vote reflects clear divisions in the nation that go beyond party labels and candidates. Men and women moved in different directions, as did parents and singles, city dwellers and suburbanites, whites and people of color. The myriad divisions robbed the eventual winner of any claim to a national mandate.
Republicans kept control of the U.S. Senate, at least for the moment, holding a 50-49 margin with one seat in Washington state too close to call. The GOP also lost seats in the U.S. House but retained a slim margin.
As officials sifted through the Florida vote count, Bush moved ahead as though the election results were final.
His aides said retired Army Gen. Colin Powell would be nominated secretary of state. Campaign adviser Condoleezza Rice would be national security adviser, which means two African-Americans from former President Bush’s national security team would hold prominent posts in the governor’s administration.