Fla. Vote Certification Deadline, Tues. 5 pm?

[Darren Hutchinson]

I expect litigation seeking an injunction preventing the state from
discarding the votes until the recounts occur.  One state judge has already
enjoined Palm Beach County from certifying its election results until a
Tuesday hearing.  The state is a defendant in that lawsuit.  I imagine that
those plaintiffs will seek futher injunctive relief, preventing the state
from enforcing the deadline.  Without such relief, the court's ealier
injunction imposes a penalty upon the plaintiffs (the results cannot be
certified until after the hearing, but the state will disregard the votes
after 5pm Tuesday).

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for con law professors
[mailto:CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu]On Behalf Of Scarberry, Mark
Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2000 11:39 AM
To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
Subject: Fla. Vote Certification Deadline, Tues. 5 pm?


 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