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Sunday November 12 2:35 AM ET Fla. Orders Countywide Recount

By KARIN MEADOWS, Associated Press Writer

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Palm Beach County officials ordered an extraordinary countywide recount, by hand, of the more than 425,000 votes cast in the presidential election for Al Gore (news - web sites) and George W. Bush (news - web sites).

Gore added 36 votes and Bush lost three in a machine recount of Palm Beach County in Florida's disputed presidential balloting. A hand count of selected precincts turned up enough errors in the election night vote to prompt county election officials to order a complete recount by hand. The vote was 2-1.

Election officials said their exhaustive manual recount found numerous differences from the machine count. Palm Beach County official Carol Roberts said the errors point to potentially 1,900 errors county wide - more than the total margin between Bush and Gore statewide.

At stake is no less than the presidency, since Florida will deliver 25 electoral votes.

The new machine tabulation, the third in this populous Democratic-leaning county, gave Gore 269,732 vote, or an add of 36 votes, and Bush 152,951, or minus three.

County election officials will meet again Monday to discuss further action. It was not clear when the labor intensive examination of ballots in all 531 precincts would begin.

``This clearly would affect the national vote,'' said Carol Roberts, a county commissioner and a member of the canvassing commission.

County Judge Charles Burton said that he wanted to obtain an advisory opinion from the secretary of state before proceeding with a hand count.

A lawyer for the Republican Party (news - web sites), Mark Wallace, objected to a further manual recount.

``It has been pandemonium today,'' he said. ``We vigorously lodge our protest and plead with you not to put the county through that.''

-- (get@the.news), November 12, 2000

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-- (in@the.news), November 12, 2000.