ALLAHASSEE - Vice President Al Gore sought to put new pressure on George W. Bush yesterday by proposing a statewide hand recount and vowing to accept the result without further legal challenges. But Bush flatly rejected the proposal, and Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced last night that she would not grant any extension of Tuesday's deadline for recounts.
Bush, rushing back from his central Texas ranch last night to appear at the governor's mansion in Austin, said Gore's proposal would be ''neither fair nor accurate.'' Bush said he instead wanted the ''next and final'' tally to be by midnight tomorrow, when his current 300-vote lead will have been combined with overseas ballots.
Bush also deflected Gore's suggestion that the two contenders meet promptly to try to tone down the acrimony between the camps. Bush said he would meet with Gore, but only after the election outcome is final.
Just a couple of hours after Gore made his dramatic proposal, the matter was complicated for the vice president when Harris announced at a late-night press conference that she had rejected the requests by three mostly Democratic counties for an extension of Tuesday's deadline for submitting recounted votes. Harris said the requests by the counties were ''insufficient to warrant waiver of the deadline.'' While Harris did not explain the insufficiencies, her office has noted that state law specifically allows an extension only for circumstances such as voter fraud.
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Harris, a Republican and Bush supporter who has been accused by Gore aides of being partisan, said she made her decision ''independently and, I believe, correctly.'' Just hours earlier, the state Supreme Court, dominated by judges appointed by Democrats, declined to block the hand recount.
With no agreement between Bush and Gore, the matter is likely to go yet another round in the courts. Gore plans to ask a court for permission, notwithstanding Harris's ruling, to include the hand recounts in the final tally. Bush's lawyers, meanwhile, plan to appear today before a federal Appeals Court in Atlanta, seeking an order putting an end to the hand recounts in several heavily Democratic counties.
Gore, in an appearance timed to be broadcast live during the national news on the East Coast, proposed that a recount be completed in at least three key counties where he is likely to gain votes: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. But Gore also said he would support a recount in all 67 counties, a task that he said could be completed in just a week. The results of that count, plus the overseas ballots, would determine the winner of the election, Gore said.
''I don't know what the final results will show,'' Gore said after summoning reporters to his Washington residence on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory. ''But I do know this is about much more than what happens to me or my opponent; it is about our democracy. My faith is in the people's will, in our Constitution and in our system of self-government.''
But Bush, saying that Gore's proposal was nothing new, said a recount in all 67 counties would be ''compounding the error by extending a flawed process statewide.''
''This means every vote in Florida would be evaluated differently by different individuals using different judgment, and perhaps different local standards, or perhaps no standards at all,'' the Texas governor said.
Bush noted that Harris had said, just one hour before, that there should be no further hand recount.
The Gore campaign plans to challenge Harris's decision in court, Gore campaign chairman William Daley said last night.
''We are very surprised that the secretary of state has taken such a rash and precipitous decision,'' Daley said.
If Gore fails to win permission for the manual recount, his hopes for winning the presidency could rest on the overseas ballots that are due by tomorrow.
Gore also proposed yesterday that he meet one-on-one with Bush, ''not to negotiate but to improve the tone of our dialogue in America.''
Responded Bush: ''Once this election is over, I would be glad to meet with Vice President Gore, and I join him in pledging that regardless of who wins after this weekend's final count, we will work together to unite our great country.''
Gore did not address some of the more technical - but potentially crucial - questions about what is considered fair tabulation of the ballots. Bush advisers have said the manual recount is subject to human error and ''mischief.'' Nor was it clear whether Gore was correct in contending that it would take only seven days to recount by hand the nearly 6 million votes statewide.
Gore made the proposal for a statewide hand recount after receiving two pieces of good news. The state Supreme Court declined to block a manual recount, as had been requested by Harris, and a judge in Palm Beach County ruled that ''dimpled'' ballots could be included in the count. Dimpled ballots are those in which an impression has been made in a punch hole for a candidate but the paper ''chad'' has not been removed or has been left hanging.
Thousands of dimpled ballots were tossed out in Florida in the first recounts on the grounds that they didn't manifest a clear voter preference. If they are now included in the vote, it could mean an advantage for Gore.
Bush adviser James A. Baker III decried the Gore legal strategy earlier in the day, saying it was ''litigation run amok.''
But Gore's advocate, Warren Christopher, told reporters that the vice president merely wanted ''to be able to say to the people of the United States that there's been a full, fair, and accurate count of the votes here in Florida.''
Bush leads Gore by 300 votes in the state, according to an official state count. The winner in Florida would take its 25 electoral votes and with them the presidency unless results in other states are recounted and changed.
As has been the case all week, much of the focus yesterday was on the power of Harris, who oversees the state election process. Harris had said that all ballots had to be recounted by Tuesday. But several counties said that was not enough time. Harris then said that the counties would have to tell her in writing by 2 p.m. yesterday why the deadline should be extended. After reviewing those requests, Harris rejected them.
Harris said that she intends to certify the final Florida result Saturday, with the only addition being the overseas ballots, which Bush aides believe will favor them. Gore would need a margin of at least 301 votes in the overseas ballots to win the elections if Harris's decision is upheld.
The Bush campaign, meanwhile, is taking another route to try to stop the recount. Lawyers for the Texas governor, having failed Monday to persuade a federal court in Miami to stop the recount, have appealed that ruling and are scheduled to appear before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. But whatever happens in the Appeals Court, the losing side is likely to appeal once again. That prompted one Bush adviser, Representative Bill McCollum of Florida, to say on CNN that it may be ''inevitable'' that the US Supreme Court would have to deal with the question of whether hand counting should be allowed.
Despite all the talk about the urgency of the hand recount, there was little action in the counties yesterday. In Palm Beach County, election officials, hunkered down in the hurricane-proof emergency operations center, suspended the recount before it was scheduled to begin yesterday at 7 a.m. They were waiting for a ruling from circuit court Judge Jorge Labarga on whether they should count ballots with dimpled chads.
Labarga, the sixth judge to be appointed to the case after others recused themselves, ruled that nonperforated but dimpled rectangular holes on the ballots could not be categorically excluded from the county's final tally.
''No vote is to be declared invalid or void if there was a clear intention of the voter,'' Labarga said after a 90-minute hearing in West Palm Beach. ''The present policy utilized by the local election officials restricts the canvassing board's ability to determine the intent of the voter.''
Democrats, who hoped the ruling would allow county officials to quickly commence the hand count, expect that thousands of previously rejected ballots to now be seen as intended for Gore.
''I would describe this as a tremendous victory,'' said Greg Barnhart, a lawyer who filed the suit for the Florida Democratic Party. ''The judge granted exactly the relief which we sought. ... There was an inequity, and he corrected that.''
Still, the recount in Palm Beach remained in its two-day limbo. The three elected officials voted to wait until this afternoon for the conclusion of a Republican appeal of the ruling before moving ahead with the recount.
In Fort Lauderdale, Broward County's canvassing board reversed its previous stance on whether to conduct a countywide recount and granted a request by Gore's campaign for a full hand recount of its 588,000 ballots. Two Democrats on the board outvoted one Republican.
As Republicans went to court to block the recount, Broward joined Palm Beach in submitting a petition to the state Supreme Court for clarification of its position on recounts. The heavily Democratic county began its recount at 2 p.m. yesterday; the counting is expected to continue until Monday.
The recount in Broward is being conducted by 12 four-person teams; in Palm Beach there are 50 two-person teams. A Republican and Democratic observer will monitor each group.
Earlier in the day, Republicans contended that Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts had illegally manipulated ballots Saturday during a sample hand recount of ballots from four precincts.
Roberts approved several ballots displaying only minor indentations while refusing to count ballots with partially punched holes, according to a letter to the canvassing board from a Republican lawyer, James Higgins. Republicans asked her to step down.
Refusing, Roberts insisted she has been ''fair and impartial.''
Meanwhile, as the hearing at the Palm Beach County Courthouse began, Labarga disclosed that he had served on the county's GOP executive committee and was a former president of the Cuban-American Republican Club. He also said he had attended rallies for Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican presidential nominee. Despite his partisan political past, he promised it would not prevent him from fairly hearing several recently filed election-related lawsuits.
Tomorrow, he will hear arguments about the legality of the now-notorious ''butterfly'' ballot and whether it's possible for there to be a revote in Palm Beach County.
