Three Palm Beach voters sued late Wednesday to force another vote in the county, alleging that the badly designed ballot was illegal and caused Democrats to cast their votes for Buchanan when they were trying to vote for Vice President Al Gore. Even Buchanan jumped into the fray Thursday, telling NBC's "Today" that "it seems to me that these 3,000 votes people are talking about -- most of those are probably not my vote and that may be enough to give the margin to Mr. Gore." Shortly after, a federal judge agreed to hold an emergency hearing on the lawsuit Thursday afternoon.

At the end of the day Wednesday, the Palm Beach County mystery deepened when it was reported that over 19,000 ballots were nullified for having more than one hole punched for a presidential candidate.

It's hard to imagine that liberal Palm Beach County, with its many Jewish voters, would turn out to be a Buchanan bastion. Buchanan is widely considered to harbor anti-Semitic sentiments, once praising Adolf Hitler as "an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him." He has also written admiringly of Nazi Germany's efforts to counter the Soviet threat.

In 1992, the Anti-Defamation League charged that Buchanan had shown "a disregard or hostility toward those not like him and a consequent displeasure with the exercise of freedom by these others ... [a] displeasure expressed in a 30-year record of intolerance unmatched by any other mainstream political figure."

But where Buchanan earned three-tenths of 1 percent of the votes Florida cast for president, he drew eight-tenths of a percent of the presidential vote in Palm Beach County.

Gore's team dispatched a delegation of 50 workers to Florida to monitor the recount and to investigate the many reports of polling problems. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher headed to Tallahassee to monitor the vote recount for the Democrats, while his Republican counterpart, James Baker, secretary of state in the Bush administration, performed the same duty for the Republicans.

The notion that a state led by Bush's brother Jeb holds the key to the election is a twist out of fiction, and raised intense concerns about the fairness of the election. The network's flip-flopping predictions about the Florida outcome throughout Election Night further heightened the mystery. Gov. Jeb Bush recused himself from responsibility for the recount. Meanwhile, Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat and close Gore advisor, took a leading role in focusing attention on the alleged voting irregularities. Political analysts pointed to recent cases of rampant electoral corruption in Florida, including the last mayoral race in Miami, raising the possibility that the state's presidential vote may also have been sullied.

At the end of the day Wednesday, Bush's margin over Gore in Florida had fallen to a mere 790 votes, as Palm Beach County's recount added nearly 1,000 votes to Gore's tally.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson flew to Miami early Wednesday and led a rally to protest possible voter fraud and intimidation. Democrats received reports that African-American voters were harassed by police in Wakulla County. "Highway Patrol troopers were stationed outside of those precincts with lights flashing and ticketing people," Florida Democratic Party chairman Bob Poe told ABCNews.com. "It was bizarre; it was like going back into the early 1900s," he said.

Other complaints focused on Volusia County, where Democrats complained that Gore's vote count dipped by 10,000 at one point, inexplicably.

But the most explosive complaints came from Palm Beach County, where officials said that Democratic votes that inadvertently went to Buchanan could provide the margin of victory for Gore.

"You look at ballots where people voted straight Democratic tickets, except that they voted for Pat Buchanan, and that tells you something is wrong," said state Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton. Klein said he had been assigned by the Gore-Lieberman organization to monitor the recount at the Palm Beach County Elections Department.

"You also have votes that were disqualified because people voted twice for the presidency. That also indicates that people were confused. This could be of such magnitude that legal action could be called for." He said that Democrats might seek a court order from a federal judge that would lead to repolling in the district.

Klein had no firm numbers for how many ballots might have been affected or if it would be enough to change the outcome in Florida and the awarding of its decisive 25 electoral votes. Absentee ballots arriving from outside the country could also affect the final balance.

Republicans branded the polling controversy a ruse. Victorious GOP Rep. Mark Foley said the Buchanan vote tally, only 0.8 percent of votes cast in the county, was not particularly high. He said that in his Florida district race, the Reform Party candidate had drawn 2,651 votes, indicating more Reform Party voters than anticipated. But Democratic county commissioner Bert Aaronson disagreed.

"I don't think we have 3,000 Nazis in Palm Beach County," he said, referring to the Buchanan votes.

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