to change the way they report on election night. Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up roadblocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election. The Voting Section of the U. S. Department of Justice later investigated reports from the Tallahassee and Tampa areas and concluded that there was no evidence that roadblocks were related to the election or had occurred in close proximity to voting places. On November 8, Florida Division of Elections staff prepared a press release for Secretary of State Katherine Harris that said overseas ballots must be "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day. It was never released. Harris did send out a letter saying that absentee ballots without postmarks must be discarded, but Florida's Attorney General subsequently said they should not be. On November 13, Harris issued her first statement on overseas ballots, saying that they had to be "executed" on or before Election Day, not "postmarked on or prior to" Election Day. Over Thanksgiving, 14 county boards decided to include 288 overseas ballots that had been rejected days earlier, an act that was dubbed the Thanksgiving stuffing. On November 14, Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo on how to challenge flawed ballots, including overseas ballots cast by members of the military. The Herron memo gave postmark and "point of origin" criteria that Herron maintained could be used to challenge overseas ballots. It was in line with a letter sent out by Harris stating that if a postmark was not present on an overseas ballot, it had to be thrown out. Meanwhile, Republicans relied on their own 52-page manual for the same purpose. But on November 19, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore supporter, later told the counties to reconsider those ballots without a postmark. Before that, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce postmark requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots from overseas, which were predominantly for Bush. In contrast, Republicans pursued a strategy of disqualifying overseas ballots in counties that favored Gore and pressuring elections officials to include flawed overseas ballots in