Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Jason Unger, thirty-two, is but one of the attorneys hired by the state GOP to focus on the issue of military overseas absentee ballots. Working with other attorneys at his firm, Gray, Harris & Robinson—one of the few Republican firms in Tallahassee—he has prepared all week for deadline day, November 17.

  Ed Fleming, a Republican attorney in Pensacola who represents Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., has been drafted by Unger to work on the project. In one of their conversations, Unger tells Fleming of a rumor he’s heard that the Dems are going to go full-bore in challenging overseas military absentee ballots. On Thursday, Fleming asks a local county attorney if he’s heard anything about the rumor. Sure, the attorney tells him. Got a memo right here about it, written by the Democrats. He faxes Fleming the memo, written by Herron, outlining the Gore strategy.

  Fleming gives news of the memo to Stuart Bowen, a Bush attorney from Austin who’s supervising the absentee-ballot effort in the Panhandle. On Friday morning, after making sure that Fleming obtained the memo legally, Bowen tells him to fax the memo to Tallahassee ASAP.

  At 11:42 A.M., the memo arrives in Unger’s office. He shows it to the senior attorneys running his shop, who have it run over to Bush HQ at the Bush Building.

  “This is gold,” Tucker says when it gets around to her. It’s a PR jackpot—it plays into an already existing perception that the Democratic Party cares less about the military than the Republicans do. Plus there’s the hypocrisy angle. “Count every vote”? Except for American soldiers?! The Bushies got ready for a full assault. From now on, they will refer only to “military ballots,” not “overseas absentee ballots.”

  Duval County, Clay County, Escambia County, Okaloosa County—the places where there is the highest concentration of military voters—seem to be where it’s the worst. The Gorebies are after ballots for not having a postmark. They’re after military ballots for having a U.S. postmark, though the military will later explain that several batches of these overseas ballots were postmarked in the United States from various port cities. They’re after federal write-in ballots, which are for individuals abroad who claim that they requested an absentee ballot but never received one. Along with their voting information, users of federal write-in ballots have to swear in an affidavit under the penalty of perjury that they requested an absentee ballot and didn’t receive one. The Gorebies are making elections supervisors check the names of the voters against their records to see if, in fact, they did request absentee ballots.

  Gore recount expert Chris Sautter is before the Broward County canvassing board when a team of three other Gore attorneys comes in to disqualify absentee ballots. Sautter is not happy.

  Like Young, Sautter’s a big believer in adopting a conciliatory tone with the canvassing board. And now here come these schmucks, sent by Tallahassee, trying to eliminate votes. Sautter’s first instinct is to not even let them into the room.

  Sautter has a brief discussion with them—not one of them has ever been involved in a recount before. They’re carrying the Herron memo, which he has never seen before. They seem to be under the impression that their orders are to be stringent when it comes to military overseas absentee ballots but not to overseas ballots in general. To Sautter, their attitude is “We’re the pros, and we’re here to take over.”

  This is a county that Gore won with 67 percent of the vote, Sautter tells them. They don’t use the Herron memo.

  One of the Florida Bushies, state GOP finance chair Al Austin, is good friends with Norman Schwarzkopf, and he calls up ol’ Stormin’ Norman to see if he knows about the Herron memo. When he learns of it, the Persian Gulf War commander blows his top. But Schwarzkopf is sick with the flu, so he can’t appear at any press event. Nevertheless, on the morning of Saturday, November 18, Schwarzkopf calls Tucker and dictates a statement. “These armed forces ballots should be allowed to be tallied,” Schwarzkopf says. “It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis, yet because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States who will be their commander in chief.”

  When Tucker and an aide go to the Tallahassee press camps Saturday morning armed with copies of the Herron memo, Schwarzkopf’s statement, and a few other documents, reporters attack them like locusts. On TV on Saturday, and in print on Sunday, the story erupts.

  Ron Klain tries to point out that the rules the Herron memo details are just the same rules that Jim Smith spelled out on Sunday, when the Republicans were fearful of sacks of absentee ballots coming S.W.A.K. from Tel Aviv. He runs over to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, distributing copies of the transcript of Smith’s press conference. But not one media outlet mentions Sunday’s press conference by Jim Smith or how the Bushies have shamelessly pulled a 180 on the issue, since rigorous application of the law will now clearly affect armed servicemen and -women more so than Jews abroad in Israel. * Instead, the focus is on the Gorebies’ nakedly hypocritical love for election law hypertechnicalities in their mad rush to disenfranchise American soldiers. And on the fact that of the 3,733 overseas absentee ballots that have come in since Election Day, 1,527 of them have been scrapped.

  In Austin, Montana governor Marc Racicot—a friend of Bush’s and longtime supporter—sits in with the brain trust and hears this business. Racicot (pronounced Roscoe), once the chief prosecutor for the largest U.S. military jurisdiction in Europe back when he was in the judge advocate general’s corps, volunteers to go point on this.

  Armed with anecdotes that have come from the organized, information-gathering infrastructure that Enwright, Mehlman, and Eskew have assembled, on Saturday Racicot gives a televised press conference to lash out at the hand-recount process and the Democrats’ absentee-ballot disqualification campaign.

  Racicot is a perfect pick for this. His low-key manner combined with his prosecutor’s taste for the jugular will allow him, over the next few weeks, to make the most ugly of allegations while seeming perfectly reasonable. As one of the leaders of the Libby High School basketball team in its first and only state basketball championship season, student body president Racicot set a record that still stands for the most assists in a hoops game: 32. He will give Bush a big one as well.

  More important, he knows how to try a case, having earned a 95 percent conviction rate over an eleven-year stretch. He became Montana’s twentieth governor in 1993, and he will be retiring this year, mentioned frequently as a possible member of a Bush cabinet.

  “There is something, obviously, that is terribly, terribly wrong with what has been occurring,” Racicot says. “We now have clear and convincing evidence—in fact, in my judgment, it’s beyond that—that in Palm Beach County and Broward County, the hand counting of the ballots that is ongoing is not only fundamentally flawed; it is becoming completely untrustworthy.”

  The attempt to discredit the hand-recounting process by mocking the chad has not gained enough steam—especially since everything is televised and witnessed by members of both parties—so the Republicans have decided that they have to just start lying, fibbing, exaggerating, and insinuating.

  They had tried. On Thursday and Friday in Palm Beach, Eskew’s complaints weren’t finding many takers among the reporters who were there, who saw that absent a few minor incidents of human error—all corrected—there wasn’t much to gripe about. Everything was pretty orderly. So Eskew passed off his charges to Tallahassee, and a new Big Lie begins, and the campaign the otherwise respectable Racicot begins to aggressively wage here on behalf of the Bush team henceforth consists of nothing short of a goulash of truth, lies, and innuendo—most offensively against the judiciary—and served to the American people with a sprinkle of concocted moral outrage.

  Right off the bat, Racicot says that the Miami-Dade canvassing board consists of “two Democrats and one Republican.” That’s not true. King is a Democrat; Lehr and Leahy are independent.

  Racicot refers to
“the taping of chads to ballots.” He refers to witnesses who “have completed affidavits that indicate that a taped chad has been taped over the hole where the ballot or the notation could be made for a vote for Governor Bush.” It is true that some of these ballots exist, but in every case the chad was apparently taped by voters. There is no evidence, and there are no witnesses to anyone else doing the taping.

  Racicot goes on to make hay out of the mixing of piles of Gore votes and Bush votes, reading conspiracy in bureaucratic ineptitude, just as Democrats did with minority voters turned away from the polls on Election Day.

  “Ballots have been used as fans,” the former military prosecutor alleges. “In fact, the chairman of the Palm Beach canvassing board, Judge Burton, had to warn counters not to use the ballots as fans.” This one is true; Mehlman himself saw it. Burton told them to stop fanning themselves; the fanning stopped; but not one chad was ever seen falling out as a result of the fanning. Of course, Racicot doesn’t mention that inconvenient fact.

  Racicot harps on: “On Thursday night at one A.M., an elderly counter dropped twenty to sixty ballots over the floor, creating a huge scene. Other observers stepped on the ballots as they were lying on the floor. Just for a minute, imagine that you have a seventy-year-old man at two A.M. in the morning trying to count thousands of small cards, many of which stick together, to see where these tiny holes are located.

  “In Broward County, there’s chad on the floor, on the counting tables, on the chairs,” he continues. Of course this is true. When ballots with hanging chad are handled, sometimes the partially punched chad falls from the ballot. But anyone who has handled and seen these ballots knows that the chad doesn’t fall out unless it was already at least partially, usually almost entirely, punched. And in all the allegations the Republicans will allege, not once will they ever produce evidence—or even one convincing story—of someone punching the chad from a ballot during the counting.

  Anyone who sees the process knows that it is organized, and highly supervised, with bureaucrats and county workers slaving away, trying to do the right thing while under the watchful eyes of the media as well as political operatives from both sides. But the Bush team doesn’t want America to know this. Harping on the changing standards alone isn’t doing the trick, so they begin alleging fraud and corruption.

  “I think when the American people learn about these things, they’re going to ask themselves, ‘What in the name of God is going on here?’”

  One might say the same thing about Racicot’s press conference. It’s a pretty shameless episode in an otherwise respectable career.

  But Racicot is not done, and only now does he hit on the heart of the matter.“Last night we learned how far the vice president’s campaign will go to win this election,” he says. “And I am very sorry to say, but the vice president’s lawyers have gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces in an effort to win at any cost.

  “Last night across Florida, they threw out between nine hundred and eleven hundred votes cast by military men and women. In Duval County, for example, forty-four votes, mostly military, were thrown out. The man who would be their commander in chief is fighting to take away the votes from the people that he would command.” Even with those ballots tossed, Bush picks up 1,376 votes, Gore 750. Bush is now ahead by 926 votes.

  In the Bush Building in Tallahassee, one senior member of the Bush team has a realization.“Boy, they could really use Jim Smith’s words against us,” the strategist says. Luckily for them, neither the Democrats nor the media do so. In fact, only one media outlet—a Web magazine—even points out the contradiction.

  If two men lie, one stuttering, the other smooth and smiling, it is human nature to disbelieve the stutterer and trust the man with the confident grin. And right now, the Bush team is smiling.

  Considering that behind closed doors Lieberman was the most aggressive proponent of using the law any way that the Gore team could, his seeming capitulation on the overseas-absentee-ballot issue is astounding.

  But since he, not unlike Racicot, is a man who wraps harsh partisan rhetoric in a calming, reassuring package, since he is far more effective than Gore in communicating, oozing sincerity where Gore can’t even dribble any, and since he is Gore’s no. 2 and thus able to serve as both attack dog and cheerleader, Lieberman agrees to do all five Sunday shows—ABC’s This Week, with Sam and Cokie, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s Late Edition, with Wolf Blitzer, and even Fox News Channel’s Fox News Sunday.

  On NBC, Tim Russert brandishes the Herron memo and grills Lieberman on it. Throughout the campaign, senior members of the Gore team whined that Russert, a former Democratic Senate staffer, was in the tank for Bush—Bush wanted him to moderate at least one of the debates! they point out—and today he does little to change their minds.

  “Many controversies swirling in Florida,” he says right off the bat. “The most recent: Democratic lawyers challenging overseas absentee ballots, some fourteen hundred and twenty were disqualified, more than either Bush or Gore won. Many of them members of the armed services, and people are very, very concerned. They point to a memo written by Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists the Gore campaign, telling Democratic lawyers, ‘This is how you knock out ballots from military people overseas.’ They don’t have a postmark right. They’re not dated properly. Technicalities, if you will.

  “How can a campaign who insists on the intent of the voter, the will of the people, not disenfranchising anybody accept knocking out the votes of people of armed services?”

  Lieberman says that he hasn’t read the memo, that Russert’s copy is the first he’s actually seen of it.

  “Let me just say that the vice president and I would never authorize, and would not tolerate, a campaign that was aimed specifically at invalidating absentee ballots from members of our armed services,” Lieberman says. “And I’ve been assured that there were more absentee ballots from nonmilitary voters overseas that were ultimately disqualified. We’re all about exactly what you said, having every vote counted fairly and accurately, and I think that was the end aim of what happened with the absentee ballots, and it’s our aim as the hand counts go on in these three counties in Florida.”

  Russert reads from more Bush propaganda, a letter the Bushies secured from the deputy director of the military postal services who “says that if a sailor is on a ship, it’s hard to get a postmark. Will you today, as a representative of the Gore campaign, ask every county to relook at those ballots that came from armed services people and waive any so-called irregularities or technicalities which would disqualify them?”

  Lieberman crumbles like a matzoh. “We ought to do everything we can to count the votes of our military personnel overseas….I would give the benefit of the doubt to ballots coming in from military personnel generally, but particularly in light of the letter and the kind of statements we’ve heard about that.”

  Elections officials are probably afraid of litigation and are therefore following the letter of the law, he says. “I’d urge them to go back and take another look. Because, again, Al Gore and I don’t want to ever be part of anything that would put an extra burden on the military personnel abroad who want to vote….I’d give the benefit of the doubt to ballots generally.”

  Among those watching Meet the Press Sunday morning is Herron, who is stunned to see Joe Lieberman sell him down the river. All his memo did was detail Florida law. He had written it, for Godsakes, at the direction of the Gore-Lieberman team! He’d already lost his job so he could help the effort, and here was the vice presidential nominee distancing himself from the memo when all it did was explain Florida law!

  Stunned, Herron takes a walk to calm down. Baldick has a slightly different reaction. As the guy in charge of the kids who have been running around the state for Gore-Lieberman, the twenty-somethings who were yelled at before canvassing boards from Panama City to Palm Beach while protesting these ballots—so as to help ge
t Lieberman in the White House—he’s enraged at the Connecticut senator’s capitulation. And how about poor Mark Herron, who was just shit-canned from his firm because he’s one of the few Democratic lawyers in Florida—especially in Tallahassee!— with the stones to work for Gore regardless of what Jeb thinks about it? “Fuck Joe Lieberman!” Baldick rants to anyone who will listen. If Lieberman runs for president in 2004, Baldick vows, he will do everything he can to hurt him in the two states he knows best and Lieberman will need most—Florida and New Hampshire.

  Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, is watching this all unfold, and he can’t believe the shit the Republicans are getting away with saying.

  It’s not just this matter of the absentee ballots. Kerrey is retiring from the Senate this year, heading to Manhattan to be president of the New School, but he is not going softly into that dark night. As a Navy SEAL and war hero, Kerrey left a leg in Vietnam. In 1992, when he ran against Bill Clinton for the presidency, Clinton’s draft-dodging offended him to no end. In 2000, George W. Bush’s draft-dodging offended him only slightly more than the cocky way Bush handled it and the free ride the media gave him.

  It wasn’t that Kerrey was such a Gore guy. After all, he was one of only three senators to endorse Bill Bradley in the primaries, and his later take on the glaring weaknesses of Gore’s Social Security reform plans didn’t do the Democratic nominee any favors. But surfing the Web in October, Kerrey was shocked to read a Boston Globe story detailing how Bush, then the son of a congressman, jumped ahead five hundred places in line to get in the Texas Air National Guard. He was even more stunned to learn that there was an unaccounted-for year in Bush’s air guard duty, when Bush was to have reported for duty in Alabama but no one could remember him ever having been there, with no corresponding records that he ever fulfilled the obligation.