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"Im with the Bush-Cheney team, and Im here to stop the numerate."Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a capital of Florida library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were narrateing ballots cast in Floridas disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al bloodletting.Bolton was one of the ring of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the states electoral votes and the presidency.The Dec. 9 intervention was Boltons drop dead and most significant blow against the democratic process.The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a broad recount of ballots in order to finally resolve the forefront of who won the state. But Bolton and the Bush-Cheney team got their Republican allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to block the review. Fearing that each minute of additional counting would reveal t he realism of voter sentiments in Florida, Bolton personally rushed into the library to stop the count.Bolton was in South Korea when it became clear that the Nov. 7, 2000, election would be decided in Florida. At the behest of spring Secretary of State James Baker, who fronted the Bush-Cheney team during the Florida fight, Bolton winged his way to Palm Beach, where he took the lead in challenging ballots during that countys recount. Then, when the ballots from around the state were transported to Tallahassee for the recount ordered by the state Supreme Court, Bolton followed them.It was there that he personally shut down the review of ballots from Miami-Dade County, a populous and particularly contested county where fencesitter reviews would later reveal that hundreds of ballots that could reasonably have been counted for Gore were instead discarded.Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy argued at the time that 2,257 voters had apparently attempted to mark ballot car ds for Gore or Bush but had not had them recorded because they had been improperly inserted into the voting machines. A hand count of those ballots revealed that 302 more of them would have gone for Gore than Bush. That call forth in the numbers from just one of Floridas 67 counties would have erased more than half of Bushs 537-vote lead in the state.But attempts to conduct a hand count were repeatedly blocked by the Bush-Cheney team, culminating with Boltons Dec. 9 announcement, "Im here to stop the count.