In a presidential race filled with quirks, suspense and intrigue enough to fill several lifetimes, nowhere has the story been weirder than here, in the heart of the Volusia triangle.

First, the county's ballot-counting machine crashed momentarily on Election Night, but not before a computer glitch showed a Socialist Party candidate had more than 9,000 votes, while Vice President Al Gore had minus 16,000. Those numbers were sent out over the Internet, picked up by local newspapers and subsequently reported by major networks on Election Night.

The socialist eventually ended up with 9 votes in the county, and Gore with 97,063 to George W. Bush's 82,214. But the Volusia numbers were among the first signs that something strange was going on in the state of Florida on Election Night.

Then, during Wednesday's recount, a forgotten ballot bag emerged from a county poll worker's trunk. County election officials had such a bad week that they agreed with Democrats' requests for the first countywide hand count, to try to mask their public relations nightmare.

But in their efforts to clean up their act, Volusia stumbled once again. On Friday, as the county unlocked its vaults to retrieve its 200,000 or so ballots to begin the count, live television cameras rolled as three ballot bags emerged from the vaults without their tamper-proof seals intact.

"This manual recount process had nothing to do with any lack of confidence of the unofficial totals as they stand right now," insists county spokesman Dave Byron. "But [county election officials] felt that because this issue is so, so important to the public, it would be appropriate to take this extraordinary step so that when this process is completed, there will be absolutely no question whatsoever about what the total in Volusia County is."

Now the hand count itself is in the center of the race's latest political fire storm. Early Saturday, former Secretary of State James Baker announced the Bush campaign had filed an injunction to prevent hand counts of ballots because they were "subject to a host of risks."

Byron clearly didn't relish picking a fight with Baker. Asked if the hand count will give him a more accurate tally than the machine count, he qualified his answer. "I think the answer to that is probably yes in the sense that what you have is the ability to engage the intent of the voter. You have the eyes and ears of the [county employees] to make that decision."

But he quickly added that he did "not at all expect the hand count to result in any significant change" from the original electronically generated numbers. So even in their attempt at a goodwill gesture, Byron and Volusia once again found themselves on the defensive.

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The Democratic Party asked for the hand count during Volusia's first recount, which yielded the same result as the election night tally, because officials merely replaced the memory cards back into the tabulating machines and reprinted the results from the original vote. It was only after the public relations disaster in the county this week that Volusia granted the Democrats' request for a total manual recount.

Now, county officials are under extreme pressure to finish the recount before Tuesday at 5 p.m., the deadline for all Florida counties to finish their tallies. If they do not meet the deadline, individual members of the state election commission will face stiff fines from the state.

To meet that deadline, Volusia has put more than 300 employees on "hurricane duty," which allows county employees from outside the election division to do election work. They will be counting ballots around the clock until all 200,000 some ballots are recounted, one by one. "This is just like any other natural disaster," Byron says. It is unclear if he is being ironic.

Clearly, Dave Byron is having a bad week. Not as bad as the Democratic election supervisor who approved the Palm Beach butterfly ballot, Theresa LaPore. But he is showing scars from being battered by the press and pols alike.

When asked about the mysterious vote totals, Byron says, "I'm glad you asked that," a look of aggravation on his face. "This has been a story on the national level that has been very, very inaccurately reported," he said. "It's been the genie I can't get back in the bottle." Byron says it was a simple computer glitch that did not affect the actual internal vote total, just the projections that were sent out to the rest of the world.

So while the Republican and Democratic brain trusts huddle in Tallahassee, and Democratic protesters focus on Palm Beach County, Volusia serves as a third front in the battle for Florida, a remote outpost on the state's East Coast which is fast becoming an abbreviation for political incompetence.

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