11/22/00 11:35 a.m.
Highway Robbery
They are burglars.

By Stephen F. Hayes, a writer living in Washington, D.C.

hey are burglars. But they are the bumbling, drop-your-wallet-at-the-scene kind.

Al Gore's attorney David Boies emerged this morning to celebrate most of the Florida supreme court's decision. But he lamented the Sunday deadline, once again raising the specter of "disenfranchised" voters.

He was — and not for the first time — full of it. The deadline clearly works in the Gore campaign's favor, and Miami-Dade County's heavy-handed decision this morning to consider only the undercounted, challenged ballots gives their game away.

Here's why: If a dimpled chad counts as a vote on the undervoted ballots — those ballots where no presidential hole has been punched, even partially — a dimpled chad must also count as a vote on all other ballots. A vote, as several astute readers have pointed out to me, is a vote.

So to be consistent, election workers would have to start over, scrutinizing even the cleanly punched ballots for dimpled chads or other marks that might indicate voter intent. If a voter punched through the hole for Al Gore, for example, but also registered an indentation — a vote — for George W. Bush, then neither candidate must receive a vote. Upon finding any ballots for which one candidate receives a clean vote another in the same race gets a dimpled chad they must disqualify it as an overvote.

But the deadline Mr. Boies whined about effectively prevents this from happening. Miami-Dade County's Democratic elections officials — perhaps emboldened by two weeks of Democratic trashing of the law with complete immunity — this morning ruled this morning that its cavassing board was, in fact, skipping the entire recount and moving quickly to review only the undercounted ballots. The deadline, you see. "If dimpled ballots don't count, it's over," a top Gore adviser told the New York Times. True enough. But if dimpled ballots really count, then it could also be over.

The Gore strategy is simple: Dimpled ballots only count on undervotes. They count in no other context. And Gore recount spokeswoman Tricia Enright makes this clear.

"If there is only one indentation, it is likely that the voter intended to vote for that particular candidate. I find it hard to believe that most folks went in into the voting booth with no plans to vote for president," she said.

I find it hard to believe that Ms. Enright kept from bursting out laughing as she made her comments. Why can she divine voter intent "if there is only one indentation?" Does she anticipate the very objection I'm making, and set up a response in which they argue — again with a straight face — that some dimples count and others do not?

There are some 27,000 undervotes to be counted in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. Broward County officials had already completed the manual recount and were preparing to revisit thousands of "challenged" undervoted ballots. And in Palm Beach County, where the "recount" is about 70 percent complete, officials are awaiting a circuit court ruling on which votes count.

But if the Gore campaign has its way, dimpled chads will rule.

Sometimes.