A circuit judge rejected GOP requests to set standards in Dade for ballot review and to search garbage cans for chads - scraps of paper that are dislodged when a ballot is punched. In Broward County, all ballots with dimpled chads or just one corner of the chad detached are set aside to be reviewed by the canvassing board after all the other ballots are counted. Officials finished counting ballots not in dispute last night, and Gore had gained 118 votes on Bush. Senior Republicans and Democrats said Gore could net another 500 or so votes in Broward alone if the dimpled ballots are allowed. Fla. - Senior Democratic strategists said yesterday that Vice President Al Gore could not win the presidency without votes from ballots on which no holes were punched for a presidential candidate.
Democrats say the dimples indicate the voter's intended selection.
But without those indented ballots, several senior Democratic strategists said, it would be nearly impossible for Gore to gain enough votes to erase Gov. George W. Bush's 930-vote lead in Florida and win its decisive 25 electoral votes. Two weeks after Election Day, Gore campaign officials are still methodically projecting how votes will be counted and have tabulated the number of dimpled ballots that have been set aside by the canvassing boards in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. But in its response, the Bush campaign said the justices did not have the power under law to rule on the standards for counting ballots. The court, in its ruling last night, set no standards for how to count partly punched ballots. And based on their review of disputed ballots in Palm Beach County, whose recount is about 70 percent complete, they said they could gain at least 297 votes there.