Seesaw battle too close to call

  The Associated Press Vice President Al
Gore (left) and Texas Gov. George W. Bush
await results of the elections, which were too close to call.

By David Drucker and Michael
Falcone
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Texas Gov. George W. Bush appeared to defeat Vice President Al
Gore in dramatic fashion Tuesday night to become the 43rd President
of the United States.

But Gore scored an 11th hour reprieve when it became apparent
that a definitive winner could not be determined due to the
differential in vote returns as compared to the number of ballots
left to count.

At press time, the Republican candidate was reported to have a
224 vote lead over his Democratic rival in the Sunshine State.

Early today Gore called Bush to concede the race, but less than
an hour later, the vice president made a second call to the
governor, retracting that concession.

Between the time of the two calls, Gore arrived in his motorcade
at War Memorial in Nashville where he was to give either an
acceptance or concession speech, but neither Gore nor his running
mate Joe Lieberman ever made it to the podium.

At about 12:45 a.m. ABC News reported the New York Times stopped
presses and minutes later the Washington Post did the same. Both
had printed a headline that indicated a Bush win.

Just after 1 a.m. Daley addressed a crowd of supporters
congregated outside the War Memorial.

“It now appears that their call on Florida was
premature,” he said.

“Let me be very clear about this. According to the
information supplied by the secretary of state of Florida there is
a margin of only about 1,200 votes of millions cast . Over 5,000
are left to be counted,” Daley said.”

Daley said under Florida state law, there would be an automatic
vote recount.

“This race has come down to the state of Florida,”
Daley said. “Vice president Gore and Sen. Lieberman are fully
prepared to concede and support Governor Bush if and when he is
elected president.

“But our campaign continues,” he added.

Minutes after Daley’s brief statement the Cable News
Network reported that Florida election officials said they still
needed to count overseas absentee ballots, which could take up to
10 days to count.

Meanwhile, Don Evans, close friend of the governor and chairman
of the Bush campaign, made a brief statement expressing his
confidence that the Texas governor would prevail.

“We hope and have every reason to believe that Governor
Bush is the next President of the United States.”

The evening ended in large part the same way it began. At 5
p.m., it was reported that Gore won Florida and its 25 Electoral
College votes.

A candidate must win enough states to compile at least 270
electoral votes in to win the White House.

After media projected a victory in Florida for Gore, the vice
president added victories in the key battleground states of
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois ““ all three with a total
of 63 electoral votes. And with Democratic strongholds California
(54 electoral votes) and New York (33 votes) looming on the
horizon, it looked to be a long night for Bush.

At 6:55 p.m. CNN announced Florida was still in play, and put it
back into the “too close to call” category, and other
news outlets followed suit.

From then on the two candidates engaged in an electoral
tug-of-war that lasted over 4 hours, the likes of which has not
been seen since the election of 1876, when Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes beat Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by a single electoral
vote.

Both CNN and ABC reported unconfirmed allegations that some
voters in Florida may have mismarked their ballots, accidentally
voting for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Gore.

Although electoral cliff-hangers are rare, some believe
adjusting the electoral college system, if not outright doing away
with it, is something that should be looked at.

“I’m not sure you can make a moral case for the
electoral college system,” said School of Public Policy and
Social Research professor Andy Sabl, who studies American Political
institutions.

“If the purpose of democracy is to provide one vote to
every citizen, then maybe we should look at having a system that
actually works that way.”

By 2 a.m. today the Associated Press reported Bush had won 246
electoral votes compared to the 244 held by Gore.