They prowled the room vigilantly — hovering together, leaning toward the recount tables and whispering in small circles.
He and the other observers and lawyers just kept watching as the three county officials at each of the eight recount tables, cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape, patiently went through stacks of ballots.
In Hastings, observers for both leading candidates -- Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican, and Al Franken, the Democratic challenger -- were hovering, leaning, and whispering in small circles behind the yellow "caution" tape around eight recount tables.
And at the recount tables in South Florida, Democratic observers have repeatedly accused their Republican counterparts of raising objections to the tiniest details -- a pencil mark here, an overfilled bubble there -- as a way to manufacture the very chaos they are now condemning.
Although Mr. Smitten acknowledges the help of surviving members of the Livermore family, their contributions appear to have been limited to recounting dinner-table tales and settling old scores.
Tears flowed on occasion as he sat at his dining room table recounting the details of his case in a two-hour interview.
Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, who for much of her career was used to being the only woman at the table, recounted at a conference at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin last month how she walked into a Pentagon meeting where there wasn't a single man.
The dramatic film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) recounted the Round Table from the perspective of Dorothy Parker.
"He has this laptop on the table," Melton recounted over the phone.
"I always thought it was a little miracle that there would always be a paper on the table," Thomson recounted in a 2009 speech to the American Australian Association.
