With George W. Bush possibly sustaining a lead of fewer than 400 votes after last week's statewide recount, the outcome in Florida, and thus the nation, has shifted to the most low-tech of fronts. Everything hinges on the absentee votes still drifting in from abroad, which are not expected to be fully counted until this Friday. Even more important, because they could easily reverse Bush's narrow lead, are the manual recounts that have been approved by local electoral commissions in Palm Beach, Broward and Volusia counties.

A commission in Miami-Dade was supposed to meet this week to consider a Democratic request for a hand count there as well. But on Saturday, as the tedious process was beginning elsewhere, the Bush campaign asked a federal judge in South Florida to disqualify manual counts anywhere in the state and certify the recount already completed. Democrats quickly put out word that Bush had liked hand counts in Texas. Three years ago, he signed a law recommending them to settle disputed votes.

Both parties had been saying for weeks that the presidential campaign would all come down to Florida. Neither of them suspected how much of it would come down to Palm Beach County. Or to the experience of people like Andre Fladell, 52, a Jewish chiropractor. At around 7 a.m., he punched his ballot at Orchard Elementary School in Delray Beach. On the way out, when he heard people complain that the ballot had confused them, he assumed they had not paid enough attention. But at lunch later with friends, Fladell says, he broke into a cold sweat when he heard them describe the correct punch hole for Gore-Lieberman. Fladell realized that he too had inadvertently voted for Pat Buchanan, a man who has had, to put it mildly, some problems with Jewish voters. "A ballot is supposed to lead me to my vote," says Fladell, who is now a plaintiff in one of several lawsuits seeking to invalidate the Palm Beach vote. "This one led me away."

Frustration with the Palm Beach ballot had begun to go public even before the polls closed. At the Lucerne Point residence community, poll workers were so overwhelmed by complaints that they had to draw a diagram showing where each ticket's punch hole was located. Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County election supervisor who had signed off on the ballot design, soon arranged for a flyer to be distributed at polling places around the county that would help voters decipher it. LePore, a Democrat, told reporters that day that she had favored the design partly because it permitted larger type that was easier for older voters to read.

Around 4 p.m., Democratic National Committee officials put in an urgent call to TeleQuest, a Texas-based telemarketing firm, asking it to call thousands of Palm Beach voters to alert them to the complications on the ballot. Two hours later the company's phone clerks began making the first of some 5,000 calls. A TeleQuest spokesman said afterward almost half the people contacted thought they might have made a mistake when they voted.

"I don't think people understand the complexity of Florida," says Republican Lieutenant Governor Frank Brogan. "You can't take anything for granted about this state." Certainly not the electoral map. Over the past decade, the political power of Miami's conservative Cuban Americans has been challenged by an influx of non-Cuban Latinos who lean toward the Democrats. Non-Latino Democrats in the southern end of the state are balanced by white Republicans in the northern Panhandle, while myriad new immigrant groups have allegiances that are still up for grabs. Dario Moreno, a political scientist at Miami's Florida International University, points out that the mix was not usually inflammatory - "as long as lightning didn't strike."

Lightning was striking everywhere by the early evening of Election Day, as hundreds of optimistic state Republicans gathered to watch the returns in the grand ballroom of the Doubletree Hotel in Tallahassee. When the networks first awarded Florida to Gore, around 7:50 p.m., the party mood deflated fast. In an upstairs suite, the state's usually boisterous Republican leaders were thunderstruck. "There was dead silence," says Brogan. "It didn't seem possible." Al Cardenas, the state's GOP chairman, was frantically checking returns on a laptop that showed Bush ahead in the few precincts that had reported. Knowing that the loss of Florida could discourage Republicans from bothering to vote in Western states, where the polls were still open, Cardenas put in the first of what would be more than 20 calls that night to Florida governor Jeb Bush in Austin, Texas, who was following returns on his laptop.

Even some Florida Democratic officials were surprised by the early awarding of the state to Gore. One explanation was that initial exit polls had been skewed by an early and especially large turnout of African-American voters for Gore. In the end, they would account for more than 16 percent of the state's overall vote, almost double the usual black vote. Less than an hour after the network announcement, the Republican response began to take shape. Brogan and the other officials in his suite went downstairs to the ballroom to announce that they had serious doubts about the networks' projections. "We didn't believe Florida was over," he says.

It wasn't. A few hours later the networks had taken the state away from Gore and given it to Bush - along with the presidency. MORE>>

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