Over and over, reporters asked them which counties had not reported their recounts, what their position was on hand-counted ballots and what they would do if lawsuits were filed, and Ms. Harris and Mr. Roberts simply refused to answer.
And he's paying with a complex combination of hand-counted money and an arbitrary payment on his soon-to-be-declined card!
Mr. Kucinich's letter cited "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots".
But the result was all the same: disenfranchised voters, hand-counted ballots and delayed results.
"When is it going to end; I ask you, when is it going to end?" former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Mr. Bush's chief representative here, demanded this morning as he offered to drop his objections to including any hand-counted ballots and accept however many could be submitted by this evening if the Gore campaign would drop its effort to prolong the count.
If the federal court rejects the Bush campaign's argument, and if the Florida Supreme Court overrules the circuit court and orders that hand-counted ballots must be counted, things may get even more interesting.
In Texas, Mr. Bush was at his ranch, seemingly content to let lawyers and advisers direct the effort to have Ms. Harris disallow hand-counted ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties and certify a count more favorable to Mr. Bush.
The election overhaul will eliminate punch-card and hand-counted paper ballots.
In Iowa, the results changed when the party found that the totals of the hand-written and hand-counted ballots had been misreported in 131 of 1,774 precincts.
The narrower the vote margin, the more hand-counted ballots have to be pulled and counted according to this audit's formula.
Canvassing boards in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and other Florida counties hand-counted all or some of the undervotes, but the United States Supreme Court stopped a statewide hand count of undervotes, saying among other things that the standards used to count them differed too much from county to county.
