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 deadline, I mean something like five or ten minutes.

M: [It was] no more than ten minutes.

P: So, you immediately sent in your returns.

M: Well, here's what happened. It was interesting. Katherine Harris sent us a letter
 on her letterhead, I forget if it was sent by mail or by fax, but it was a letter signed
 by her on her letterhead. [The letter said], we will send a representative to
 DeLand, and this representative has authority to accept your certified results.
 The date and time of the receipt by our representative in DeLand will be noted on
 the papers that you hand to our representative, and this will be deemed to be a
 timely filing in Tallahassee. We had a letter from Katherine Harris to that effect,
 and sure enough, on the last day of the recount, this very nicely dressed young
 man came in and he told me who he was. I said, I need to see some
 identification. He showed me his identification, and I was satisfied that he was
 who he said he was. The news media wanted to see it, so we had a ceremony of
 sorts, with all the cameras flashing and all the TV stations filming. I was standing
 in one location, and directly opposite from me, about five or six feet away, was
 the secretary of state's representative, and between the two of us, facing all the
 news media, were the other two members of the canvassing board. I said, are
 we ready? So, I handed it out and I held it there for about a minute or minute
 and a half while all of this filming is going on. I said, I'm going to let go now, and
 he held it. I said, let the record show that the time is, I think it was five minutes
 before five.

P: But you had actually finished a little earlier. You knew you were going to make
 that deadline.

M: I would say by mid-afternoon on the last day we realized we were going to make
 it, but just barely.

P: Of the four counties that were challenged by Gore for recount, you were the only
 one who got your recount in on time. Could you have done it had you had Vote-
 a-matic machines, punch card machines, or if there had been [more ballots to
 count]? Volusia, obviously, is the smallest of the four counties, so you didn't
 have as many votes to recount.

M: I doubt it, because I saw on television hearings of the holes in the IBM cards,
 dimpled chads, and hanging chads, and pregnant chads. I mean, to me it was
 ridiculous.

P: So, it turns out Deanie Lowe had gotten the county to pay for these optical scan
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