Votes

CLEVELAND -- Vice President Al Gore and Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp each appealed to minority voters yesterday -- pushing conflicting views of how best to improve the economic condition of U.S. cities.Gore, touring a gritty neighborhood here that is the site of one of the Clinton administration's "empowerment zones," argued in favor of targeted government assistance to help bring economic development to poor neighborhoods and warned that Republican policies would make matters worse.

WASHINGTON -- For weeks, the feverish guessing game had focused on whether a swing group of as many as a half-dozen Republican senators might buck their colleagues and side with Democrats in trying to end or truncate the impeachment trial against President Clinton.But when it came time for those pivotal votes yesterday, only one politician broke party ranks, and that maverick turned out to be a Democrat, Sen. Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin.Like all of his Republican colleagues but none of his fellow Democrats, Feingold, one of the Senate's most earnest and independent thinkers, opposed a motion to dismiss charges against Clinton and supported a motion to take depositions from three witnesses.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton rolled over essentially token opposition in presidential primaries in Pennsylvania yesterday and moved a step closer to a head-to-head confrontation in the general election Nov. 3.Mr. Clinton defeated former Gov. Jerry Brown of California by what appeared to be a margin impressive enough to give the Arkansas governor a strong case to make when he flies to Washington today to seek the support of uncommitted "superdelegates" from the Senate and House.

Setting aside allegations that his lewd and sexist remarks make John S. Arnick unfit to be a judge, a state Senate committee voted 14-4 yesterday to recommend that the former delegate be confirmed for a full 10-year term on the Baltimore County District Court bench.After a tense week and an extraordinary four-hour hearing, the Executive Nominations Committee concluded that one night's mistake should not ruin a man's long and successful career in public service.The vote came after Mr. Arnick said he could not recall precisely what he had said during a dinner conversation a year ago with two female lobbyists.

During Thursday night's gubernatorial debate, Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend rattled off a litany of past votes meant to dress Republican Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. as a staunch conservative who only lately has put on a moderate outfit. "The fact is you have a very conservative record," Townsend, the Democratic nominee, told him. "It doesn't make you a bad person. It just makes you a bad governor of Maryland." Ehrlich countered that Townsend was slippery with the facts. "You know how easy it is to take a vote out of context," he said.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - University of Maryland men's basketball coach Gary Williams got what he expected yesterday at the Atlantic Coast Conference Operation Basketball preseason event. Williams figured the Terps, who feature five newcomers and 11 players with no more than one year of experience, would be pegged by the league's media members to end up in the middle of the ACC pack. Maryland got 271 votes, good for a projected fifth-place finish, marking the lowest spot since 1993, when the Terps were picked to finish eighth.

Former state trooper Norman R. Cochran hung on to his narrow lead in the race for the Republican sheriff's nomination last week and will take less than a quarter of the total votes cast into a tough matchup in the general election. Cochran is likely to face an uphill battle against Democrat L. Jesse Bane and might have made his bid more difficult by not attending the final deputies union meeting before its members decide whom to support in the general election. Since its inception in 1989, the union has backed every successful candidate for sheriff.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The instant-replay proponents aren't going to take no for an answer.Minutes after replay fell two votes shy by a 21-9 margin yesterday at the NFL owners meetings, Charley Casserly, the general manager of the Washington Redskins who has led the charge to bring back replay, said, "We'll be lobbying for Cleveland's vote next year."Cleveland will become the 31st team in the league next year.That guaranteed that replay will be back as an issue at next year's annual owners' meeting in Phoenix as its supporters keep trying to bring back some form of a system that was used from 1986 to 1991.

Virtually every segment of Maryland's old Democratic coalition, the president of the United States and some newly developed allies helped Gov. Parris N. Glendening to a second term.Glendening's victory over Republican challenger Ellen R. Sauerbrey was more decisive than expected and seems to have benefited from widespread unhappiness with the Republican Congress and its pursuit of President Clinton.Exit polling showed Glendening with nearly a 2-to-1 lead among voters who disapproved of Congress' performance.

WASHINGTON - Assuming that the Florida presidential vote is finally sorted out, the nation still won't know for sure until January who will become president. Congress, under the law, has the last word, and it could reject the outcome. The Constitution's 12th Amendment, controlling the Electoral College, and an 1887 federal law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes leave little doubt that the lawmakers may reject the presidential votes sent to it by the states. If the partisan feud over the choice of the next president continues even beyond a resolution in the potentially decisive state of Florida, either Democrats or Republicans could seek to nullify the result if it has not gone their way. If Florida cannot produce a winner of that state's electoral votes and does not vote in the Electoral College, that alone could prompt some in Congress to try to reject the Electoral College's choice of a president.