DELAND, Fla. — Volusia County workers Monday finished a manual recount of all but absentee votes among 184,000 presidential ballots that could tip a U.S. presidential election poised on a razor's edge.
All local precincts had been recounted and workers were counting about 30,000 absentee ballots, county officials said.
The county, on the central Atlantic coast and home of the Daytona International Speedway, began its hand recount Sunday and appeared likely to be the only one of Florida's four contested counties to finish its work before the secretary of state's 5 p.m. deadline Tuesday for certifying results.
Although much of the nation's attention was focused elsewhere — in a federal court in Miami, a recount in Palm Beach County and the Florida secretary of state's office in the capital Tallahassee — it was the mid-sized county of Volusia that was first to undertake the laborious hand recount.
"It was the right thing to do," said County Judge Michael McDermott, chairman of the three-member canvassing board that must certify the vote and act on questionable ballots, such as ones with write-in votes for Jesse Ventura and Jesus Christ.
McDermott said the county government was pressing ahead with a lawsuit challenging the state's Tuesday deadline, even though Volusia was likely to complete its recount on Monday. The Gore campaign Monday joined the county's lawsuit.
"The secretary of state, a crony of the Bush brothers, is trying to steal this election away and no one is going to stand for such a naked political act," Gore communications director Mark Fabiani said.
"One never knows what problems may come up. We've had some surprises and most have been unpleasant," McDermott said in his explanation of why the county was asking for an extension.
The county seat of DeLand is like a postcard from small-town America, but there is also a history of election-day shenanigans in a county was once ruled by machine politicians and the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1996 a sheriff's race was thrown into court after the handpicked deputies of the incumbent, losing as the precincts closed, where allowed to "darken-in" ovals on ballots that might have been too light to be counted. After a machine recount, the Republican sheriff kept his job."
There were problems with this election, too - a computer error that took 16,000 votes from Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore at one point, bags of ballots left unsealed and one kept out overnight by an poll worker.
From the first whiff of controversy, McDermott took control of the process from the elected supervisor of elections, who has largely remained in the background. McDermott ordered that every contested ballot be witnessed by both Democratic and Republican party officials.
The canvassing board, which is two-thirds Republican, was the first in the state to authorize a hand recount.