Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  After that he ran and won as state representative. In ’78 he ran for attorney general but lost to Jim Smith in the primary. Soon he started a small law firm that grew and grew and eventually merged with Greenberg Traurig in ’91. He’s known for his silver tongue and his silver bouffant and a pretty decent command of the law.

  The butterfly ballot confusion was a shame, Richard thinks, but it wasn’t much more than that: a shame.

  By Thursday, Bushies have set up their basic shop, which is almost entirely headquartered in the Tallahassee Bush Building.

  Baker is in charge, assisted as he always is by Margaret Tutweiler, who has served him throughout his career in a variety of positions, perhaps most notably as State Department spokeswoman. Zoellick is on board as well, as is Bush domestic policy adviser Josh Bolten.

  If Baker’s the CEO, Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh is chief operating officer, running the day-to-day, ensuring that there are no gaps in communication, making sure the trains run on time. Ginsberg heads up legal, helped by George H. W. Bush administration deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, now a senior partner at White & Case, Kirk Van Tine from the D.C. office of Baker Botts, an elite firm formed by an ancestor of Jim Baker. Eventually, the Bush legal effort will draw from a cast of hundreds from the best firms in the nation. Terwilliger, called and drafted by Evans in the midst of an interview on Fox News Channel, is picked up at the Tallahassee airport by his fellow White & Case-ians Tim Flanigan and Bob Bittman—the latter of whom had been a key aide to Ken Starr in his pursuit of President Clinton.

  Ken Mehlman and Randy Enwright—a Florida political operative who served as political director of the Florida GOP from 1995 through 1999—run the ground team. Tucker Eskew and Mindy Tucker—with advice from Tutweiler—work on communications, always in conjunction with other Bush spinners in Austin, like Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett, Ari Fleischer.

  The whole team is concerned. The powers that be worry that the floor is slipping out from under them.

  After Palm Beach County’s machine recount, there’s been a 643-vote shift for Gore, one that the elections supervisor there, LePore, cannot immediately explain. In Pinellas County, Gore gains 404 votes, and Bush loses 61. But then the elections officials retract those numbers, too. Gore picked up 153 net votes in heavily Democratic Gadsden County—just what the hell is going on?!

  More bad news; Gore’s popular-vote lead now exceeds 300,000 votes.

  And Broward, Volusia, and Palm Beach Counties are going ahead with the first steps toward a hand recount; the Miami-Dade canvassing board has announced that it will hear arguments about the matter on Tuesday. And after the state-mandated machine recount concludes Thursday evening, Bush’s lead has been cut from 1,784 votes to 327. Baker, Ginsberg, and the other Bush recount team leaders worry that at some point the lower fourth of the MSNBC TV screen will post a headline with Gore’s vote lead over Bush.

  They all sit in the Bush Building, in the room they call the “bull pit.” Baker, Ginsberg, Olson. This is untenable, they think. Many think that the election is being stolen from them.

  Word comes from Austin that the team needs to prepare, to think about how to argue from a PR standpoint when and if the numbers turn. Bush won, they say. Everything the Democrats are trying to do is a violation of preexisting Florida election law. Hand recounts are for when there’s a problem, a malfunction, with the machines—not for when a candidate simply doesn’t like the result.

  GOP pols in the field report back to Tallahassee: “If they keep counting, we’ll be behind,” they say.

  Additional worries come when Frank Jimenez hears that the Democrats on the ground are already making noise about the standards by which ballots will be judged in any hand recount. They want the most generous standard available—even mere impressions in ballots, so-called dents or dimples.

  If this all keeps going on, Gore could win.

  Baker won’t have it.

  What about their own hand recount? The deadline’s Friday. They can cherry-pick a few of their own counties, glean some votes that way.

  But Baker wants to draw a line in the sand. No recounts. No nothin’.

  When Terwilliger flies down from D.C. Thursday night, he takes notes on the plane. Note number one:“Federal Court—On What Basis?”He’s skeptical that there was a role at all. But when he arrives, Ginsberg tells him to figure out how to get the matter into federal court. Terwilliger and other lawyers talk about it, and the conventional wisdom is that this is a state issue.

  “Not good enough,” Terwilliger says.

  Florida courts are considered rather liberal, rather Democratic, especially the state supreme court. In 1996, Terwilliger had represented John Walsh from TV’s America’s Most Wanted, in an open-documents, or “sunshine law,” case involving the police files surrounding the homicide of Walsh’s son. Walsh didn’t want the file disclosed, because police and prosecutors were closing in on a suspect, and there were some details in the file that might jeopardize the case, Walsh thought. The courts were liberal, more inclined to side with newspapers than cops, Terwilliger learned. That experience, combined with the observations of Florida Republicans about the Florida courts, convinced Terwilliger that this has to end up in federal court, where they have friends, especially at the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Around this time, Berger receives a phone call from a colleague, Harry Jacobs, a personal injury lawyer from Longwood who’s given Gore and the Democrats more than $50,000.

  “We have a problem in Seminole County, too, Mitchell,” Jacobs says. “What do we do?”

  Berger finds out the basic story. The state Republican Party screwed up the absentee ballot applications it had sent out, forgetting to include a line on the form for the voter ID number. In Seminole County, Republican elections supervisor Sandra Goard allowed Republican operatives to camp out in the elections office for ten days filling in these numbers on the voters’ behalf. Berger is outraged.

  “You file a protest, Harry,” Berger tells him, walking him through the process.

  Jacobs will eventually lie about this conversation. When asked by MSNBC’s Hardball host, Chris Matthews, on November 29,“Have you had any contact with Ron Klain or any of the attorneys for the Gore campaign?” Jacobs will say, “No, sir.”

  “None at all?” Matthews asks. “No contact with the Gore people at all in Washington or in Florida?”

  “Well, I can tell you that I’ve talked to a lot of Democrats; I’ve also spoken to a lot of Republicans. Whether or not they have some official capacity, that’s something unknown to me. I’m pursuing this case on my own.”

  “Right,” Matthews says. “You’ve got no signal urging you on, for example; no cheering section from anybody connected to Gore?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Jacobs will say. *

  Though we’ve heard all sorts of news reports here and there about results of the first machine recount, the world still has no official number. At 6 P.M. that evening in the state senate building, the three Florida officials in charge of the election certification who are now supervising the state’s recount effort—Harris, Roberts, and Crawford, Bush supporters to a man—come before the cameras to tell us that they don’t know, either.

  “We will all remember these times as some of the most critical and defining moments in our nation’s history,” says Harris. “A time when we as Americans are working to ensure the meaning and vitality of our democratic system.” Only fifty-three of the state’s sixty-seven counties have provided her office with their official recount results, she says. Though Harris requested all the re-tallies by Thursday, the fourteen remaining counties legally have until Tuesday, November 14, to provide her with their results.

  The unofficial results are as follows, she says: Her candidate, Bush, scores 2,909,661 votes; Gore gets 1,784 votes less than that, 2,907,877. But these numbers mean nothing. They reflect a mishmash, a casserole, the new numbers from the fifty-three counties that have recounted and certified their
results * plus the old numbers from the fourteen counties that have yet to turn their re-tallies in. And some of these fourteen counties outstanding are unbelievably important for Gore’s hopes. Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties, for instance. Also unreported is Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg and is near Tampa, and Orange County, which includes Orlando—major population centers of the fabled Interstate 4 corridor. Old tallies have Gore beating Bush in both these spots, but not by all that much; about 20,000 total. A small increase in any one of these places could completely flip the election results.

  Harris says that some news organizations are calling the counties on their own and counting those as recount results. The official standards, she says, are a bit more stringent. “Until we have the physical certification in our hands, they are not officially certified,” she says. Absentee ballots from overseas, Harris reminds us, must be both received in Tallahassee and counted by November 17.

  Crawford seems to speak for all three when he says that his endorsement of Bush won’t affect his duties.“Anybody who’s going to serve on this commission had to vote for somebody,” Crawford says, though he neglects to point out that Harris and Roberts voted the same way. It does seem a bit much, all three of them being Bushies.

  “Nobody ever said that democracy is simple or efficient,” Crawford says. “But this is democracy in action. If you want simplicity, just go about seventy miles south of Florida, and you got Cuba, and they’re very simple, they have no elections.”

  They leave the building, and none of us is any closer to knowing really much of anything at all.

  5

  “That limp-dicked motherfucker.”

  In Fort Lauderdale on Friday, November 10, Judge Robert W. Lee, forty, is trying to keep things orderly.

  Lee, appointed to the bench in 1997 by then-governor Lawton Chiles, had hated having to do the automatic machine recount two days before. Having gone to bed at 5 A.M., he awoke Wednesday at 6:30 to run 588,000 Broward County ballots through the ten tabulation machines again.

  Things got a little odder on Thursday, when Democratic lawyers petitioned the canvassing board, asking them to do a hand recount of 1 percent of the county—roughly three precincts. Why? Lee wondered. The machines seemed to be functioning perfectly well. What would be the justification for a hand recount? And now it’s Friday, and the canvassing board is voting on whether or not to begin the 1 percent hand recount, to see if it’s needed countywide.

  Supervisor of Elections Jane Carroll isn’t even there. Carroll, the Republican who’s retiring on January 3 after thirty-two years as elections supervisor, is in Beech Mountain, North Carolina. She participates in the canvassing-board meeting by phone.

  All eyes are on Lee here. Everyone knows Carroll is opposed to the very notion of hand recounts. Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger, meanwhile, has voted for hand recounts as far back as March 1995, when a campaign for the Lauderdale Lakes city council was lost by 2 votes, and another for Miramar commissioner was lost by 9. “I felt strongly then as I do now that we should bend over backwards to protect this democracy,” says Gunzburger, a partisan Democrat elected city commissioner in 1982, county commissioner ten years later. “Whatever we need to do to allow voters to have their voice counted, it is our responsibility as a canvassing board to do so.”

  There isn’t a whole lot of law in this area, Lee thinks. The statute for a recount—signed in 1989 by then-governor Martinez, a Republican—is kind of vague, he thinks. Is the law for when there’s a problem with the vote counting? With the vote tabulation? Lee turns to the county attorney.“This statute is extremely vague as to what it means. When do we have to do this manual recount?”

  Leonard Samuels, a Gore lawyer, suggests that the board count just the county’s 6,686 undervotes. Carroll says that separating the undervotes from the other 582,000 ballots won’t be easy; it will mean manually removing them all. Gunzburger makes the motion that they do the 1 percent plus the undervotes.

  Lee and Carroll refuse to second it. Not going to happen. They’ll stick with the three-precinct rule. If anything.

  The law allows the petitioner to select the 1 percent he wants counted. Not surprisingly, Samuels presents three districts that are almost laughably pro-Gore, the VP having won 91 percent of their 3,892 votes. Precinct 6-C, Sanders Park Elementary School in the Pompano Beach neighborhood of Liberty Park, is so overwhelmingly African-American that only a dozen whites are even on the voting roll. Democrats outnumber Republicans 1,755 to 78. On Election Night, there were 1,071 Gore votes, 19 Bush votes, and 59 undervotes. The other two precincts are in the largely Jewish retirement condo community of Wynmoor Village in Coconut Creek, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a 10-to-1 margin. In precinct 1-F in the Wynmoor Village Entertainment Center, Gore racked up 1,308 votes, with, as was the case in precinct 6-C, more undervotes than Bush votes, 80 to 62. Precinct 6-F in Wynmoor Village was similar: 1,175 Gore votes, 52 Bush votes, and 43 undervotes.

  Ed Pozzuoli, chairman of the Broward County Republican Party, is hardly delighted with Samuels’s picks. “It is not about fairness,” he says. “They’re looking for more Democratic votes.”

  Lee agrees that the precincts they picked are skewed, but that’s the law. “I think we’re setting a bad precedent,” Carroll says. The canvassing board, she says, has no business deciding “whether a voter really intended to vote it…. That’s the reason that I’ve not been in favor of this sort of thing before.”

  In fact, Broward County hasn’t conducted a hand recount since March of ’96, for the Lauderdale-by-the-Sea mayoral race, where Anna Mae French lost to Thomas D. McKane III by 1 vote. And that hand recount just confirmed that French had, indeed, lost by 1 vote.

  Not that Carroll likes punch cards. She’s been trying to get the county commission to pony up for better machines for some time now. In 1993, she wrote a memo criticizing the commission’s wait-and-see attitude on voter technology. “If the theory of waiting to see what will come along in the future had been employed, we would still be on a manual registration system and hand-counting paper ballots brought in by horse-drawn carriages,” she wrote. Still, Carroll’s mind is made up against a hand count. So is Gunzburger’s, in the opposite direction.“We always say one vote makes a difference,” she says. “Well, we’re looking at the next leader of our democracy, the forty-third president.”

  Both Lee and Gunzburger support the 1 percent hand recount; Carroll opposes.

  Carroll agrees to return by Monday early afternoon. The hand recount of the three precincts will commence then.

  It’s weird that they keep bumping into other players in this drama, Daley thinks. Small town. Last night, he, Chris, and Klain went out to dinner at a local restaurant, Cypress, where who should come over to say hi but Katherine Harris. She was perfectly nice, perfectly lovely. Her cousin is chef and co-owner. Still, it was weird.

  Now Friday morning, at the Doubletree, Daley and Chris run into Baker and his gang—Allbaugh, Zoellick, Tutweiler. They’d had a nice meeting yesterday afternoon, Daley thinks, why not go over there and say hello?

  “Hey, Jim, I got a proposition for ya,” Daley jokes. “How about we give you Oregon and Iowa in exchange for Florida?”

  Baker doesn’t seem to find this funny. Daley’s greeted by four stone faces; you can almost hear the distant sound of crickets. Something’s changed, Daley thinks. These guys are in a different mode than they were yesterday. They’re in full battle gear, he thinks. Daley awkwardly exits.

  “I think he’s really pissed off,” Daley says to Christopher.

  The fact that Bill Daley is the son of former Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who helped steal Illinois for JFK in 1960, is not the reason why Fabiani thinks he shouldn’t be so out in front on all of this. Though it doesn’t help. Daley’s gene pool is an irony not lost on us in the media, and it becomes a major talking point of the GOP. Which is too bad, because Daley—who was twelve in November 1960—has worked hard his enti
re life to embody the positive aspects of his father’s politics and to shun the corruption.

  A Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune investigation into the Daley machine in 1972 detailed the myriad ways Daley’s machine ensured victory: dead people voted; other mystery voters had official addresses that didn’t exist. The names of bums were copied from guest registers in skid row motels, and somehow they voted, too. Many Republican judges were kept from supervising, while others worked with their Democratic counterparts for Daley. Poll workers walked into the voting booths to “help” senior citizens pull the straight Democratic lever. 1

  And it worked. In 1960, Kennedy beat Nixon nationally with a hair-thin margin, 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6. Kennedy won Illinois by 8,858 votes—out of a total 4,657,394 cast. And while it’s true that there were credible allegations of vote fraud in downstate Republican areas of the Land of Lincoln, it was Mayor Daley’s Chicago where Kennedy won 89.3 percent of the vote—456,312 votes—which carried him over the top. And though Kennedy’s electoral-vote margin of victory was large enough that he could have lost Illinois and still won, it was not large enough that he could have lost Illinois and Texas—another state where there were rampant allegations of vote fraud—and still won.

  Already Republicans like Baker are pressuring Gore to concede, regurgitating the historical falsehood that Nixon conceded Election Night for the good of the country. In fact, Nixon didn’t even formally concede until November 11, three days after the election, and he did so, by his own admission, with thoughts that a recount would take up to half a year, and with consideration of his future political viability paramount in his mind. And even after the concession announcement—made by his press secretary, not the candidate himself—the Republican Party began investigating allegations about Daley’s machine. RNC chairman Sen. Thurston Morton of Kentucky flew to Chicago and announced the formation of the National Recount and Fair Elections Committee. Recounts and recanvasses were ordered. One precinct’s recount tally went from Kennedy having 323 votes to Nixon’s 78 to a much closer count: 237 to 162. 2