Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Greenberg says that Leahy, a twenty-six-year expert, has already testified that he does “not believe that running ballots through the card reader will further degrade the ballots.” In his experience, Leahy has already testified, any chad that falls off is one “hanging on by two corners, or one corner, [and] we have unanimously determined those to be clear votes. There may be instances where a clear hanging chad, either through manual handling or through this operation of putting them through the reader one more time, may fall off. I’m not concerned about that as a canvassing-board member. That is a clear vote. And we’ve already determined those to be clear votes.”

  Martinez pipes in. “Your Honor, when we were before the canvassing board last week, Mr. Zack… said, quoting from the motto on the seal of the Supreme Court of Florida, he read a quote in Latin, and he translated it for the benefit of all of us…. ‘Soon enough, if done rightly.’… The right thing for you to do is to put a pause to these matters and get some guidance from the Supreme Court of Florida,” which will be meeting tomorrow.

  Esquiroz denies the motion.

  Martinez and De Grandy will file the motion before another judge when the work week begins, but that will be denied, too.

  Ed Pozzuoli is fired up.

  “The Gore campaign now wants to lower the bar because it needs more votes!” the Broward County GOP chairman rants. With Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties utilizing looser standards, Broward decides to do so as well on Sunday, November 19. County attorney Ed Dion, a Republican, and assistant county attorney Andrew Meyers, whose wife is helping the Gore legal team, conclude that the two-corner rule is too stringent. Meyers comes armed with the Texas standard, raising the eyebrows of Republican observers who wonder if maybe his wife gave him a copy of it.

  The timing, at least, is a bit suspect. With counting in 390 of the county’s 609 precincts completed, Gore has picked up 105 net votes, which will not be enough. For Judge Lee, however, the more significant timing issue comes from the fact that they all just reviewed about 50 dimpled ballots from a precinct where clearly something was wrong with the voting machines.

  “Any semblance of a standard of fairness in the hand-counting process in Broward County has been abandoned,” says Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan.

  Dion, of course, says that’s nonsense. He’s a Republican, for Godsakes! It’s just that judges in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties have ruled against a per se exclusion of any ballots. “My only job is to represent the canvassing board,” Dion says. “This is an evolving situation. What we believed to be accurate legal advice on Monday is now changed.”

  The Palm Beach group is only a few hours into their Saturday chore when a Republican counter, a woman, angrily leaves table nine. She is enraged.“I’ve had it,” she whispers to a reporter. “I’m not coming back. There are some real games going on here.” The problem isn’t the Democrats, however. It’s the Republicans. The GOP observer at her table is objecting to every sixth Gore vote, a pattern that is repeating itself at other tables. These are not dimples or otherwise disputable ballots, these are clear Gore votes, punched through. The Republicans’ strategy is now offending even Republicans. *

  Burton realizes this, of course, and before the count began today he approached each counting team to tell them how the canvassing board was inspecting the “questionables.” One precinct had 440 “questionables,” he says, but at the canvassing-board table, he anticipated that Republican lawyers like Wallace and John Bolton, a newly arrived senior Bush aide, would object to “about four of them.”

  In fact, Bolton doesn’t even wait for the ballots before he starts launching objections. He says that counters shouldn’t be intimidated into not putting ballots in the questionable pile. Burton says he’s just trying to “educate” the counters. Bolton disagrees.

  It’s the Republican strategy: gum it up. They don’t like the fact that the counts are going on, so they want to ruin them. It’s rather immature, not to mention vaguely anti-democratic. But it’s working.

  Early afternoon, a new GOP observer comes in and begins raising hell at Team Five. Everything had been going fine with Team Five until this young punk arrives. The Democratic counter—an older African-American woman—has had a routine: she picks a ballot from the stack, holds it up for everyone to look at, flips it front and back, then places it in the appropriate pile—for Bush or Gore or whomever. While she’s putting it in the stack, she takes another ballot with her other hand. Young Punk has a problem with her routine, though.

  “Wait until you put it in the stack before you pick up another one,” he says.

  “We’ll be here all day,” she says under her breath.

  “You’re doing it again,” he says. “One at a time.”

  He raises his hand: a formal objection. Lawyers swarm.

  “She’s picking up two ballots at a time, calling them out like it’s only one,” he says, falsely.

  “You know that’s not the truth,” she says. “You are not truthful. That’s a lie.”

  This offends Bolton. “I don’t think you have to say that at all,” he says.

  “Who are you?” the Democratic observer, an older white man, says to Bolton, clearly annoyed.

  The cavalry—Burton, sheriff’s deputies, county officials, lawyers—arrives.

  “If you see something going on you don’t like, you don’t talk to her,” Burton tells Young Punk. “You talk to your lawyer.”

  Burton orders Young Punk to another table. Bolton complains that this makes it look like Young Punk did something wrong. The Democratic woman agrees to change teams instead.

  “Thank you very much,” Burton says. “You are a lady. I think tomorrow morning we’re going to have to make some changes.”

  Later Burton makes a plea to the observers. “I want to assure you, if you’re an observer, by all means put aside a ballot if it’s questionable. But if you’re objecting simply to object, the board is going to have to discuss it. When we go through four hundred and fourteen objections and only six are objected to when the lawyers go through them…”He trails off. “I’m begging you all to be reasonable,” he says.

  Outside, the Elián connection is complete. We already have Gutierrez. And Coffey. And Cuban-Americans angry at the Clinton-Gore administration, and chaos in Miami, Al Gore not sure what to do or what to say, courts and lawsuits.

  And now we have “the fisherman.”

  Donato Dalrymple got his fifteen minutes a year ago, when—out in the Atlantic on his cousin’s boat—his cousin dove into the sea and rescued poor Elián. The media called him “the fisherman,” even though he’s a house-cleaner and that was his first time out in the boat. His cousin would later say that Dalrymple overinflated his role in the rescue. But he was there—holding Elián in his arms, hiding in the closet—on that fateful April morning when the INS stormed into the Little Havana home, forever harming Gore’s chances for significant support in Miami-Dade’s Cubano precincts.

  So what the hell’s he doing here, outside the Emergency Operations Center?

  “I was a victim of this administration,” Dalrymple says. “And I just came here to check it out. Before the election is actually stolen, or someone concedes, I just wanted to come and see. I’m just like any other citizen here.”

  You here because the media’s here?

  “I’m not here for the cameras,” Dalrymple insists. “I just came here to support George Bush.”

  On Wednesday, November 8, Gore fund-raiser Peter Knight convened a bunch of the fat cats who were in Nashville for the election and secured $3 million in pledges to the Gore recount fund. On Sunday, November 14, Don Evans sent out an emergency e-mail to Bush supporters, asking each to kick in $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney recount fund.

  By now, the money to the Bush and Gore recount committees has started to really pour in. Twice as much for Bush as for Gore, of course—about $7.5 million. The same people and network that made the Bush campaign the most cash-rich presidential campaign in history, t
o the tune of $100 million, kick in $7.4 million. To his credit, Bush has limited donations to $5,000 and is listing the names of his contributors on the Web—people like former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and Kenneth Lay, chairman of Enron, a Houston-based Texas energy company that has been over the years Bush’s largest benefactor. American Airlines CEO Donald Carty, Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks, and MBNA chairman Alfred Lerner all give $5,000. With Boies fighting for Gore, Republican donors affiliated with Microsoft have twice the reason to kick in bucks; and Microsoft lobbyist Jack Abramoff; Charles Simonyi, chief programmer of Word and Excel; Bryan Woodruff, a software design engineer; and several others have all donated.

  Knight’s been able to bring in $3.5 million. Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch kicks in $500,000; Stephen Bing, a Hollywood writer (Married… with Children) and producer (Stallone’s Get Carter) gives $200,000; Slim-Fast founder S. Daniel Abraham $100,000; actress Jane Fonda $100,000; the political action committee of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle $5,000; Las Vegas Sun editor/president Brian Greenspun gives $5,000. New Jersey senator-elect Jon Corzine just bought himself a senate seat with $60 million of his own money; he kicks in $25,000. New York songwriter Denise Rich, who’s trying to get her slimy, sleazy, fugitive tax-evading ex-husband a pardon, donates $25,000.

  By now, civil rights attorney Henry Latimer * —a former Broward circuit judge and the first black partner at the Fort Lauderdale law firm Fine Jacobson Schwartz Nash Block & England—has been designated the Gore team’s go-to guy on all the complaints about voting irregularities in the minority community. He reaches out to members of the civil rights community throughout the state, tells them to let him know of anything—anything—at all. He works with the NAACP, talks to the organization’s representatives in Washington, D.C., and in Florida.

  He hears of things that disturb him. Black voters shut out at one precinct because the polls were closed, but two white voters are allowed to stroll in and cast their votes. Hundreds of voters, the majority of whom seem to be black or Hispanic, who should have been on the voting rolls but weren’t for some reason. Other instances, where black voters were asked for two forms of picture ID. Voters complaining about cops oddly swarming about polling places. But what can be done about any of this? Latimer wonders. A lot of the stuff is just anecdotal. And you can’t go to court on every complaint. The Gorebies are sensitive to the perception that they’re running to court every time there’s the most minute incident.

  He is bothered a great deal by the fact that there was so much ballot spoilage in black precincts. Latimer doesn’t hold Jeb or Harris responsible—not in the direct, conspiratorial sense, anyway. But what happened on Election Day is generally reflective of the community at large, and most people are prone to overlook the rights of minorities, Latimer thinks. It’s no surprise that black precincts have worse machines, poorly trained elections clerks.

  “Gee whiz,” Latimer thinks, recalling his youth in Miami in the 1950s and ’60s, marching for civil rights. “All these years, and I don’t know if my vote counted.”

  Racism is different now than in his youth. No, they don’t have Sheriff Bull Connor standing out there with bulldogs, keeping blacks from the polls by force. No, it’s benign neglect these days, he thinks. Still, what can be done legally? The best thing now might be to focus on how to change this situation in the future.

  Sunday, Bruce Rogow flies up to Tallahassee. When he arrives at the Double-tree Hotel, right there in the lobby, David Boies is being interviewed by 60 Minutes.

  “This is not where I’d be the day before a case before the Supreme Court of Florida,” Rogow thinks.

  Rogow’s no foe of media attention, but he wonders if Boies is playing too many roles on the Gore team. He’s not sure that you can keep yourself on the kind of track that you need to be on to plot the strategy when you’re also being asked to be the spokesperson. When you’re the lawyer, you’re the lawyer, he thinks.

  Boies continues with the interview.

  11

  “Es un circo.”

  Last Tuesday, the Rodgers brothers drove about seven hundred miles south to Tallahassee to protest Al Gore stealing the election.

  “I’m here because I’m angry,” Fred Rodgers, sixty, tells me.

  It’s Monday, November 20, almost two weeks since the election, and I’m up early (for me, anyway; it’s 8:15 A.M.), standing outside the state supreme court, so as to ensure a seat by the time of the historic oral argument, scheduled for 2 P.M. I’m about eighth in line. They said 148 members of the public are allowed to watch the proceedings, first come, first served. Some members of the media got tickets through a lottery, but there are only so many seats.

  Not everybody is here to see; some are here to be seen. Like Fred, of course.

  Fred’s a retired reliability engineer from Newburgh, Indiana, “a statistician,” he says, “and I’m angry that they’re doing a hand recount. Machines are designed to have test programs. Test diagnostics make sure the machine is performing properly. When Palm Beach County came up with over eight hundred votes added for Al Gore in the second recount, I can tell you it should not have had another recount, they should have looked for fraud.”

  Fred is walking up and down the street, holding a sign that says, “The Hand Recount is a Farce.” On the other side it says, “Selective Recount Unfair.” His sixty-five-year-old older brother, Ron, has a sign, too: “Al, if every vote counts, why not the military?” on one side, and “Al Gore: Commander-in-Thief” on the other. The one belonging to brother Jim, fifty-eight, says, “Hand Recount—a License to Steal” and “Gore/Daley/Boies ‘Liars, Cheaters, and Thieves, Oh, My.’”

  “We’re just three grandpas from the heart of America,” explains Fred.

  This has been a big Rodgers family project. The letters on the sign have been painstakingly etched out in pencil first, and carefully colored in with black ink. The signs, in fact, are ever-changing, consisting as they do of two pieces of poster board attached with those fastener paperclip things. Every few hours, Fred Rodgers wanders off and returns with a whole new sign.

  Originally this was going to be just a two-day protest. On Friday, they shuffled back into Fred’s 1995 Chrysler New Yorker, the one with a hundred thousand miles on it, and drove the seven hundred or so miles back to Mount Carmel, Illinois, where Ron and Jim live, so as to see Ron’s grandson play football in the state semifinals.

  It was a crappy day; halfway to Atlanta, they heard that the state supreme court had put a stay on Harris’s certification. Then, later that night, the Mount Carmel Aces got their butts handed to them by the Harrisburg Dogs. So on Sunday, the Rodgers brothers got back in the car and came back here. They’re staying at the local Motel 6.

  I get back in line. A Florida Coastal Law School student named Trevor Mask, twenty-five, number seven in line, has been saving my place; Delta Airlines flight attendant Alyson Wood, thirty, is behind me. Both are native to Tallahassee, though neither lives here anymore. Both voted for Bush and came to see a bit of history.

  Down the street,“Angelina the Polka Queen”—crown on her head, clad in a red dress and sequined shoes, playing an accordion—and her partner “King Ira”—crown atop his blond wig, red sequined jacket, strumming on the old banjo—are singing against the proceedings. “George W. B. / Please put the world back in order for me,” they sing. “I don’t like liberals creating such confusion. / Just want all folks to respect the Constitution.” They’re from Gainesville, they say in between spats of mugging for various TV cameras.

  “We’re here to debut the queen’s new song,” says Ira Philpot.

  “We got some great Christmas songs, too!” Angelina Woodhull chirps.

  It’s 9:30 A.M. now, and the line has grown to about fifty. Across the street, eight TV networks have set up tents. One of the several officers from the sheriff’s office keeps approaching Alyson and whispering in her ear.

  Trevor’s friend from high school and Florida State, Frank Mayern
ick, twenty-four, a law student at FSU’s College of Law, suddenly appears with doughnuts and coffee, which he and Trevor offer to everyone in the surrounding area. In front of Trevor and Frank is state senator Skip Campbell, an Orlando Democrat, with a couple of attractive female senate staffers.

  With much of the line consisting of reporter types like me and professional pols like Campbell, Trevor and Frank soon become very popular among the reporters. They’re real people, after all. “Are you guys the students?” a Bloomberg Business News reporter asks, pouncing. Trevor is interviewed by Bloomberg, NBC News, and USA Today. Frank gets Bloomberg and Orlando’s ABC affiliate; he tells the USA Today scribe that “This is a circus,” and it is noted how much better a sound bite that was than Trevor’s more earnest and ponderous utterings. Soon a correspondent from Spanish-language channel Univision comes over and asks if anyone speaks Spanish.

  “How do you say ‘This is a circus’ in Spanish?” I ask him.

  “Es un circo,” he says.

  Frank tries it out. His accent sucks, though. The Univision correspondent turns his attention to the sweet young state senate staffers in front of us. Within minutes, Mr. Univision gets a phone number.

  By noon about 175 have joined the line. Including a bunch of professional Republicans who have blatantly cut in line right behind me, RNC counsel Ginsberg, Florida state GOP chair Al Cardenas, others. In front of us, state senators Jim Scott, a Democrat, and Tom Lee, a Republican, also violate the “no cutsies” rule.

  On the sidewalk right in front of the supreme court building, Baker exits an SUV like he’s at the Oscars. A smattering of applause follows. Ginsberg, his hair particularly neon in the Florida sun, scampers after him.

  Cardenas spots GOP power attorney Ted Olson about fifteen places behind him in line. “I got all those positive vibes right here,” Cardenas says in his thick Cuban accent.