Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  “Secretary Christopher and I have been in Florida now for over twenty hours,” Daley says. “We’re here to report that what we have learned has left us deeply troubled.”

  Daley specifically cites the reports of the voters in Palm Beach County. “More than twenty thousand voters in Palm Beach County who thought they were voting for Al Gore had their votes counted for Pat Buchanan or not counted at all,” Daley says. “These logical conclusions are reinforced by the phone calls, faxes, and other reports from over one thousand residents of Palm Beach County that have poured into us, saying that they believe they were victims of this ballot confusion,” he adds. He neglects to mention that the Democrats have used staffers and paid telemarketers to call Democratic voters to alert these residents to the problem. Out of thin air, Daley plucks a number of Buchanan votes that he would allocate to Gore. “Based on the totals from other counties, there seems every reason to believe that well over two thousand of these votes were votes for Vice President Al Gore, more than enough to make him the winner here in Florida,” Daley says.

  “Those numbers cry out for justice,” adds Coffey.

  “Here in Florida it also seems very likely that more voters went to the polls believing that they were voting for Al Gore than for George Bush,” Daley says. “If the will of the people is to prevail, Al Gore should be awarded the victory of Florida and be our next president.”

  Of course, electoral victories are not built upon “the will of the people.” They are built upon 270 electoral votes garnered from enough states where a plurality of voters cast their ballot—competently—for a particular candidate. In 1996, more than fourteen thousand Palm Beach County residents also had their ballots thrown out. The Flag doesn’t point it out, but Palm Beach County has had problems before the butterfly ballot.

  Finally he announces what Team Gore is up to. “Here’s what we intend to do about this,” he says. “Today, the appropriate Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a hand count of ballots in Palm Beach County as well as three other counties: Volusia, Dade, and Broward. In addition, today I’m announcing that we will be working with voters from Florida in support of legal actions to demand some redress for the disenfranchisement of more than twenty thousand voters in Palm Beach County.

  “In addition, we are still collecting accounts of other irregularities, voter intimidation and other oddities in other parts of the state. And if substantiated and appropriate, they, too, will become part of legal actions.”

  Whoa! Litigation-a-go-go!

  “That ballot is completely illegal,” Coffey says of the poor little butterfly. “It confused voters. It led an unprecedented number of voters—many of whom are elderly, who waited for hours—to have their votes disqualified, because it was very hard looking at it to figure out exactly what to do.

  “The law requires a simple linear listing so that the boxes are punched in the same order and you don’t have this massive confusion,” Coffey says. “Florida election law is very clear.”

  Actually it’s not so clear at all, but the Gorebies point to a section of Florida law that discusses placing “a cross (X) mark in the blank space at the right of the name of the candidate for whom you desire to vote.” Since half the candidates on the butterfly ballot require punching a hole to the candidate’s left, this would be a violation.

  But whether they’re lying or incompetent or just innocently mistaken, it turns out that the Gorebies are grabbing an irrelevant section of law. The relevant section, which applies to counties that use voting machines, says that, “Voting squares may be placed in front of or in back of the names of candidates.” Nevertheless, Daley alludes to other possible legal challenges.

  Asked about Baker, Christopher feebly says, “We’ll see if there’s some way we can cooperate with them. I must say, the cooperation cannot extend to the point of our giving up justified legal challenges that are absolutely necessary to ensure the fairness of the process.”

  Daley adds that the Bush campaign has “blithely dismissed the disenfranchisement of thousands of Floridians as being the usual Florida mistakes made in elections.”

  True enough. The Bushies want this done. In Thursday newspapers, the Bush campaign has leaked the names of cabinet appointments—most notably Powell.

  They want this thing to be over.

  Now.

  “They’re trying to presumptively crown themselves the victors. To try to put in place a transition runs the risk of dividing the American people and creating a sense of confusion,” Daley says. “Let the legal system run its course. Let the true and accurate will of the people prevail.

  “And if, at the end of the process, George Bush is the victor, we will honor and obviously respect the results.”

  With that, Daley, Christopher, and Coffey walk out of the room. After they become aware of Coffey’s involvement on the Gore team, the Miami relatives of Elián González cancel a celebration that night in honor of their attorneys.

  Anita Davis, Tallahassee NAACP president, has been called to Gadsden County. More than 12 percent of the 16,812 ballots cast on Election Day weren’t read by the machine, so, in addition to conducting their machine recount, members of the canvassing board there are going to review the 2,000-plus scrapped Opti-scan ballots. Republicans are there objecting to the whole process, of course.

  As the board reviews the ballots, Davis deflates. Some of these voters have filled in every circle except for Gore’s. Some had filled in Gore’s circle and put an X through Nader’s. Some are discernible, however, and the board ends up finding 187 votes—170 for Gore and 17 for Bush.

  Ken Sukhia, of the Tallahassee Republican law firm of Fowler, White, Gillen, Boggs, Villareal, and Banker, is objecting. This is not what the secretary of state ordered the canvassing board to do, he says. County GOP chair Russell Doster understands Sukhia’s suspicion—this is the most Democratic county in the state, so he could see how at first blush this looks bad—but he knows the members of the canvassing board, he respects them, and he has faith in their ethics. Moreover, Doster has seen these newly approved 187 votes, and he agrees with their assessments. He assures Sukhia that everything’s on the up-and-up.

  But Davis has a larger concern. “We’ve fallen short,” she thinks. “We’re registering people to vote but failing to educate them on the use of the ballot. And we’ve been doing it this way for twenty years!”

  Soon Baker walks in. And with the appearance of this former world leader, who carries with him a far greater sense of command than Daley and Christopher combined, the room falls silent.“I’ll take a few questions, but I can’t be here too long,” he says.

  He’s asked about the butterfly ballot. “The ballot in Palm Beach County that has been alleged to be confusing is a ballot that has been used before in Florida elections; it is a ballot that was approved by an elected Democratic official; it is a ballot that was published in newspapers in that county and provided to the candidates, to the respective political parties, in advance of the election in order that complaints, if any, could be registered. And, hey, guess what? There were no complaints until after the election.” He accepts a few more questions, and then he takes off.

  It’s a difficult task to figure out what really is going on.

  The idea of a “revote” seems ridiculous on its face—the Constitution requires that the presidential election be held on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November; it makes no allowances for re-doing it for any reason. Even if all 425,000 Palm Beach voters joined hands and yelled “do-over” at the top of their lungs.

  And Daley, Christopher, and Coffey seem more than a little desperate in their “support” for voter lawsuits, in their insistence that the butterfly ballot was “illegal.” Confusing, sure. But illegal?

  The Bushies, however, have decided that they’re not even going to acknowledge that anyone was confused. This despite the fact that that morning, Buchanan—in a rare moment of statesmanship—tells Charlie Gibson of ABC’s Good Morning
America that, “Yes, I did get thirty-four hundred votes. But I also agree that many of those very probably and almost certainly were intended for Al Gore.

  “The ballot is confusing to those who move through it very rapidly,” Buchanan agrees. “There’s Bush and Gore as the first and second names on the left, but if you vote for the second dot, you vote for me, and my name’s on the right. I can understand how people have made that mistake, and people coming out were very anguished in chagrin, and I don’t think they’re acting. I think they probably voted for me mistakenly.”

  “So what to do, Pat?” Gibson asks. “What’s the remedy, do you think, in fairness for this?”

  “There is none, Charlie,” Buchanan says, before calling for Gore to concede. “That ballot was agreed upon. That ballot’s been used before. And they used it again. There is no remedy for that. It happened. It was done.”

  That afternoon, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer—who is known by reporters to have an on-again, off-again relationship with the truth—tries to explain why Buchanan did so well in the heavily Jewish community of Palm Beach.

  “New information has come to our attention that puts in perspective the results of the vote in Palm Beach County,” Fleischer says. “Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold, and that’s why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there.”

  I call up Buchanan’s Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, and read him Fleischer’s comment.

  “That’s nonsense,” McConnell says.

  McConnell says that he and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County’s Reform Party, estimate the number of Buchanan activists in the county to be between three hundred and five hundred—nowhere near the 3,407 who voted for him. “Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do,” says McConnell. “We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere.” Says Cunningham of Buchanan’s actual number of supporters in Palm Beach County: “It’s in the hundreds; it’s not a significant amount.”

  Asked if the county is “a Buchanan stronghold,” as the Bush campaign has asserted, Cunningham said: “I don’t think so. Not from where I’m sitting and what I’m looking at. They can say that because they would like to believe that. Because the votes we received they would like to believe were not mistaken votes.” Heck, the Buchanan campaign decided not to even advertise in the area, nor in most of southeast Florida, Cunningham says, adding that “the percentage of people down there who would be receptive to our message is much smaller than in other parts of the state.”

  Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, Cunningham says, “I think a thousand would be generous.”

  In any other business, liars are called liars. There are penalties for perjury in the law, fines for inaccurate claims in advertising, libel laws against journalists and publishers. But many political spokespeople take to lies like mutts to kibble, knowing that their bosses are rarely held accountable for such lies. Politics, of course, by necessity utilizes spin, obfuscation, and a degree of hyperbole. But lines can still be crossed—when speakers say things for political purposes that are just plain false, whether aware that the matters were not true or simply indifferent to what the truth is. And the media rarely calls them on it. Democrats and Republicans both know this and exploit it in desperate circumstances. Perhaps because Gore already had a reputation for misleading voters and overstating his record, the Bush people got away with it much more. So by November 9, they’re emboldened to say whatever the hell they want to.

  After Fleischer’s widely distributed nonsense, Bush strategist Karl Rove appears before the cameras in Austin to bolster the untruth, which he calls in great Orwellian fashion, “set(ting) the record straight.”

  “There are 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County who registered as a member of the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, which were the labels borne this year by the reform effort in Florida,” Rove says.“This in an increase of 110 percent over the registration totals for the same party in 1996.”

  About the ballot itself, Rove says that “the Gore campaign has been handing out a somewhat hazy and fuzzy copy of it, so we are making available to you, and can do so electronically as well, a relatively clean and clear copy of the butterfly ballot, which indicates that this is not as susceptible to confusion as Chairman Daley indicated.”

  “The Bush campaign is inflating the numbers of Reform Party members to the limits of gullibility,” McConnell says after hearing Rove’s comments. “They’re including everybody that can in any way be assumed to be members of the Reform Party.” Members of the American Reform Party and the Independent Party “are absolutely not Buchanan supporters.” The American Reform Party “is largely made up of people who supported [former Colorado governor] Dick Lamm against Ross Perot for the 1996 nomination,” McConnell says. He doesn’t even know what the Independent Party is.

  Cunningham says that the Independent Party didn’t have a presidential candidate on the Palm Beach County ballot and endorsed Buchanan’s Reform Party rival, John Hagelin. And the American Reform Party split with Reform, and this year endorsed Ralph Nader for president.

  In Nashville, Fabiani is shaking his head. Daley was too hot at the press conference, way too hot. He’d wanted Daley to say that the butterfly ballot story in that day’s New York Times—one that the Gorebies had been working on with its author, Don Van Natta—was astonishing and proved beyond any doubt that Bush, had all the votes been counted accurately, had lost Florida. It was time for Bush to stand up and explain to people how he could claim the throne when he’d seemingly won because people were confused about the butterfly ballot.

  Keep saying it was the media making the allegations—that was Fabiani’s plan. But instead, Daley had gone out there and read a statement Klain had written for him, this one about the lawsuits and all. The press conference had moved the issue away from people talking about who really won and who really lost to whether or not Gore was a spoiler trying to win the presidency by suing.

  “Speaking of automatic recounts,” Bush campaign chair Don Evans says, before the press throngs in Austin,“I want to alert you that there are at least three other states in which automatic recounts are likely.” Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico—all of which went for Gore—may have recounts as well.

  Rove is asked if the Bushies are going to ask for recounts in those three states.

  “We are waiting to see the results of the canvass Tuesday night in Wisconsin, and to be guided by Governor [Tommy] Thompson,” he says.

  Rove adds that any comments by the Gorebies about their man’s popular-vote win are premature. Just as he claimed before the election that Bush would win by 6 or 7 percentage points, Rove again offers a prognostication that in hindsight couldn’t end up being further from the truth. Rove says that a vote count in Colorado, as well as the continued tallying of absentee ballots in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, has made his team “confident that this will carry with it the likelihood of an increasing amount of popular votes for Governor Bush and a diminishing margin between the two candidates.”

  Bush communications director Karen Hughes is asked about Gore’s rising 200,000-vote lead in the popular tally. “I would point out that Governor Bush, in this election, has received more popular votes than President Clinton did in either of his two elections, in either 1996 or in 1992,” she says. For that matter, Bush also garnered more popular votes than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Just not more than Al Gore.

  The Gorebies are disappointed. Some top members of the blue-chip law firm Holland & Knight agreed on Wednesday to take the Gore case: Martha Barnett, a senior partner at the firm and president of the American Bar Association, and Chesterfield Smith, the H&K partner who’s the dean of Florida lawyers. But by Thursday they tell the Gore lawyers that there’s a potential conflict, which they’re working on resolving. We’ll
get back to you, they tell the Gorebies.

  But Team Gore never hears from them again. Bye-bye, Holland & Knight.

  The Democrats are disappointed but not surprised. This is Jeb Bush’s terrain. All the major law firms in the state have offices in Tallahassee, so all are beholden to an extent to Jeb and the GOP-controlled state house and state senate.

  Imagine the Everglades in the mid 1930s. Gladesmen hunted gators and otters, poling their skiffs through mangroves for weeks at a time, sleeping on small piles of peat at makeshift campsites with names like Break-A-Leg and Buzzard and Camp Nasty. 1 They fended off predators and irritants ranging from gator fleas to moonshiners to God-knows-who and God-knows-what. Now picture dropping Harvard boy Albert Gore, Jr., smackdab in the middle of it all. The Gladesman—who know their way around the marshes, the swamps, the jungles—are not inclined to help the foreign preppie.

  One such Gladesman is Frank Jimenez—a slight, intense guy whom I run into one night at Tallahassee hot spot Café Cabernet. Jimenez sits with Katie Baur, Jeb’s communications director. Jimenez is angry. He says chad are on the floor. He says Daley’s a thug. When I point out that Daley was twelve when his dad helped JFK, Jimenez calls me naive. He’s motivated by anger, and, having taken an unpaid leave as Jeb’s assistant general counsel, his charge is whatever it takes to help his boss’s brother. Three other members of Jeb’s legal staff take time off to help as well, as does Baur.

  Another Gladesman is J. M. “Mac” Stipanovich, a former Marine who helmed the gubernatorial campaigns of Bob Martinez in ’86 and Jeb in ’94, and who spent ’98 helping both Jeb and Katherine Harris win. Stipanovich used to be much higher profile, always quick with a quote for reporters. But from ’98 on, the lawyer/lobbyist at Fowler White learned to keep his trap shut while he sat in the money-laden nexus of Tallahassee politics, raising money for Republican candidates, then turning around and lobbying them on behalf of clients like Big Tobacco. Stipanovich, who has likened politics to the Vietnam War, was drafted into duty by a senior Bush adviser the Thursday after the election, and he has been closely advising Harris ever since. All the while, he’s been talking to Bushies. And Stipanovich’s call is not the call of law or justice. It is the call of victory.