by Jake Tapper
You have no proof of receipt by seven o’clock on the night of the election, as the statute requires, Meros says. You have no proof that the ballots were in the safekeeping of the board, which is also what the statute requires.
But where Meros argues the rule of law, Sancho sees overzealousness. “He’s treating the proceeding as if it’s a criminal proceeding,” Sancho thinks. Sancho had in fact investigated how the ballots ended up at the polling warehouse where the ballots are taken, and he ascertained that the ballots were legit. He explains this; Meros doesn’t buy it, calling Sancho’s investigation “hearsay.”
Sancho explains that seven of the ballots had been filled out by county employees who had been running the polling precincts on Election Day, and therefore didn’t have time to show up to their precincts and vote. The county employee who collected these seven just happened to forget to turn them in to the county’s “AB,” or absentee ballot, department. There were two ballots that had been sent to Sancho’s office through interdepartmental mail, which—in the mail crush leading up to November 7—no one had opened until after the election. Then there were three absentee ballots from voters who had recently changed addresses; the ballots were then hung up in the bureaucracy of the addressing office.
Meros does everything he can to block the admissibility of the ballots. Led by county judge Jim Harley, the canvassing board overrules him, pointing out that Sancho had the authority to accept them. Meros is not happy.
Then they open the ballots, right there, before Meros and the judge and about a dozen others.
Ten votes for Bush; 2 for Gore.
Meros and the other Republicans in the room start smiling.
“Are there any more objections, George?” Harley asks knowingly. Everyone laughs.
“I’m not saying another word,” Meros says, thanking the canvassing board for its time and walking out of the room.
“I see it all across the state,” Sancho will later say to me.“Each side is simply trying to achieve its ends, uncover votes it believes will be favorable and suppress votes it believes will be unfavorable.” In the process, neither party is doing much to elevate the dignity of this process much above your average Panama City wet T-shirt contest.
Carol Roberts is fired up. “I never would have agreed” to seek an opinion from Clay Roberts “had I been told it was binding,” she says, “because I believe we in Palm Beach County ought to be making that decision.” She wants the team to ignore it.
Burton now wants to do the count, inspired at least in part by Wallace’s annoying object-object-object stall tactics, Kerey Carpenter’s suspected shiftiness and Harris’s stalwart partisanship. But as turned around as he feels, the judge is not quite on Roberts’s program when it comes to ignoring the law.
“As a county court judge and as a chair of this board,” Burton says, “I think it is my obligation to follow the law, and the law tells me that this opinion is binding on this board, and the law tells me we have to follow it. And so based on this, it would be my motion that the manual recount be suspended.”
Burton calls the vote to suspend the countywide hand recount before it even begins. LePore—now taking guidance from county attorney Denise Dytrych, not Montgomery—votes aye. Roberts votes nay. It’s Burton’s motion, so he’s automatically with LePore.
At this point the board can’t even certify the results it has because of a restraining order granted last week in the butterfly ballot case. In the afternoon, circuit court judge Jorge LaBarga—the poor dude forced to contend with the butterfly ballot revote case—dissolves the restraining order and also tells the board that it is “permitted” to conduct the full hand recount, though Harris has discretion as to whether or not she’d accept the late returns. “If she decides to accept them, fine,” LaBarga says. “If she doesn’t, then you need to talk to her about it.”
So can the board go ahead with the count after all? The canvassing board debates the matter. Dytrych says that they shouldn’t.
“What happens?” Roberts asks, at the height of her you-go-girlness. “Do we go to jail? Because I’m willing to go to jail.” Democrats in the crowd cheer.
“If we start, and the supreme court tells us to stop, that’s what we’ll do,” Burton says. He and Roberts have made up after he accused her of sandbagging him, but he’s still unhappy when she goes into campaign mode.
Wallace is furious. “The entire world is watching you all and the action that you take,” he says. “The chief elections officer of the state of Florida has told you that you cannot act lawfully and conduct a manual recount. What we suggest and what you suggested this morning—and nothing has changed since your hearing this morning—is that you wait for a court decision telling you it’s legal or not legal to continue with the manual recount.”
Roberts acts as if Wallace’s microphone isn’t on and calls for a vote on the recount.
All three vote aye.
“What happens if the supreme court says that the canvassing board is acting illegally by conducting this manual recount?” Wallace continues.
“Then we’re going to abide by any ruling of the court, of course,” Burton says. A lot of Burton’s statements to Wallace include an “of course.” The kid is getting really annoying, Burton thinks.
“And what would you do to preserve the sanctity of those ballots?”
“I think the same thing that’s always done, Mr. Wallace.”
“What is that?” Wallace asks.
“You have been in there,” Burton says.
“No, this has never been done before,” Wallace presses. “I don’t understand what’s to be done.”
“All right, do we need to address anything else?” Burton asks.
“I don’t have anything else,” says Roberts.
Wallace is fired up. “Is the judge refusing to answer the question?”
“I think the judge answered the question,” Burton says. “We have kept those ballots under security, and they’ll continue to be kept in the same manner that we’ve done to protect the sanctity of them.”
They break and agree to start the counting at 7 A.M. tomorrow, Wednesday.
Bush spokesman Eskew gripes to reporters, who await his every word. “Machine counts are accurate. Let’s not forget, we’ve had three of them,” Eskew says. “What on earth rationale is there for going to a less accurate accounting, other than to come up with a different result?”
Good question. Maybe he should ask Bush why he ever signed that 1997 Texas law.
LePore is starting to come to terms with her naïveté. She is no longer listening to Montgomery, favoring instead Republican county attorney Dytrych, whom she likes and respects and, more important, knows. And the judge. She’s listening a lot more to the judge these days.
But it’s not as if she thinks that the Democrats are the only ones with agendas. She’s clearly resentful of Kerey Carpenter and all her lobbying. And now there’s the matter of Katherine Harris and Clay Roberts. LePore is bending over backward to be as impartial as she can; she cannot believe how Harris and Roberts are behaving. “As an election official, you need to have at least the appearance of being nonpartisan and treating everything that you do in a nonpartisan manner,” she thinks. She remembered when she heard that Harris was actively involved in Bush’s campaign; she thought it was inappropriate then. Now it is totally out of hand. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Every year, the association of elections supervisors has a reception for legislators in Tallahassee. In this past one, the association was to hold a news conference announcing its statewide “Get Out the Vote” campaign with its GOTV foundation. The organizers of the campaign wanted Harris to appear, but—LePore remembers—Harris kept having it rescheduled because she was on the pro-Bush “Freezin’ for a Reason” tour for the New Hampshire primary.
Elections have never been a priority for Harris, LePore thinks. Even though she’s constantly a font of promises—telling the association, “We’re gonna do this” and “We’r
e gonna do that”—when it comes time to do it, she’s never there. Harris didn’t cough up the cash she’d pledged for the association’s GOTV campaign, she barely worked with the association at all on voter registration, she’s been a nonentity. Most of the time Harris didn’t even attend the association’s conferences, though she is—as she reminds the world now—the chief elections officer in the state.
And now, the way she’s acting, so transparently pro-Bush, so unwilling to let them do a hand recount, forced by a judge to consider reasons why vote tallies might come in late… LePore just didn’t understand it.
LePore has an opinion on Clay Roberts, too, whom she’s worked with a lot: “Clay knows who his boss is,” she says.
While Harris is coming at the board from the right, telling them that they can’t count, Gore attorney Ben Kuehne is coming at them from the left. On behalf of the Florida Democratic Party, Kuehne files a motion before LaBarga to seek injunctive relief and make the canvassing board scrap that 1990 standard and start to loosen it up, to “review ballots based on voters’ intent.”
The law Kuehne cites is good ol’ 102.166 (7) (b): “If a counting team is unable to determine a voter’s intent in casting a ballot, that ballot shall be presented to the county canvassing board for it to determine the voter’s intent.”
In Fort Lauderdale, the Democrats are suing the Broward County canvassing board, too. It seems that where the canvassing boards do what they want, the Dems claim the hegemony of the canvassing board. All hail! Where they don’t, they sue. Mean old board!
Meanwhile, local Democrats are spreading rumors about Lee, about the fact that Jeb appointed him, that some big circuit court judgeship is awaiting him in return for yesterday’s vote. The Democratic lawyers’ take on Burton is even far more angry and suspicious.
The counters in Miami-Dade take around four hours. They’re interrupted to hear King read an announcement that Harris is delaying the preliminary certification until tomorrow, and will consider reasons for late tallies if faxed to her by 2 P.M. Wednesday.
Before 8 P.M., the board issues the news: Gore gained a total of six votes.
Now: Should they count all 653,963 ballots?
Six votes? Martinez says. “They have not met the threshold requirement….We have to follow the law here. What happened today does not rise to the level of an error.”
Coffey points to the 10,750 undervotes. “Some think that there could be eight thousand disenfranchised voters who did not strike it right. Take six percent of that in the mind-boggling closeness of the election. The outcome shows that indeed there are additional votes in favor of Al Gore. We are in a situation right now where it just wouldn’t be right to stop the process, the process of getting to the truth.”
De Grandy has a different take, of course. “It is time to reach closure,” he says.
“We need to follow the law,” Martinez adds. “I can talk for hours about Dickens or 2000-and-whatever-it-was Space Odyssey. I read fiction. That’s not what you want to hear from me. I’m a lawyer, and you are a canvassing board that has to follow the law.”
De Grandy knows recounts firsthand. In 1988, during his first run for public office, he beat Carlos Valdez by 9 votes in the GOP runoff for a state legislative seat. * After the absentee ballots were counted, however, De Grandy and Valdez were tied. An automatic recount had Valdez picking up a vote, De Grandy losing one, so De Grandy asked for a hand recount. The canvassing board voted 2 to 1 to conduct the count—Leahy, of course, voted against it—and while they found De Grandy’s missing vote, they also found another one for Valdez. De Grandy didn’t appeal.
King calls for a vote. He exercises his chairman’s prerogative and asks Leahy to vote first. Leahy’s been doing this for more than a generation. He’s a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, a milquetoast moustachioed man of impeccable credentials and zero charisma. He believes in his machines. When he votes no, few are surprised.
Lehr’s the wild card here. While King, a Democrat, has made it pretty clear that he favors a countywide hand recount, no one knows what Lehr’s going to do. She’s quiet. Born in Brussels, Belgium, she’s married to a big GOP honcho. All eyes on her.
Lehr votes no.
King votes yes.
No hand recount in Miami-Dade. Though they do want the additional Gore votes added to the certification.
Good, Martinez thinks. He’s glad. The rule of law prevailed.
Ticktock, ticktock.
Miami-Dade’s a goose egg, Palm Beach starts tomorrow, Broward’s waiting to see what the Florida Supreme Court says about the conflicting opinion… what about Volusia?
Volusia’s done. And the new tally is good news for Gore. Gore picked up 241 votes in the hand recount, Bush 143, a net gain of 98 for the vice president.
Jack Young smiles.
In Tallahassee, Baker enters the state senate hearing room, where a bunch of us media idiots are sitting. He then rhetorically urinates in Gore’s ear while announcing to the world that it’s raining.
Offering “a proposal that we think is very fair,” Baker says that the Bush campaign will change its position on manual recounts, accepting them as valid, as long as the counties engaging in the manual recounts finish their task by Tuesday at 5 P.M. “We are offering to accept the manual recount up to the time of the statutory deadline,” Baker says.
This is of course a clear physical impossibility, as declared by the Palm Beach County canvassing board, which has said it would need six days for the operation. Additionally, whatever hand-counting the board could have accomplished Tuesday was shanked when Harris issued her opinion questioning the legality of the hand recount, thus suspending it. Nonetheless, Baker pushes this forward as a “compromise that both campaigns [could] enter into in good faith,” knowing full well that the Gore team will reject it on its face. (Which happens a few minutes later, when Daley, in Washington, issues a Chicago-style deep-dish No Way.)
It is imperative, Baker argues, that the Gore team accept his offer. “More and more we see uncertainty in financial markets and we see uncertainty abroad,” Baker says, insinuating that Gore may be responsible for an impending apocalypse.
Oh, sweet Moses.
Baker, his comments actually written by Zoellick, slams the Gore campaign for suing Broward County when it refused to continue with its hand recount. “The Gore campaign, which placed great weight on Florida law when it thought the provisions served its tactics, does not like this Florida law,” he rightly says. “In sum, the Gore campaign has been unwilling to accept any finality,” Baker continues, “after the vote, after the recount, after the manual recount tests in selective favorable counties, or even after the larger selective manual recounts within the time established by Florida statute. Indeed, the manual recount in Palm Beach County is at least the fourth count of these votes, because the county also undertook a third machine count.”
Baker neglects to mention that the third machine count came at the request of the Republicans. Since the first one was just the regular election count, and the second was the law-mandated recount because the margin of victory was so slim, that would mean that the Democrats and the Republicans have one recount apiece done at their respective requests, the one done at the Democrats’ request being manual, and uncompleted, the one done at the Republicans’ request being that third machine recount.
But Baker’s counting on you not knowing that.
Baker is asked how this is in any way a compromise. The Palm Beach hand recount has no chance of being concluded by close of business Tuesday, while Bush still leads by an estimated 388 votes. And—according to the Bush team—Bush will be the anticipated winner of the absentee ballots due by midnight Friday. How does this not give Bush a distinct advantage?
“How can you say that?” Baker asks, seemingly almost wounded. “There’s no assurance he will win those [absentee ballot] votes. Traditionally, they have favored the Republican candidate, and we should say that; I’ve already said that. But there’s absolutely no
assurance. So if you’re suggesting that we take no risk by this proposal, I would argue with that rather strongly.
“I think for them to reject it just on the grounds that it locks in a victory for us is simply not right,” Baker says.
In the midst of this nonsense, Baker does make some of the legitimate, cogent arguments on his side. It is true—and somewhat disturbing—that the Democrats have yet to offer any sort of timeline for when the recount process might be over to their satisfaction. On Thursday morning on NBC’s Today show, for instance, Lieberman was asked if his ticket would cease gumming up any finality to the Florida recount process if it got its manual recounts, and he hedged. “We have a wait-and-see attitude about that,” Lieberman said, playing right into the Bush campaign’s argument that the Gore team is going to keep challenging the Florida results until it finds an outcome it likes.
Baker is asked: If the Bush team objects to the “subjectivity” of the largely Democratic counties from which the Gore team wants recounts, would he therefore agree to a statewide hand recount?
“I reject that categorically, and let me explain why,” Baker says. “It took fifteen hours to count four precincts in Palm Beach County. There are six thousand precincts in the state of Florida. It would take an inordinate amount of time to count six thousand precincts manually. Furthermore, we have made very clear since we’ve been here our problem with the fundamentally flawed process of manual counting. How it could lead to human error or even mischief—those concerns are well known.
“Many people around the country have urged both candidates to reach out to one another with a fair proposal to resolve this divisive and unfortunate process,” Baker concludes. “We are doing just that.”
For a woman who doesn’t seem to think we have a second to spare before the winner of Florida’s presidential contest is declared, Harris sure takes her time getting to her 5 P.M. press conference tonight.