by Jake Tapper
“We could run this anytime,” Leahy says of sorting out the remaining undervotes.“We don’t have to do it today.We want to get this process started.”
They agree to do so, to get to work on counting the undervotes that have already been sorted out.
Leahy is more concerned about the angry reporters than the obnoxious Republicans. He doesn’t want the process, the deliberations, the counting to be perceived by the news media as not being open or public. Throughout, everything they’ve done has been nothing but out in the open. “It would really bother me if it were to be reported that we’re in a closed-door, smoke-filled room for these deliberations,” he thinks to himself.
“Let the news media know we are going to move downstairs because of the concerns about the board, that the people are not able to view the process,” Leahy says to Villafana.
“You are going to give us time to work some issues out?” Villafana asks. “There is a full protest going on out in the lobby, and we cannot bring people in or out. We have people attempting to get into a fight with officers or with members of the media.”
Villafana isn’t sure if it’s the Democrats or the Republicans outside. But whoever it is, they want a confrontation. He asks Young and Conolly if they can tell the protesters to go back downstairs.
“Agreed,” Young says. “On behalf of the Democrats, agreed.”
“Until the demonstration stops, nobody can do anything,” Leahy says.
Bushie Joel Kaplan says, “I suspect that if the announcement was made—”
“That announcement needs to be made by someone from the party,” Villafana insists.“I don’t think at this point in time they are willing to listen to anyone that represents either the government or the media.”
“Would the board be able to issue a couple of sentences?” Bushie Conolly asks, stalling.
“You can express that, and if you like, I will be there as well,” Villafana says, “but as long—they will listen, I think, to someone from the party.”
“I don’t know if they would listen to us or the other side,” Conolly says, “but if the board decides affirmatively, we will reconvene at X time, and we can tell them that—the board—they will respond.”
“This is being driven by both parties, and I have been out there already, and it’s gotten somewhat pretty dicey,” Villafana says.
“We were both crushed up against the door,” Conolly says.
Young pipes in, “I will say for the record that I don’t believe that there’s anyone that is associated with my client who is involved with this matter. And if there is, it is because they have violated an express order from the highest authority of my client. And if there is anyone representing the Democratic party involved in these activities, it is highly unauthorized, and we will deal with it, but I don’t believe it is both parties.”
“I would simply request that the board affirmatively state that it intends to come downstairs as soon as possible and tell us what time,” Conolly says, knowingly.
The board adjourns.
But they can’t go downstairs. The security personnel have decided that they want to make sure that everything’s secure on the eighteenth floor. They tell the canvassing board that they’ll let them know when they’re ready for them to meet down there.
It’s county Democratic chair Joe Geller’s misfortune that in the thick of the insanity, he decides to take the elevator to the nineteenth floor to obtain a demonstration ballot to show someone how the problem of the 5’s and 7’s could happen.
From behind the glass window, a clerk hands Geller the demonstration ballot. It says “SAMPLE” on it.
House staffer Duane Gibson spots Geller tucking the sample ballot into his pocket.
“This guy’s got a ballot!” Gibson yells. “This guy’s got a ballot!”
The masses swarm around him, yelling, getting in his face, pushing him, grabbing him.
“ARREST HIM!” they cry. “ARREST HIM!”
With the help of a diminutive DNC aide, Luis Rosero, and the political director of the Miami Gore campaign, Joe Fraga, Geller manages to wrench himself into the elevator.
Rosero, who stays back to talk to the press, gets kicked, punched.
A woman pushes him into a much larger guy, seemingly trying to instigate a fight.
In the lobby of the building, a group of fifty or so Republicans are crushed around Geller, surrounding him—though thankfully a handful of cops are there to keep them off him, protecting him.
The cops escort Geller back to the nineteenth floor, so the elections officials can see what’s going on, investigate the charges. Of course it turns out that all Geller had was a sample ballot. The crowd is pulling at the cops, pulling at Geller.
It’s insanity! Some even get in the face of seventy-three-year-old Rep. Carrie Meek.
Democratic operatives decide to pull out of the area altogether.
Young and Kaufman return to the eighteenth floor; they’re wondering what’s taking the canvassing board so long to come back downstairs. In the meantime the Gorebies conduct a quick retraining on undervotes, as led by Chuck Campion and others. They get the computer system up and running. And Young tells them to prepare for a bad day and a half. We know that the next couple hundred precincts are Republican, Young says. So be forewarned; we’re going to lose votes for a while, maybe for the next day and a half. We’ll come back in the following few hundred, and end up netting maybe 150 votes. But we’re gonna go through the hard part of this, and the politicos are gonna flip out.
Where is the canvassing board? Young wonders. They’ve been missing for a while. Young’s concerned. You got these protesters out near the elevators raising hell, you got the clock ticking and a Sunday deadline, you got Leahy saying that they can’t count all the votes, who knows what’s going on here?
At 1:30 P.M., the Miami-Dade canvassing board finally reconvenes on the eighteenth floor, in the larger room. “The reason and purpose for our meeting here at this hour after we previously had decided that we felt we could reasonably meet the deadline of the Supreme Court of Florida for an expedited yet accurate count has been somewhat changed,” King says, “and that’s why we wanted to hear from counsel.”
Murray Greenberg is upstairs in his office, passed out on the floor from exhaustion. His boss, county attorney Robert Ginsburg, steps up to address the question Leahy puts to him: “whether or not this canvassing board could request or submit a petition” to the state supreme court to ask for a deadline extension.
“I will advise you,” Ginsburg says,“the supreme court opinion in its conclusion specifically negates any kind of petition for rehearing.” The Sunday, November 26, deadline is “final,” Ginsburg says.
“Based on that advice, we have no option but to not press forward with a full manual recount, and that was our decision this morning,” Leahy says. But now, even with the task to count just the 10,750 undervotes, “I can’t sit here and tell you that if we begin the process, it will be concluded,” Leahy says.
King now seems to have second thoughts about just doing the undervotes, that the hand recount should be of the entire county’s ballots. That combined with the fact that they may not meet the deadline makes King think that “that does not meet the test that the citizens and the residents of our county would expect of me or the rest of this board.” After they moved to the tabulation room, King says, “it became evidently clear that we were in a different situation… than we were this morning when we made that decision.”
The protesters have accomplished what they came to do.“A radically different situation,” King says.
In Tallahassee, Klain has left one cubicle in Berger’s office to go to another cubicle where lunch is being served. He walks by a TV and sees a meeting of the Miami-Dade canvassing board. “This must be taped,” Klain thinks. After all, Kendall Coffey has been great about reporting in religiously about any kind of proceeding there. But it says “LIVE” on the screen.
“Kendall would have
called me,” Klain thinks.
He listens in. He starts to panic when he hears what they’re saying. He grabs the phone.
“Kendall! Why aren’t you at the proceeding?!” he asks.
“What proceeding?” Coffey asks. For the first time, the board never notified him.
When Judge McDermott in Volusia County sees this nonsense on TV, he shakes his head. These younger judges are too soft. Too nice. You have to be tough. That’s the reason they’re all having these problems. One of the reasons they succeeded in getting the count up and running and done on time in Volusia is because he wasn’t afraid of hurting anyone’s feelings. Not that he enjoyed being a hardass, but if you have a job to do, and you have the authority to put an end to all the nonsense, then that’s what you do.
There were obnoxious protesters in Volusia, too. Both Bush people and Gore people. When McDermott heard them yelling outside, he told the deputy: “Move ’em across the street. I want them off this property now.”
There’s a time and a place for everything, and a canvassing-board meeting is not Woodstock, not the Million Man March. If McDermott were in charge at Miami-Dade, he thinks, he would not only have ordered the GOP protesters out of the hallway, he would have ordered them out of the building. He’s surprised that Judge King didn’t. Even the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel, which endorsed Bush in the election, praised McDermott in an editorial entitled “Thank You, Judge,” which couldn’t have been nicer if McDermott had written it himself.
You can’t be afraid to be a sonofabitch. It’s the only way to get anything done amid all this nonsense.
De Grandy and Young are asked to speak.
Both of them are under the impression that the canvassing board has already made up its mind to end it all. De Grandy thinks that his voting rights argument from the morning has finally sunk in. All three members of the canvassing board will say that De Grandy’s voting rights argument played no role whatsoever in their decision—since they were starting all over again, they never thought it was relevant. But that won’t stop De Grandy from telling reporters that it was his argument that saved the day.
Young, for his part, has no idea what the hell’s going on—and is suspicious about where the board was for the last hour, and just what the hell they were doing.
De Grandy refers to a count of just the undervotes as illegal, as King himself seemed to think just a few days ago. “Nowhere in the forty-some-page order of the supreme court does it direct any canvassing board to violate the law in order to complete a recount,” he says. He begins to go step-by-step through the mercurial history of the canvassing board’s rulings on a countywide hand recount, on whether counting the undervotes is enough.
Judge King, De Grandy points out, “is quoted on page ninety-six and ninety-seven of the transcript stating clearly that in your opinion, sir—”
“I’m well aware of what I said, Mr. De Grandy,” King breaks in. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but we know clearly that the vote was taken, and that we ordered a hand recount of all of the ballots in Dade. And in—”
“Sir,” De Grandy says, “either I can argue my client’s position or I can’t.”
“We’re not here for that,” King says. “We’re here to ask your input with respect—”
“I’m not arguing it to you, but to the other two members, sir,” counters De Grandy.
In De Grandy’s mind, he’s shoving King’s words back in his face—and also serving them up for Lehr and Leahy to contemplate. King’s been totally testy during the process, accusing his buddy Martinez—one of the sweetest, gentlest guys on the planet, De Grandy thinks—of looking at him the wrong way; accusing De Grandy himself of grandstanding. That’s enough, De Grandy thinks.
“No, I’m not trying to cut you off. What I’m saying is—”
The Republicans in the crowd boo.
“— I concur with you wholeheartedly, sir, that the board did what it did at those times,” King finishes. “But now we’re faced with a new challenge, and we’re asking for your input on that.”
De Grandy continues his statement as he wants. “Today there was a motion made to change the process to something which this board has determined, and which we strongly believed and had argued consistently in every hearing, to be illegal. You cannot count less than all votes. You either count them or you don’t.”
Young gets up to speak, though he’s clearly fighting the tide. “There are ten thousand seven hundred fifty citizens out there whose vote has not been seen by man, woman, or machine,” he says. “That is simply an error. It’s a systematic error. It’s nothing more than the way machines and the process are designed. I believe that the statute tells you to correct the error.
“The question, I think, is then one of simply ensuring that all concerned see a process that is transparent. Well, that seems to me to be something that we can do. For example, in a northern county, Volusia, Judge McDermott had one pool camera in his counting room and allowed everyone to share off that, so the media saw precisely what the board was doing.
“My experience in recounts in large states, in statewide recounts, is that where there is a will, there is a way,” Young says. “And I believe that ten thousand votes can in fact be counted accurately between now and Sunday.”
King takes the mike again. He is bothered by the fact that he had spoken against doing just the 10,750 undervotes and today voted for it. But the logistical concerns are primary.
“I vote no,” he says. “I believe we should stop at this time. We cannot meet the deadline of the supreme court of the state of Florida. And I feel it incumbent upon this canvassing board to count each and every ballot and to not do a hand recount that would potentially—potentially, Mr. De Grandy; not guaranteed but potentially—even under the proposed plan of this morning, could disenfranchise a segment of our community.”
Leahy’s turn. “I’m going to also vote no for two reasons,” he says.
There is loud applause.
“In my opinion, there was no requirement, or it wasn’t warranted, that we do a full manual recount, based on my administrative reading of the law,” Leahy says. “When the board voted last week to have a full recount, I supported the decision. I’ve done everything I can do to carry out that decision of the majority of the board. But at this time I do not believe that there is time to carry out a complete, full manual recount that is accurate and that will count every vote, because of the limitations put on this board in terms of time.”
The thing is, it would take a whole other canvassing board for them to finish. He had said they could do it only if they went through 300 ballots an hour. But upstairs they were managing only between 60 and 100 max. They just weren’t going to make it.
“Judge Lehr?” King asks.
“I, too, am going to vote no,” Lehr says.
The Gorebies are demoralized. Some from their number weren’t sure that there were votes in Miami-Dade, but Whouley had anticipated that they would glean anywhere from 150 to 350 votes there. So they now know that there is no way Gore will be certified the winner on Sunday; if there’s an election contest, now they will be the ones who have to file it.
Moreover, they are convinced that something strange is afoot.
“The idea that they could not complete a count of the undervotes in four days is just factually incorrect,” Klain thinks. They file a mandamus brief before the appellate court that night, to force the canvassing board to count the undervotes, confident that the district court of appeals will rule in their favor.
They are wrong.
The court agrees that the canvassing board has no discretion to decide to stop a count before they’ve finished it; but the court also rules that they cannot force the board to do the impossible.
Thursday, Thanksgiving, the Gorebies try to get the Florida Supreme Court to force the board to count.
They lose that one, too.
Boies will tell me in January that the lowest moment of it all was “when Dade sus
pends, and we can’t get it restarted, we can’t get those votes counted. If we had, it would be even harder for the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the election. If we could have gotten the votes counted in Dade, so that at the time it went to the U.S. Supreme Court there were actual canvassing-board returns that put Gore ahead, I think that would have changed things.”
A lot will be said and written about the Miami-Dade canvassing board’s 180-degree turn. Some of it will be lost amid the Wednesday-morning news of Dick Cheney’s fourth heart attack. * Much of it will be speculation. And as David Boies will tell me on January 15, 2001,“I don’t think anybody who hasn’t interviewed the canvassing-board members with truth serum will know precisely why they stopped.”
That doesn’t mean that Democratic pols won’t try.
Lieberman will come forward on Friday to give his trademark sanctimonious wince. “I am deeply disappointed by reports of orchestrated demonstrations on Wednesday inside a state building—a government building—in Miami-Dade County…. These demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate and to prevent a simple count of votes going forward.”
“What happened in Miami-Dade was illegal,” Deutsch tells me.“Out-of-town paid political operatives came to South Florida to disrupt a federal election,” he charges, alleging that such actions violate a law that prohibits crossing state lines to “intimidate” parties supervising a federal election. † Congressman Deutsch will take those charges a step further, from rhetoric into the terrain of demagoguery, in a letter to the U.S. Justice Department’s division of elections, calling for a federal investigation.
But all three canvassing-board members—and, indeed, spokesman Villafana, who was no fan of the protesters—will insist that they weren’t intimidated. King, in particular, comes from a pretty tough family—his judge father ruled against drug kingpins, and his sister prosecutes them. Leahy will tell me, point-blank, that he was never intimidated.
What about a story in the New York Times that implied that he had been intimidated? “He misunderstood something I had said,” Leahy will say to me. The Republican observers had clearly been an impediment to the process, he says, but not through intimidation. “They attempted to delay everything we did,” Leahy says. Once again, trying to find the truth floating at the bottom of this Florida swamp is near impossible.