Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  When the hand recount starts today, Young very early professes to the canvassing board his desire to have certain controversial Bush votes be counted. In the end he knows allowing those ballots will mean more Gore votes than Bush votes. Plus, he establishes some credibility by appearing fair-minded.

  He’s done this before. He wants the board to have confidence in him. He wants them to partner with him so the correct—and most generous—standard is applied. People forget, Young thinks, these are little administrative agencies. Be deferential but helpful. Treat them right, give them information so they look smart. Develop principled decision making so your guy gets more votes.

  Twenty-two tables of counters and observers. The canvassing board in the corner, checking out the disputed ballots. Young on hand to share his thoughts. Go.

  Burton drives from West Boca to his West Palm Beach judicial office to do some more research on when a countywide hand recount is legally allowed. He’s still mad at Roberts, still upset about the partisan tone from last night.

  “We need to at least talk about how to do this,” he thinks. “Somebody oughta have a plan. If you’re gonna start a business you don’t know anything about, you don’t just start it. You go work at a restaurant before you open one up.”

  A judge friend comes into the office to help him do research.

  There are clearly conflicting statutes in the law. One provision allows for manual recounts. The other says that the election has to be certified by Tuesday. The secretary of state has discretion to postpone the certification if she so chooses, and it doesn’t say anything about how that will only be at times of emergency—like during hurricanes—as Kerey Carpenter has been telling him. Hmm.

  On his own, Burton faxes a letter to division of elections director Clay Roberts, asking if they can extend the certification deadline. If they do the hand recount and sent them the tally after Tuesday at 5 P.M., will their hard work—and any new votes they find—be ignored? Will they just be screwed? Are the voters whose ballots weren’t recorded by the machine just shit out of luck?

  He gets back a fax from Roberts. It says: Yes.

  Clay Roberts also receives a phone call from Frank Jimenez today. Jimenez wants to know why Roberts hasn’t yet issued forth an opinion on why counties can’t conduct hand recounts. No one’s yet requested one, Roberts says. Sunday night, state GOP chair, Al Cardenas, asks Roberts for the opinion. Roberts gladly issues it, and it is distributed to the world. Like turn-of-the-century Chicago Cubs infield double players Tinkers to Evers to Chance, the Jimenez to Cardenas to Roberts maneuver is but one example of how the Gorebies are at a distinct away-game disadvantage.

  David Leahy, the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, would never understand why the Palm Beach County canvassing board is going through such angst. Of course they have the discretion to do whatever they want, he thinks, and though he interprets the statute to mean an error in the vote-tabulation machines, and nothing else, he doesn’t think there’s any big rush to finish by Tuesday at 7 P.M.

  Certainly that’s part of the reason why the board decided to put off their hearing until Tuesday. Leahy is sure that if the board wants to amend its returns after November 7, it can. If it votes to complete a full countywide hand recount, it has some time. December 12 is the “safe harbor” date, by which the Legislature can step in if no electors have yet been assigned to a candidate; Leahy figures they have until December 1 to complete the count, if they want. Plenty of time.

  Outside the Palm Beach County Governmental Center, protesters for both sides are takin’ it to the streets.

  “THEY! HAVE! NO CLASS!” cheers a Floridian woman with a face like Karl Malden whose rather generous dimensions have been impressively wedged into a tight floral pantsuit.

  She’s offended by a Gore backer who’s carrying around an effigy of “King George II.” It consists of a George W. Bush Halloween mask covered in Band-Aids wrapped around the head of an inflatable doll and dressed in an ensemble of K Mart’s finest polyester. The whole rig hangs from a six-foot-long two-by-four.

  “THEY! HAVE! NO CLASS!” the woman continues.

  It’s one of the few chants that doesn’t catch on here, on the corner of North Olive and Fourth Streets, on a lovely Sunday afternoon.

  The crowd that’s gathered isn’t one whose members, Bush backers or Gore backers, care much about class. This is a good guys/bad guys deal. There aren’t many thoughtful debates about the nature of democracy or the hair-trigger media projections. No one’s discussing why Bush signed his 1997 hand recount law for Texas but filed for a federal injunction yesterday to stop the same from happening here. No one’s discussing the litigious nature of America, or why Gore ran such a piss-poor campaign—losing his home state even!—that it’s even come down to dimples and such. No one’s quoting historian David McCullough.

  “No hand jobs,” says one Bush backer’s T-shirt, hastily scrawled in pen on Fruit of the Loom cotton. Yes, definitely not David McCullough.

  “No More Lynching in America!” reads the sign of Jennifer Lowery-Bell, fifty-three, who drove down from Washington to join the call for a revote. She’s drawn an African-American hanging from a noose.

  How is this lynching? I ask.

  “Anytime you have a violation and the people cannot do anything to help themselves, they go to extremes,” she says. She cites the Palm Beachers confused by the butterfly ballot, the African-American voters who were supposedly intimidated from voting throughout the state. “What is that except lynching? It’s just a different phrase for doing it,” she says.

  But Lowery-Bell is in the distinct minority today; the Bush forces are out and energetic. When they cheer “Bush won twice!”—as they do, quite often—she is relegated to standing on the curb and yelling “No!” after each line. She soon changes this to a long “Oooohhhh nooooo!” during the Bushies’ cheer, which is at least competitive in its annoyance factor.

  Maybe Lowery-Bell just chose the wrong day. A local merchant hawking “Re-Vote” T-shirts says he’s sold four hundred since Friday, at $10 a pop. If he keeps it up, Bush’s tax-cut plan may start looking more attractive.

  Between the Bush backers and bashers, cops, journalists, and bystanders, there are only two hundred or so of us here today. But on TV it must look like many more, since anytime MSNBC’s Suzanne Malveaux goes live, she immediately becomes the most popular kid in the playground. The crowd mobs her. As soon as the camera light goes off, the protesters quickly dissipate.

  Otherwise, they don’t seem to know what to do. A few times, the Bush crowd marches halfway up the one block of Fourth Street that has been cordoned off. Then they march back.

  You get the feeling that they’re all kind of new at this. One guy is so eager to join the fun that he marches while still in the midst of making his sign. He holds his posterboard awkwardly in front of him while he colors the block letters in the words “NO CONTROLLING LEGAL AUTHORITY/ BUSH WINS” with a thick green Magic Marker.

  “GORE = MILOSEVIC” reads a completed sign by Wade Whitaker, twenty-two, of Las Vegas.“It’s the same parallels,” Whitaker says when I ask him about his sign. “When Milosevic was voted out of power, he wouldn’t leave, either.” Whitaker is here because, hepped up about the presidential controversy, he jumped on a red-eye that arrived in Orlando at 5:00 Saturday morning. He doesn’t know anyone in town and isn’t even sure where he’s staying tonight.

  Make no mistake: These protests are not to be confused with those seen at recent anti-globalization protests in Seattle or, to a lesser extent, in Washington. The local cops here in Palm Beach look bemused more than anything else. One tells me they aren’t worried at all. “I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble,” says a member of the Sheriff’s Department. “Look at the ages of the people here. Two fifty-year-olds tend not to get in fistfights.”

  A local in an SUV keeps speeding by and riling up the crowd, yelling, “Bush is an alcoholic! No junkies in the White House!”

  “We
xler’s people cannot read directions,” reads another sign, belonging to Carole Parsons, a fifty-five-year-old Palm Beach housewife whose sign refers to Florida representative Bob Wexler.

  Who are “Wexler’s people”? I ask, suspiciously.

  “The people who elected him, who voted him into office,” she says.

  And who would those “people” be?

  She pauses for a moment.

  “Liberal Democrats,” she finally says.

  She later holds up a sign that says, “Wexler needs his Beano.”

  Both groups are pretty entrenched—both the side decrying “Jeb Crow” and the others who are constantly cheering “Jesse Go Home,” a reference to Jesse Jackson, who has yet another rally scheduled for tomorrow.

  A dozen or so religious leaders walk in, dressed in their Sunday best. “We’re here to pray for peace,” says Marc Murray, a local youth minister with Trinity Church International. They stand in a circle and are noticed only for the space they take up.

  Heated arguments pop up here and there. Four older pro-Bush Cuban-Americans pretend to cry, mocking a young pro-Gore white girl. “Ayayay!” says one of the Cubanos, an older woman.

  “You are not compassionate!” the young girl lectures. “Compassionate conservatives don’t make fun of people!”

  “Go home and cry!” responds an older man.

  Another sign: “If arrows confuse you, you shouldn’t be driving. Re-voke Palm Beach Dems driver’s licenses.”

  Yet another: “Incompetents can’t vote.”

  A few signs mention Elián González. Others mention Rush Limbaugh.

  Soon the crowd decides that its new mission is to score supportive honks from passing cars. They stand at the police barricade and screech wildly every time a Grand Am toots. A woman powders her nose while a local idiot tries to hit on her. A guy with a sign saying “God Made Bush President” appears. Another, hyping the Web site Newsmax.com, starts shouting out that “Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw have bald spots.”

  This guy has a bald spot, too.

  Two middle-aged white men start challenging the bona fides of an effeminate, fortyish Gore supporter. “Let’s see some ID!” yells one of the Bushies. “You’re not from around here!” His chum joins in: “He’s an outof-town rabble-rouser! Just like Jesse Jackson!”

  The Gore guy says he isn’t about to show the two his driver’s license.“Are you a cop?” he asks. “No? Then fuck you!” He crosses his arms defiantly. As the crowd converges on itself, a local teenager—Alex Baker, fourteen—jumps into the circle.

  “Who wants water?” he asks at the top of his lungs. “We’re selling water here! Who wants some?”

  The crowd laughs and dissolves.

  Baker and his buddy, Tyler Virgadamo, thirteen, are selling water for $1.50 and soda for $1.

  “All the yelling that they do, their throats are going to start hurting,” says Virgadamo of the crazy grown-ups all around them.

  They’ve made $150 today, Baker says.

  The world will never fully know what role Jeb Bush plays in all of this. He largely stays hidden from view, though his operatives—Jimenez, Harris, Speaker of the State House Tom Feeney, who was his running mate in ’94—play leading roles. Because of the sunshine law, reporters will be able to obtain records of phone calls made and received, but we will never know the content of those calls.

  E-mail is different. Jeb is a wicked e-mailer, with at least three addresses.

  The day after the election, Jeb spokeswoman Katie Baur sent an e-mail to Frank Jimenez, who took official leave that day to help Jeb’s big brother. Jeb’s chief of staff, Sally Bradshaw, had asked her to send him a message.

  “SALLY WANTED ME TO REMIND YOU TO TALK TO BEN GINSBURG [sic] PRIOR TO PRE-BRIEF,” she wrote. “SORRY FOR CAPS… DRAMATIC TIMES.”

  Today, Monday, December 13, Jeb gets involved, too.

  One woman writes Jeb: “Is there any way this can be stopped?” She keeps getting phone calls, she complains, telling her,“Your vote along with nineteen thousand others was thrown out.”

  Jeb forwards the note to Baur and Bradshaw, with a note: “This is a concerted effort to divide and destroy our state.”

  “Ve have our vays also,” Baur—ever-sensitive to those Holocaust survivors of Palm Beach County—writes back. “I’m working on this.”

  Bradshaw writes: “This is obscene. I hope we are getting this to the press. Shouldn’t we give them a list of all the scare tactics the Gore campaign is using?”

  Three minutes later comes the note from Baur, whose boss has supposedly recused himself from it all: “That is what I am gathering.”

  In Miami, the Rev. Jesse Jackson—the man who once referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” who once said that “Zionism is a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism,” who griped that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust”—is standing in front of the congregation of Temple Israel of Greater Miami.

  “It seems that in West Palm Beach, the African-Americans and the Jewish senior citizens were targeted,” Jackson says. “Something systematic was at work here….It was large and systematic. Once again, sons and daughters of slavery and Holocaust survivors are bound together with a shared agenda, bound by their hopes and their fears about national public policy.” He’s trying to re-forge the brotherhood between Jews and blacks that was so important to the civil rights movement, a connection that Jackson bears more than a small share of the blame in having helped fracture. News stories in the coming days will report that Jews and blacks are working together again, but these news stories are largely nonsense. Beyond a few rallies here and there, nothing really changes. *

  Jackson’s pet rabbi, Stephen Jacobs, whom he had to bring with him from Los Angeles, steps up. “Now, we blacks and Jews find ourselves fighting old battles we thought we had won,” he says. “We must stand together, or we will perish alone.”

  The synagogue’s leader, Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, agrees. “Some people say what is happening here in Florida is hysterical. It’s not hysterical, it’s historical. And it’s especially historical for us Jews and blacks as we come back together.”

  Time passes in Volusia.

  What’s this?

  In Volusia County, Young has discovered 320 votes not included in the count on Election Night.

  Apparently, in precinct 305 in DeBary at 9 P.M. Election Night, one machine stopped accepting ballots for some reason. After the elections tech-nerd didn’t show, the clerk tried to fix it herself, turning the machine off and then on again. The machine flashed: “Prepare for election” which told her that it was starting over again, so she secured the ballots and wrote a note to “check these.”

  When he checks, Young notices that there are more ballots counted than were recorded in this precinct. Young wants this to be a lock-down indisputable recount, unchallengeable. So even though he knows that DeBary leans Republican and that these 320 votes mean a net gain of 58 votes for Bush, Young’s not worried. Someone was going to discover this sooner or later, and he doesn’t want a 58-vote difference to be the grounds for any GOP gripes about this being an inaccurate count. Young already knows that he’ll be able to make up the 58 votes.

  But the 320-vote discovery feeds into a larger concern everyone in the room has: will they have enough time to finish? After all, Harris has made it clear that all results have to be at her office by 5 P.M. Tuesday.“Every county must have official certifications of the voting returns from last Tuesday delivered to the Florida Department of State by 5 P.M… or those returns will not be included in the statewide canvass,” she says in a statement. “No county canvassing board has ever disenfranchised all the voters of its county by failing to do their legal duty to certify returns by the date specified in the law. I am confident that no county canvassing board will do so in this election.” *

  Additionally, since no one wrote to Harris asking her opinion of hand recounts—despite Kerey Carpenter’s lobbying in Palm Beach—Harris wrote a le
tter to state GOP chair Cardenas, saying that, indeed, she thinks hand recounts are only for times of extreme emergency, like a hurricane. The letter was then leaked to the media and everyone else.

  Ten hours into the Volusia County hand recount, more than half the ballots have been checked out and 58 precincts out of 172. As the counting ends for the night, Bush is up a net 33 votes, much of this due to precinct 305.

  Reporters and Democrats start questioning Young’s methods. He hears thirdhand that some of the Big Gun Democrats in Tallahassee want him removed, they think he’s not aggressive enough, they’ve heard he’s being serene and not in-your-face with the board. But Young’s not worried. He knows those votes will be picked up. He tells reporters that it’s a “fluid process.” On a cell phone, he tells one of the Gorebies in Tallahassee to “go to hell.” Then he throws the cell phone across the parking lot.

  As Sunday becomes Monday, the canvassing board in Polk County in Central Florida conducts a partial hand recount of its Opti-scan ballots that you won’t hear one Bushie object to. That’s because the board—consisting of two Democrats, Supervisor of Elections Helen Gienau, and county court judge Anne Kaylor, and Republican county commission chairman Bruce Parker—scraps about 108 net Gore votes. Most of this change comes from the 90 Gore votes from precinct 131—the West Lakeland Church of God—that, upon second glance, seem to have been counted twice. A similar deal happened in Seminole County last week during a partial hand recount there; Bush picked up 98 votes in that one.

  Of course, both Seminole and Polk Counties use Opti-scan ballots, which may be easier to decipher since counters are looking at the handiwork of voters with pens on paper, not styluses on punch cards. Still, there is the same subjectivity employed, and humans—with, presumably, the same frailties and partisan temptations—are doing the counting.