EST PALM BEACH, Fla. - They almost made it.
After a near all-nighter fueled by coffee and pizzas sent by a local lawyer watching the tedium on TV, the members of the Palm Beach County canvassing board knew that as the day began yesterday, it would be tough to meet the 5 p.m. deadline. By early afternoon, they knew it would be impossible. Still, unkempt, unrested, with two wearing the same sweaters they had the night before, they raced through ballot after ballot yesterday, averaging almost 200 an hour.
And they reacted with stunned disbelief when Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced that because the Palm Beach recount was incomplete, she would take no account of it.
''Unbelievable,'' county elections supervisor Theresa LePore gasped.
But before the letdown came the rush.
As the clock wound down, with each second precious, the board began handing disputed ballots off to four two-person teams to sort. Under the ever-present eyes of election monitors - a Democrat on the left, as it happened, a Republican on the right - the teams adopted the recount squint, holding ballots up to the light or red construction paper to determine whether they could see through the circles indicating a vote for Al Gore or George W. Bush.
''I want,'' said County Commissioner Carol Roberts to no one in particular at 4:15 p.m., ''to get this done.''
It was unclear whether Roberts meant the recount or the board's concession that it would miss the deadline. Shortly before, board members had huddled in a corner with monitors from both political parties and talked among themselves.
That led US Representative Peter Deutsch, whose district partly falls in Palm Beach, to walk back and forth announcing, ''They're in violation of [Florida's] open meeting laws,'' known as sunshine laws. Journalists protested, too, but the group ignored them.
Five minutes after her pronouncement, at 4:20 p.m., Roberts walked away from the counting table, along with Circuit Court Judge Charles Burton and LePore, who approved the butterfly ballot that led to the Palm Beach recounts.
With as many as 1,000 ballots to go, the time had come to certify and then fax whatever results they had to Tallahassee.
At 4:30 p.m., with the deadline half an hour away, Burton made the announcement. He was calm. He was satisfied that the board had done its best. He was also pale, his Florida tan finally having faded a bit after so many days indoors.
''I had really believed we could make it ...,'' Burton told reporters who swarmed around him in the Palm Beach County Emergency Operations Center. ''We were moving at a pretty good clip.''
But fast was not quite fast enough.
By 2:30 p.m. or so, the board was faxing the secretary of state in Tallahassee asking for a short deadline extension - first until this morning, then for just an hour or two. Burton was on the telephone with state elections supervisor Clay Roberts, making his case and saying his team deserved the extra time after all the hours they had put in.
''I told him people have been working really hard here, breaking their butts - maybe not those exact words,'' said Burton, who changed into a shirt and tie early yesterday from the short-sleeve pullover he had worn into the wee hours the day before.
The workers included sheriff's deputies, court clerks, guides who led brief tours for citizens interested in the process, and a stenographer who had to note every challenge, no matter how obscure. The people recruited at the last minute to sort ballots included a fire battalion chief who wore a Palm Beach County Rescue patch on his left shoulder.
But Harris, a Republican and cochairman of the Bush campaign in Florida, refused to accept their effort. Not only would she decline to allow an extension, she later announced, she would instead certify the returns the county turned in Nov. 14 since the amended returns faxed yesterday were incomplete.
Burton called her decision ''bogus,'' then went back to examining ballots by hand. All told, the Palm Beach board had about 14,000 challenged ballots to review during the six-day count, excluding a Wednesday morning lost to a court hearing requested by the Gore campaign and a Thanksgiving Day spent at home. That was out of 462,644 recounted ballots, many processed by machine, the remainder by hand.
When the canvassing board finally concluded its work early in the evening, there were hugs but little happiness. The commissioner, judge and supervisor had taken a 90-minute break around sunrise yesterday, but otherwise had worked straight since Saturday morning.
All the officials knew that Gore's lawyers were likely to be in court this morning to contest the Palm Beach returns, even if the board finished on time.
The county is a Democratic stronghold, but the vice president posted smaller than expected gains through the recount.
His lawyers and advisers have argued, in the week since the Florida Supreme Court allowed the recounts to resume, that the standard Palm Beach was employing was more stringent than the court intended, and far more conservative than the one used in Broward County.
Broward's canvassing board had its results tallied just before midnight Saturday, giving Gore an extra 532 votes.
Burton called it ''not really true'' that the board refused to count so-called dimpled ballots, where the circle that was supposed to be punched instead showed an indentation.
''We set out to apply a consistent standard of review,'' he said. ''You simply can't count every ding on a ballot. You see so many weird things you don't know what you're counting.''
Sometimes the counting got testy, especially in the last day.
As a small crowd of observers lighted candles outside, Burton told a Republican monitor who was making an objection, ''I don't believe this person made a mistake 14 times. There's no point arguing.'' He told another monitor who was too slow for his liking, ''If you're going to object, object.''
When another of the monitor's cell phone rang, LePore snapped, ''Someone turn that phone off.'' Roberts hushed the almost empty auditorium.
The room was far more crowded yesterday and far more tense than just three days earlier.
Behind barricades, hundreds of Bush supporters - some of them locals, others having traveled from protests in Miami to ones in Fort Lauderdale and on to West Palm Beach - recited the Pledge of Allegiance, shouted slogans through bullhorns and donned T-shirts distributed by the Bush campaign that called for an end to the recount.
Unlike Miami-Dade County, whose canvassing board declined to resume its recount last week after Bush supporters mobbed the room where it was meeting - the Palm Beach board appeared unmoved by the action outside. Its members often walked out the front door, but occasionally sneaked out the back.
Last night, as the deadline neared, Burton made clear he and his two women colleagues would leave with heads held high. They had counted and counted, he said, and they had counted on finishing. By 7 p.m., too late to matter to Harris but soon enough to satisfy themselves, they had finished.
