IAMI - At 8 a.m., the latest star of the presidential election battle pulled out of West Palm Beach and promptly got stuck in traffic. For the rest of the day, the banana yellow truck was trailed by police vehicles, news helicopters, partisan watchdogs, and ordinary citizens who deemed its journey historic and hoped to catch a glimpse as it moved steadily along the Florida Turnpike toward Tallahassee.
Never before has a lowly rental truck been treated with such reverence and attention.
By 3:30 p.m., the Ryder truck arrived in the state capital to the wail of the sirens of its motorcycle police escort and the click of news cameras that caught every awkward maneuver as the driver tried to back the vehicle into the drab underground garage of the Leon County courthouse.
In this topsy-turvy post-election world, even a utilitarian moving truck can become a celebrity for a day or so - if it contains Palm Beach County's 462,000 disputed presidential ballots.
''Well, it does have a precious cargo,'' said county spokesman Brad Merriman, who nonetheless described the fanfare as ''surreal,'' ''pretty wild,'' and ''kind of strange.''
As it made its 450-mile journey to Tallahassee, newscasters compared public interest in the truck to another vehicle that transfixed America one evening six years ago: the white Ford Bronco that carried O.J. Simpson through the streets of Los Angeles. This time, however, the stakes were much broader.
On Wednesday, Leon County Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls ordered election officials in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties to ship more than 1.1 million ballots to his court in preparation for a hearing tomrrow on whether the votes should be hand-counted. Al Gore hopes to garner enough votes from a recount to overtake George W. Bush in the race for president.
Sauls has not signaled what his decision will be, but he wanted the ballots on hand, just in case.
''Pack 'em up and ship 'em up,'' Sauls said in his folksy style. ''... Is it going to be a convoy? How many semis?''
The answer for Palm Beach County was one 12-foot, 1999 Ford truck hauling three voting machines and 167 metal cases filled with ballots, driven by a baffled elections worker who could not quite believe the attention he was receiving.
''The ballots seem to be riding fine back there,'' Tony Enos, the driver, told reporters at a rest stop near Disney World, where even his consumption of a bottle of orange juice was noted around the world.
Even Simpson couldn't resist tuning in.
''In my case, it may have been a little more intriguing because people didn't know what was going to happen,'' Simpson told the Associated Press. ''Here they know the ballots are going to get to Tallahassee.''
