ent. Bush was preparing to announce key roles in his administration. Gore noted that the Constitution "awards the presidency to the Electoral College winner, not necessarily the leading vote-getter." Except the Vice President's aides were privately making the case that Gore's popular-vote lead gives him standing to contest the recount if state officials overlook voting irregularities. (5)
             Aware that early exit polls showed Florida neck and neck, Democratic National Committee officials took their own initiative. They instructed a Texas-based telemarketing firm called teleQuest to phone voters in Palm Beach and alert them to the issue. "Some voters have encountered problems today with punch-card ballots in Palm Beach County," the callers' script read. "If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole... you should return to the polls and request that election officials write down you name so that this problem can be fixed." The call ended this way: "Do you believe that you may have voted for the wrong candidate for president?" (3) Once the Gore team learned about the nineteen thousand double-punched ballots in Palm Beach County, they redoubled their efforts to find evidence of any other irregularities in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Volusia counties. Their goal: hand counts. The Gore team got most of what they asked for. That included a manual count in four precincts in Palm Beach, which the Democrats hoped would put Gore at leastin the lead temporarily, and ultimately force an examination of all the county's spoiled ballots. They were given a similar recount in three precincts in Broward, where they believed some six thousand ballots had "hanging chad." (3) More than a thousand Palm Beach Democratic voters gathered to complain that the ballot was so confusing that it tainted the results of the presidential race. Many of t...