Fla. Vote Certification Deadline, Tues. 5 pm?

[Scarberry, Mark]

 CNN reports that the head of the Florida statewide canvassing board says
that any county not certifying its results by Tuesday at 5 pm will not have
its votes counted:

CNN:
"Bob Crawford, who replaced Gov. Jeb Bush as commissioner of Florida's
Canvassing Commission, said Saturday that if a county misses the state's
deadline for certifying results, the entire county's vote will be thrown
out."

" 'The statute is very clear that if a county's results are not to us by 5
p.m. Tuesday we shall ignore that county's vote, and the counties need to be
very aware of that,' Crawford told reporters. 'Candidates asking for
recounts need to be aware of that.' "

MY COMMENT:
If Democrats say that Bush waited too long to ask for a hand recount in
Republican counties, perhaps Republicans will say that Gore waited too long
also, and that any hand recount that can't be finished by 5pm on Tuesday
comes too late. Since the Palm Beach County election commission isn't even
meeting to talk about how to do it until Monday morning, and since they took
so long to recount 1%, we are headed for a further deepening of the morass.

My solution would be for the Bush and Gore campaigns to agree (and I hope
that Florida officials would then go along) either than all counties will be
hand recounted or that none will be.

Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law