The As It Happens Files

by Mary Lou Finlay

  It so happened that I was in Washington on election day—November 7, 2000—having been sent there to anchor a news special for CBC Radio. The U.S. being the only superpower left standing after the Cold War and an economic behemoth to boot, elections there are watched with great interest all over the world—but especially in Canada, on the other side of what was at the time “the longest undefended border in the world.” Canada is to the United States as a mouse is to an elephant, our geographic expanse notwithstanding: 90 percent of our trade is with the U.S, and as the old adage goes, if someone sneezes in Washington, we get pneumonia, and so on. That’s why the CBC decided to mount a radio news special on election night.

  Since it was November, however (not the end of the fiscal year, when funds flow like Niagara for a few weeks), they didn’t want to spend any money, so the special would consist of me and a couple of guests in our Washington studio and would last just one half-hour, from 9:30 to 10:00 p.m.

  “What if the outcome isn’t decided by ten o’clock?” I wanted to know.

  “Doesn’t matter,” they said. “We can report later developments in the regular hourly newscasts.”

  To be honest, with my unerring political instincts, I was more concerned about the possibility of the election results being known well before we got to air, thus depriving us of any element of suspense—a ridiculous worry as it turned out.

  Shortly after the polls closed on the west coast, the Amnets (American TV networks) projected that George W. Bush would have enough votes to become the next president of the United States, and they declared him the winner. A few minutes later, though, they un-declared him, as their computers took Florida out of the “Bush” column and put it back under “Undecided,” the reason being that George Bush and Al Gore were virtually tied in Florida. In the rest of the country, they had already racked up an equal number of electoral votes, so Florida’s votes were critical.

  Lack of suspense was not going to be a problem. With Florida “back in play,” we now found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the most interesting U.S. election night since Dewey didn’t beat Truman. Unfortunately, on CBC Radio, our half-hour was up. I signed off and then hung around the National Press Building for a few more hours, watching late results trickle in and fetching coffee for my colleague Henry Champ, who remained on the air for CBC Newsworld. I was itching to be back on air, but we’d made no provision for a tie vote and there was no more “special” for radio that night. When I finally went to bed the next morning, most people still thought that Bush would prevail, including Al Gore, who phoned Bush to concede. Then Gore, too, did an about-face. When the Washington papers went to bed, all they could report was that they had a cliff hanger on their hands.

  And what a cliff hanger it turned out to be. My friend Laura Parker, a Washington-based print reporter, was in Seattle for a family funeral the day before the election; the day after the election, her boss called and told her to get herself to Florida—stat! She wound up not getting home again for seven weeks, barely finding a moment to buy clean underwear and a cotton shirt during that time.

  I went back to Toronto to follow the story from the As It Happens studio, where clean shirts were not a problem, although the pace of events sometimes had us sweating more than usual. No one seemed to know how to fix the “Florida problem.” Bush’s small margin of victory there made a recount in Florida inevitable, but when people started complaining that the voting machines hadn’t worked properly, that the process was too complicated for some voters, that ballots had been properly marked but not properly counted, that they’d been counted twice, or not at all, it was clear that a simple re-count wasn’t going to settle it. Batteries of lawyers descended on the Sunshine State. Legal challenges, court rulings, hourly press conferences and shifting poll results succeeded one another with dizzying speed. Water-cooler conversation everywhere was of dimpled ballots and hanging chad and pregnant chad. (Chad was what they called the bits of confetti-sized paper that got punched out of a ballot when you voted by machine; if it wasn’t completely punched out, it might be hanging or pregnant.)

  Some scenarios put Gore ahead by a few votes, others Bush. The story went from Broward County to Dade County, from Miami to Tallahassee, and from Florida to Washington and back. You couldn’t take your eyes off CNN or the wires for a second or you’d miss a new turn in the story.

  At As It Happens, we were having the time of our lives—especially Senior Producer Mark Ulster, who was a close observer of the American zeitgeist. Every night, just as we went to air, or just afterwards, a new judgment would come down from somewhere—Count! Don’t count!—and a new appeal launched somewhere else. We had to work overtime to keep the show from being dated as it moved across the country to B.C., but it was terrific fun.

  This excerpt from a conversation I had with Jeff Greenfield on November 22, 2000, may help you remember what it was like. Jeff was, and is, a political analyst for CNN, and that day he’d used the words “constitutional train wreck” to describe what awaited his country as George Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to shut down all hand re-counts in Florida, while the Florida Legislature threatened to make hand re-counts irrelevant by naming their own slate to the electoral college.

  ML: Mr. Greenfield, on CNN you used words like nuclear, unbelievable, constitutional train wreck. Is it getting that bad?

  JG: Those were understatements.

  ML: You were at a loss for words to describe the situation?

  JG: Well, I think what happens is that many of us who, institutionally, don’t like to hype stories—try to act restrained in most cases, because there is a tendency on television to bloviate and make everything amazing—really are now looking at the situation, and realism requires that you go to the thesaurus and find some of the more extravagant adjectives. We are getting closer and closer to a situation that this country has not faced since the election of 1876, and that is a humungous, bitter, fundamental clash in the Congress over the identity of the President under rules that literally nobody understands.

  So if that’s not a train wreck, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.

  ML: All right. You were speaking also last night about the possibility that the Florida Legislature would name its electoral slate—Republicans—and the Democrats would also send a group of electors to vote. Can that happen?

  JG: Well, the last time it happened that meant anything was 1876. In 1960, in Hawaii, two different slates of electors were sent because the vote was so close—Congress ultimately decided it was the Democrats—but in that election, it didn’t mean anything.

  ML: Right. What happened in 1876?

  JG: In 1876—surely we all remember this—Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, and Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, were in a close race. Four different states had disputed electors; four different states—including Florida, by the way—sent two slates of electors to Congress. They formed a special commission—no part of the Constitution, they just came up with this notion—and after a great deal of what is largely considered highly suspect horse trading, the Republicans got all of the contested electoral votes on a party-line vote, and historians tell us it was in return for promising the South that Reconstruction would end and that they could go back to racial supremacy.

  With that little historical footnote, it could happen, if the Florida Legislature decides that this process is either so mucked-up, so unfair or jeopardizes Florida’s electoral presence in the Congress, that they take it on themselves to assign electors. They have the power to do this under federal law, which is taken from the Constitution. Our system, basically, gives the state legislatures almost total power over the electoral vote.

  ML: Okay, then, flip that around: What would be the grounds for the Democrats saying, “Our electors are the valid ones”?

  JG: If the hand-counts come in and give Gore a plurality and, say, the state Attorney General says, “As the state’s legal officer, I find this is the right count, and the electors should be the De
mocrats,” the two slates could show up in Tallahassee. Presumably, the Republicans would meet in the official state chamber, because the Legislature is Republican; the Democrats would move over to some other office and somehow cast their votes. They’d be transmitted to the Congress, one by the Governor and Secretary of State, and the other by the Attorney General, and there you have two slates of electors. And then it’s fundamentally up to the Congress to figure out which slate it will accept. The only problem is there does not seem to be anyone who actually knows how this would happen. Presumably, both houses of Congress—

  ML: Would vote?

  JG:—would vote. That’s what happens when electors are challenged.

  We have one more wrinkle if you don’t think this is enough: If the current vote totals hold up, the Senate would be divided 50–50.

  ML: Because it’s the new Congress that would vote?

  JG: The new Congress meets January 5th or 6th—they haven’t figured that one out either. If you assume a partyline vote, and that’s not necessarily the case, the House would narrowly vote for the Republican slate, the Senate would be tied and then—you ask the logical question: “Well, could the Vice-President, who would still be Al Gore, break the tie?” Everyone I’ve talked to has given me the same answer: We’re not sure.

  ML: My goodness.

  JG: And by the way—

  ML: He would not be allowed to vote, surely.

  JG: Well, it’s not clear. He votes to break ties in every other situation.

  ML: But he wouldn’t still be—Oh, I guess he would still be the Vice-President.

  JG: Sure, he would. That’s the whole point. The new Congress convenes January 6th; his term expires January 20th. He is the Vice-President; he presides over that joint session that traditionally counts the electoral votes. So he’s there. But I actually bothered to talk to the historian of the Senate and said, “Well, you know, is this a ministerial function? Is it the kind of function you vote for on ties in legislation? What is it?”

  He said, “We don’t know. The 19th-century law that was passed after that Hayes-Tilden disaster doesn’t make this entirely clear.” There’s one other thing. Suppose the House says, “Okay, the Republican electors are the ones we recognize,” and the other House says, “No, the Democrats.” What happens then? We don’t know. Negotiation? Compromise?

  ML: Okay, now let me ask an up-to-the-minute—I think—question.

  JG: Have you looked at the TV yet? It could have changed.

  ML: Not in the last ten minutes. It’s changing by the minute, I know.

  Miami-Dade: last time I looked, the canvassing board had decided to stop the hand-count, because it did not believe it could meet the deadline set by the Supreme Court, which was Sunday night. Have I got that right?

  JG: Right. As of now, that’s right.

  ML: Without that vote, presumably Vice-President Gore doesn’t have a chance and they couldn’t send—

  JG: Not so fast.

  ML: Okay.

  JG: If Palm Beach County counts all those disputed ballots—those now infamous or famous dimpled ballots—and Broward County counts all the dimpled ballots, the Gore people think they just might catch up with those.

  ML: Oh, they might still count the dimpled ballots?

  JG: Well, we don’t know. The Supreme Court of Florida did not say yea or nay. They, in effect, said to the county boards, “Count.” The opinion that they cited, which comes from another state, seems to indicate—and I’m sorry to be so, you know, evasive, but it’s not evasive, this is the ambiguity we’re all in—seems to suggest you can count them.

  My sense is that if they do, that will only further ratchet up what I can only describe as the fury that the Republicans feel that this election is being taken from them and further encourage them to go nuclear—which is to say, name their slate of electors based on the state Legislature.

  This was more or less the tenor of most of our on-air conversations about the U.S. election. What really made it fun, I think, was the delicious irony of it: the world’s only superpower, the greatest democracy, the epitome of know-how and fairness and the rule of law, couldn’t figure out how to count votes. People from places like Guatemala and Ukraine were offering to send observers to help the Americans exercise democracy at home.

  And it went on and on. Months and even years later, we were still getting reports on the vote result in several Florida counties because some media organizations had got hold of the ballots and were determined to conduct the re-count that the U.S. Supreme Court had halted. We also started to take a look at the sorts of voting machines and systems in use around the country, and we were surprised to learn how many of them were prone to giving inaccurate results. The worst system of all, of course, is one that is entirely electronic, in which there is no paper record to be examined in case of a challenge, and which is susceptible to tampering. Believe it or not, this is the system Florida installed after the 2000 election. Maybe they just don’t approve of democracy in Florida.

  Not only in Florida. I read in the New York Times not long ago that about 30 percent of American voters were confronted with paperless electronic voting machines in 2006. Now some Congressmen are working to see that every jurisdiction has some form of paper voting record before the 2008 presidential elections. A few American commentators have pointed out that up in Canada, in federal elections, they still use a pencil to mark an “X” on a piece of paper, which they stick in a cardboard box, and this seems to work pretty well. So we do and so it does, but I have no confidence in its lasting: it’s too easy and too cheap. It’s only a matter of time before someone insists that we replace our simple, inexpensive, accurate system with a fancy, pricey one that doesn’t work as well.

  When the media did their re-counts in Florida in 2003, Bush did squeeze out a narrow victory—at least, in some cases—which was also the official result when the Supreme Court (stacked with Republican sympathizers, by the way) decided in December 2000 that they would not overrule the Florida Legislature (also Republican, plus the Governor was George Bush’s brother Jeb!). This wonderful roller-coaster ride then came to an end. But as Jeff Greenfield had predicted, by that time, neither side was prepared to believe that the other guy could have won fair and square, and it would be some time before Bush’s opponents would stop thinking of him as an impostor in the White House. It would be nearly ten months, actually.

  By the time I got to the CBC building on September 11, 2001, all regular programming had been suspended and Michael Enright was anchoring the radio network coverage from the news studio, having just taken over from Shelagh Rogers, who had been holding the fort up to that time. Shelagh had been on the air, hosting her own network programme, This Morning, when the planes hit the World Trade Center. To everyone’s embarrassment, CBC Radio continued with regular programming for more than an hour, although there were brief news bulletins. As I drove downtown to the studio, I was getting all my radio news from a private Toronto station that was carrying the audio feed from CNN. This was how I learned that a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and there might be another on its way to Washington.

  It sounded as if Armageddon was happening and CBC Radio was asleep at the switch. We were told later that the reason for our sluggish response that morning was that Master Control rooms in some parts of the country had been automated to save money, making it difficult for network managers to take control of their stations from coast to coast. Whether this was the root of the problem or not I don’t know because several years later when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, after the problems with Master Control had supposedly been cleared up, we were back in the same fix: private radio beat us to the punch again.

  That said, there weren’t many facts to report when Radio News finally did take over on September 11th, apart from what you could see with your own eyes—on TV. The burning buildings in New York, the crumpled Pentagon. There were rumours of a fourth plane heading for Capitol Hill or the White House, of
buildings on fire in Washington, of a plane crash in Pennsylvania. There were TV images of President Bush being given the news while he was visiting an elementary school in Texas. He spoke a few words into a microphone, then vanished aboard Air Force One, headed for an unnamed destination.

  It wasn’t clear whether the U.S. Cabinet was in emergency session in the White House or in a bunker or had left the capital altogether. We were all scrambling to find someone who could tell us something of what was going on, and we were having a hard time of it. I don’t recall anyone mentioning al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden that day—names that wouldn’t have meant much to us anyway at the time. The pictures of the burning towers got worse and worse, and the worst of all were pictures of people, overcome by heat and smoke, jumping out of the World Trade Center and falling one hundred storeys to their deaths. In a documentary I saw later, a microphone at ground level had picked up the sound of bodies hitting the pavement. Thud! Thud! Thud!

  And then the twin towers collapsed.

  Later, when she was recalling those terrible images, a friend of mine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said to me, “I have lived too long.” She would have preferred never to have seen such things. But didn’t we all feel that way?

  Or what did we feel?

  For myself, I remember only the shock—and some fear, since no one knew how many more attacks awaited us or where. But mainly I was focused on work. When Michael Enright was ready to be relieved, I moved into the anchor chair, and now it was my turn to talk to whomever the producers could get to a phone, picking up any scraps of information they could provide. Linda Perry and Louis Hammond were in the streets of New York with cellphones. Washington correspondent Frank Koller drove up to New York but couldn’t get into Manhattan because all the tunnels and bridges had been closed. He described only what he could see from the Jersey shore. We heard clips from or did interviews with New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, New York Governor George Pataki, New York fire chiefs and many others—but no one knew very much.