Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Soon enough, Gore and Lieberman leave the Tampa rally, head to the airport, and fly to Tennessee to watch the returns. Now it’s in the hands of the people.

  People like Theresa LePore.

  LePore, elections supervisor for Palm Beach County, has been awake for three full hours. At 2:30 A.M. she eased herself out of bed. She was at work by 3:45 A.M. Voters start calling her to make sure they know the proper place to vote at around 4:30 A.M. or so. LePore feels like crap; she has a sinus infection; she didn’t get home the previous night until around 10 p.m.; she hasn’t really slept. But she’s jazzed.

  LePore loves elections. Lives for them. Says elections are in her blood. At the age of eight, she helped her Republican dad lick envelopes for his favorite candidates. In the summer of 1971, at the age of sixteen—when most girls in her school had their sights set on less lofty pursuits—LePore walked into the Palm Beach County elections office and took a job as a part-time typist, making $1.75 an hour, under good ol’ boy elections supervisor Horace Beasley, aka Mr. B. She wasn’t even old enough to vote.

  LePore’s now worked at the elections office for twenty-eight years. Originally she had registered to vote as a Republican, like her dad, a disabled Korean War veteran who never told her just how he injured his left arm. But he never really was about partisan politics, and in 1979 LePore reregistered as an independent. When a third-party formally registered as “Independent,” she changed her registration to “no party.”

  LePore earned her associate degree from Palm Beach Junior College and even attended Florida Atlantic University for a spell. But she never got her bachelor’s. She really wasn’t all that interested in pursuing an education; she’s not even a political junkie. She’d found what she wanted to do. And she’d found a mentor in Jackie Winchester, the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections, appointed to the position after Mr. B died in office in 1973. Winchester was first elected to the post in 1974, and not long afterward, Winchester handpicked LePore to be her chief deputy.

  When Winchester announced her retirement in January 1996, it was only natural that LePore would take her place. Soon after Winchester told her of her plans, in the fall of 1995, LePore registered as a Democrat and ran. LePore won by 25,000 votes, and in 2000 she has the best kind of reelection match: she’s running unopposed. So she’s not even on the ballot.

  But LePore’s job this time was a little tougher than it had been in the past. Historically, Florida had been a tough place for third-party candidates. To get on a ballot, third-party candidates had to secure the signatures of 3 percent of all voters in the district on a petition. Democratic and Republican candidates had a much easier time, enjoying the option of either securing the signatures of 3 percent of just local members of their party or paying a qualifying fee. But in 1998, Libertarians launched a campaign to level the playing field, proposing Amendment 11 to the state constitution, “grant(ing) equal ballot access for independent and minor parties” by allowing members of those parties to pay the ballot-access fee instead of getting signatures. On that Election Day—the same day that Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota as a Reform Party candidate—Amendment 11 passed overwhelmingly, with 64 percent of the vote. As a result, instead of the most restrictive ballot-access requirements in the country, Florida now had one of the loosest. LePore had no fewer than ten presidential candidates, and ten vice presidential candidates, to put on her ballot.

  In September, LePore went to voting systems manager Tony Enos, thirty-six, and asked for help. Enos was, like her, an experienced elections board employee—he’d been there for eighteen years, since he was eighteen. He soon gave her three ballot options.

  One of them was a one-pager, as they’d always done in the past. But the twenty names meant that the type was really small. This troubled LePore. She remembered the 1988 Senate race, when Republican Connie Mack defeated Democratic representative Buddy MacKay by just 33,000 votes. During the recount, Democrats complained that 54,000 ballots didn’t register a vote for Senate—a full 17 percent. A closer inspection of these undervotes, as they were called, brought blame on the ballot design. Since the Senate race had been on the same page as the presidential race—a lot of names on one page—the race, written in small letters at the bottom of the first page of the ballot, had apparently escaped some voters’ notice. Winchester and her equals in Hillsborough, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties came under some heavy criticism for the 170,000 total undervotes in their four counties.

  That experience, combined with her work for a federal task force dedicated to making it easier for the blind, disabled, and sight-impaired to vote, made LePore sensitive to the needs of voters who didn’t have the best vision. There had been numerous complaints from older voters after all the referenda and initiatives appeared on the 1998 ballot in 10-point type. This time, the names, she decided, would be better spread out over two pages. Like a butterfly. They called it a “facing-page ballot.”

  Enos had two designs with that option. One listed five candidate tickets on the left page, all huddled near the top of the page, with the other five pairs on the right page, near the bottom. But LePore didn’t like this design. She wanted the list of candidates in essentially the same location on each page, with the holes to punch staggered between pages.

  So it came down to Enos’s third option. Bush and Cheney listed first on the left page, with their hole first in the middle; Reform ticket Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster first on the right page, their hole second in the middle; Gore and Lieberman listed second on the left page, with their hole third in the middle, and so on.

  In Miami-Dade County, the voting machines are being set up at two of the most Democratic precincts in the county, two places where Gore’s gonna win big.

  Precinct 255, Lillie C. Evans Elementary School, is located at 1895 NW 75th Street. Its voters are 89.8 percent Democratic, 95 percent African-American.

  Precinct 535, Dunbar Elementary School, is at 505 NW 20th Street. Its registered voters are 88.48 percent Democratic, 93.25 percent black.

  Before the voting machines leave the elections warehouse, they’re tested to make sure that they’re functioning properly. The ten machines at Dunbar and the ten at Evans had both been deemed to be working fine. But at Evans Elementary on Tuesday morning, poll worker Larry Williams does a test ballot, and a punch he attempts for Gore doesn’t register at all. Seven of the ten machines at Evans miss punches when tested. No one ever tells precinct clerk Donna Rogers. When Rogers is asked about the problems her precinct experiences today, she’ll say that no voter complained to her, no poll worker told her about anything wrong, how was she to know. She’ll say that the Miami Herald and I are the only ones—including the elections commission—to tell her that there were undervotes in her precinct, so as far as she’s concerned, it’s all hearsay.

  But it’s true. By the end of the day, 113 out of the 868 ballots cast at Evans Elementary School will not register a vote for president. This is a precinct that Gore will win with 98.81 percent to Bush’s .66 percent—of the votes that register.

  Six of the ten machines at Dunbar miss punches as well in their morning tests. At Dunbar Elementary, 105 out of the 820 ballots won’t register a vote for president. This is a precinct that Gore will win with 98.74 percent of the vote to Bush’s 1.12 percent.

  These rates of discarded ballots—roughly 13 percent for both precincts—will be the highest rate of unread ballots in the county.

  Liz Hyman, thirty-four, sits outside the Delray Beach Gore HQ. She’s a lawyer at Akin Gump in Washington, D.C., but she’s also worked for the Justice Department, Gore’s office, and for the U.S. trade representative for the Clinton administration, and she’s taken some vacation time to help volunteer with the Gore campaign. A friend has a house in Palm Beach, so that just happened to be where she chose to do her volunteering.

  Since 7 A.M., Hyman’s been sitting at a table outside the building where she’s trying to snag volunteers for various “Get Out the
Vote” activities. She keeps hearing something weird about the ballot. Volunteers who have voted already complain that it’s difficult to understand; many are upset. Word gets out: it’s a problem elsewhere in the county, too. Conspiracy theories start cropping up: it makes it look like you’re voting for Buchanan; maybe someone tampered with it!

  At around 8 A.M., Hyman busts out her cell phone and calls her dad, Lester Hyman, another D.C. attorney. “You’re not going to believe what’s going on down here,” she says. It’s something that maybe people at Gore HQ in Nashville should know about. At the Justice Department, Hyman was once deputy to Ron Klain, a hotshot Democratic attorney and Gore guy. Maybe call him?

  Klain’s on his way to work that morning when he gets the call. Lester Hyman doesn’t really understand the problem—something about people accidentally voting for Buchanan?—but says Liz is upset.

  Klain knows that Liz does not upset easily. When he arrives, he goes into the “boiler room,” where Gore’s main on-the-ground political adviser, Michael Whouley, is working away. Klain gives Whouley Liz’s name and number, vouches for her credibility.

  Seconds later, Liz Hyman’s cell phone rings. It’s Joe Sandler, general counsel of the Democratic National Committee.

  “I hear there’s a problem with the ballot?” he asks.

  There is a problem with Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot. People are confused. Many are angry. At a Greenacres condominium clubhouse John Lazet, sixty-six, votes the right way after a proctor gives him a second ballot. But he decides to take matters into his own hands.

  He calls the supervisor’s office but finds the man who answers the phone less than sympathetic. So he and two buddies drive to LePore’s office. There they find her outside in the middle of a TV interview. Lazet starts verbally coming at her, but that quickly ends when LePore says that she doesn’t have time to talk to him. She thinks it’s just a few cranky old men. Nothing to worry about.

  Assistant poll clerk Ethel Brownstein, seventy-one, arrives at the Lucerne Point Club from her home in Lake Worth at around 5:45 A.M. By seven, there’s already a long line of voters, mostly seniors. She starts directing traffic: “You go here, you go here, you go here.”

  At around 8 A.M., a woman comes to Brownstein and tells her she’s having a problem.

  “I put this thing in, but it doesn’t go in,” she says.

  Brownstein enters the voting booth to see what she’s talking about. The rectangular ballot has gone in straight, in the slot underneath the ballot, but for some reason the stylus to punch the hole isn’t going through.

  “I want to vote for Mr. Gore,” she says.

  Brownstein looks at the ballot. “This is confusing,” she thinks. Gore is listed second, but his is the third hole. And for a lot of these voters, who are elderly, who don’t see so well, who are used to having the second hole correspond to the second name, well, they might not really understand how to vote correctly, Brownstein realizes.

  “The first hole is Bush, the second is Buchanan, and the third is Gore,” Brownstein says. Worried about crossing the line between assistance and instruction, Brownstein quickly hustles out of the booth. But she thinks, “You know, something’s wrong here. People don’t know how to punch these things.” She starts saying to voters, “Please be careful. The first hole is Bush, the second is Buchanan, the third is Gore.” Repeatedly she warns people, “Be careful.”

  Not everyone hears her or even with her advice can figure it out. Others just shrug off her warnings altogether; they’ve been voting since Truman, they don’t need directions. The complaints start flooding in from the crowd: that the stylus didn’t work properly, that they voted for the wrong person, that since there were two holes next to Gore and Lieberman’s box they punched both holes. A couple women come to her in tears, afraid that they voted for Buchanan, knowing that it’s too late since their ballots have been put into the box.

  Brownstein’s husband, George, seventy-six, is going through a similar ordeal at the Masonic Temple, precinct 121-D, where he’s serving as a poll clerk. People are having problems, but when he tries to phone the elections office, he can’t get through.

  “This is unreal,” he thinks.

  At precinct 154-G in Bethesda Health City, assistant clerk Bert Gluck, seventy-six, is also seeing the meltdown. From inside the polling stations, voters are oohing and aahing, confused, punching more than one hole, griping that on some of the ballots the arrows don’t line up with any holes. He cautions voters, don’t turn in your ballot if you’ve punched more than one hole! Forty-nine voters take him up on the offer, turning in to him their double-punched ballots, which otherwise would have been voided.

  At 10:30 A.M. in Nashville, Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway and Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus have already heard about the butterfly ballot problems. In their first briefing of the day, Hattaway and Backus tell reporters to caution Palm Beach County voters to look carefully at their ballot. At 11:24 A.M., Bobby Brochin, counsel for the DNC in Florida, faxes LePore a letter from his Miami office. The Democrats aren’t entirely sure what the problem is, just that there is one. “Apparently certain presidential ballots being utilized in several precincts in Palm Beach County are quite confusing,” Brochin writes. “They contain two pages listing all of the presidential candidates, which may cause electors to vote twice in the presidential race. You should immediately instruct all deputy supervisors and other officials at these precincts that they should advise all electors (and post a written advisory) that the ballot for the presidential race is two pages long, and that electors should only vote for one presidential candidate.”

  LePore doesn’t respond to Brochin’s fax.

  In Tallahassee, Anita Davis, past president of the local branch of the NAACP, is running around, going precinct to precinct. She returns from District 1 polling centers, jubilant. Turnout is way high.

  After Gov. Jeb Bush formally introduced his “One Florida” initiative in March—which would effectively end affirmative action in the state— local NAACP activists were rejuvenated, launching their “We’ll remember in November” voter registration/revenge drive. Today, November 7, black voters do indeed seem to be remembering. Davis’s first trip out was at around 9 A.M., to one precinct where hundreds had already voted.

  The overall numbers bear out her enthusiasm. Just under sixty thousand African-Americans registered to vote between February and October, a 7 percent increase. White registration grew by about half that. And while black voters constitute 934,261 of the Florida electorate, compared to 6,564,813 whites and Latinos, today, state black turnout is so high—the highest ever—that black voters will constitute 16 percent of the total turnout. In 1996, that number was just 10 percent.

  Today in the Sunshine State, 93 percent of black voters will go for the vice president. * Little of this seems attributable to Gore, whose consultants reportedly kept blacks out of photographs with the veep during the campaign, so as to keep him from seeming too liberal. (In September, Gore was pulled from directly addressing the National Baptist Convention for fear of scaring away the soccer moms and blue-collar dads and other white swing voters the campaign lusted after so unattractively. 1 ) No, but blacks are turning out in record numbers today, in Leon and Duval and Gadsden and Miami-Dade and elsewhere, not so much for Gore, but against Bush.

  And not just Bush—and his Bob Jones University–visiting, Confederate flag–waving, itchy-death-row-trigger-finger-wiggling, South Carolina racist–pandering cracker Texas ass. But also his brother Jeb—whom many NAACP officials call “Jeb Crow”—as well as Poppy Bush, whose aides bragged in 1988 that they would make black murderer Willie Horton seem like Gov. Mike Dukakis’s running mate when it was all said and done.

  Which is not to say that the African-American community doesn’t have issues with Dubya. In the second presidential debate, Bush defended his opposition to a hate crimes bill, saying that it wasn’t needed, since all of the killers of his fellow Texan James
Byrd, Jr., had been sentenced to death. But not all three had been put to death. One had been given a life sentence. And while the mainstream press ignored that fact, giving Bush a bye on this as they did on so much else, black radio hosts sure as hell noticed. So did the NAACP, which ran a TV ad against Bush, featuring Byrd’s niece, Renee Mullins, saying that when Bush refused to support the hate crimes bill that bore her uncle’s name, it felt like he’d been killed all over again. Incendiary stuff, stuff that whites decried as over the line, but it had an impact in the right neighborhoods.

  And it goes beyond the descendants of the late Connecticut senator Prescott Bush. Despite its reputation in the Northeast as a somewhat anomalous Southern state, Florida has a fairly ugly racial history.

  This isn’t just ancient history, the 1889 Florida poll tax, the 1920 Ococee County murders and arson and other retaliations against blacks who had dared to try to vote, the 1951 Christmas Day murder of the NAACP’s Harry T. Moore, who launched a Brevard County registration drive. No, it’s more recent than that in the minds of much of Florida’s black community. For Godsakes, post-Reconstruction, no black Floridian had been elected to the U.S. House until 1992. 2

  When Davis, sixty-four, moved down to Tallahassee from Buffalo in 1979—her son had been recruited to play football for FSU, and she was eager to get away from Buffalo’s winters—Leon County didn’t have one countywide black elected official. Not one. Post-Reconstruction, after all, the first black ever elected to the Tallahassee city commission was James Ford, and that hadn’t been until 1971. Writing before the primary that year, the Tallahassee Democrat had described Ford, the Leon High School vice principal, as a “mature Negro…. We are impressed that he may be the best-qualified Negro ever to offer for public office in Tallahassee. We would expect him to serve, if elected, as a proper representative of his racial minority without antagonistic attitudes toward the majority that might result in more frustration and discord than genuine advancement.”