Broward Ball

in Broward County, Fla. -Al Gore needs help from the Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, and nonintervention by the Florida legislature, and (if he made it that far) the U.S. Congress. The Florida Supreme Court would have to switch its position from allowance of local discretion in vote-counting to insistence on counting votes the way officials in Broward County did. WORLD took an up-close look at how Broward's dimple standard works in practice, and how this standard could change the final score. At 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 26, George W. Bush finally won the election. Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, strode into the cabinet room in Tallahassee to certify that the Texas governor had won the state's 25 electors by a bare 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast. As far as Florida's election canvassing board was concerned, the race was over. But eight years into the Clinton-Gore era, all the normal political rules seem made to be broken. Taking a page from the playbook of his politically defiant boss, Vice President Al Gore went before the nation the next day to announce that he refused to accept the Florida count. Instead, the vice president's lawyers filed suit in Tallahassee asking courts there to force three Democrat-leaning counties to recount their ballots yet again, using a standard almost guaranteed to manufacture hundreds of additional votes for Mr. Gore. Nearly a month after going to the polls, voters sat helplessly by as an army of lawyers asked a handful of judges to decide who the next president should be. The shift from polling booth to courtroom was unprecedented: Never before has a presidential election been decided by the judicial branch. The Republican side had also stepped up to the judicial bar. On Nov. 24, the U.S. Supreme Court stunned most legal observers by announcing that it would hear a Bush challenge seeking to bar all hand recounts in Florida. Lawyers on both sides scrambled to file briefs and prepare for oral arguments to meet the high court's Dec. 1 schedule. Through it all, Mr. Bush stressed again and again that he had won the election-again and again. Ahead on election night, ahead after a statewide mechanical recount, and ahead after a grueling hand recount in several counties, the Bush team argued that their man was the rightful occupant of the Oval Office. Following the certification in Florida, that argument seemed to be gaining traction. An ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 60 percent of Americans thought Mr. Gore should concede, while only 35 percent wanted him to keep fighting. (About 40 percent thought Mr. Gore should concede because the count was "fair," while another 20 percent wanted a concession just "to get this over with.") But Mr. Gore himself, for once, was in no mood to listen to the polls. After a carefully staged conference call with Democratic congressional leaders, the vice president took to the airwaves for a five-minute, prime-time address to the nation. "This is America," he insisted as flashbulbs popped. "When votes are cast, we count them. We don't arbitrarily set them aside because it's too difficult to count them." While Mr. Gore struggled to make his case to the public, his lawyers were already pressing their legal case. Less than 24 hours after the state's electoral vote was certified for Mr. Bush, David Boies, a Gore attorney, was arguing in circuit court that the certified vote should be overturned. The Democrats' suit contested the vote totals in three counties where full hand recounts were not certified. Using recount totals-even partial recount totals-Democrats argued, would have brought the candidates within 100 votes of each other. And if a stack of "questionable" Bush ballots from absentee voters were disqualified, the vice president would actually have won the popular vote in Florida. He still would win, Mr. Gore believes, if certified results were thrown out in three counties:

-with reporting from Margaret Menge in Miami