Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Scherer erupts.

  Lee and Gunzburger are totally confused by Scherer’s behavior, have been as the week has progressed and Scherer’s gotten increasingly angry. Republicans like Shari McCartney and Ed Pozzuoli have been vociferous advocates for the Republican side, but they’ve remained human. Scherer, on the other hand, with whom Gunzburger worked closely, has been losing it, they think. Today he outdoes himself.

  “Your attempt, constant attempt to stifle us, the Republicans, from giving you our side and to give you reasoned analysis is overwhelming and is astounding, as you are trolling for votes here,” Scherer fumes. “It is obvious that you know you can’t get this election any other way, so what are we going to do? Recount all of these votes again?! And I understand you’re going to be bringing precincts in that we didn’t know anything about in a few minutes. Precincts that you didn’t tell us about. Precincts that you did not discuss on this record in public that you had left out.

  “You’ve told these lawyers to go bring you more votes, and I assume we’re going to keep bringing them to you until such time as you’ve got a thousand votes. I think that’s what you’re looking for!”

  Lee can barely contain his anger. It is unimaginable that Scherer will ever again appear in Lee’s courtroom to argue a case.

  “All right, Mr. Scherer, you’re out of line,” he says. “OK, and we’ll go ahead and recess. I’ll ask the deputies to clear the courtroom, and Mr. Scherer is not welcome back in this room. He can watch the proceedings from outside. OK, thank you. We’re in recess.”

  As the deputy approaches him and steers him toward the door, Scherer holds his wrists out, as if he’s about to be handcuffed.

  “That’s not necessary,” she says, continuing to guide him out.

  “Unless you’re going to arrest me,” Scherer warns, “don’t touch me, ma’am.”

  Scherer’s anger isn’t show. He is genuinely outraged.

  Republicans have been watching this board very carefully, and there have been comments—most notably by Gunzburger—that indicate to them that there’s clear Democratic bias afoot.

  In precinct 14-J, Lee announces that there’s only one disputed ballot in the pack.

  “No reasonable certainty on that ballot,” Rosenberg says.

  “I believe I can see light on three sides, and it’s a clear vote for Gore,” Gunzburger says.

  “I agree with Judge Rosenberg,” Lee says.

  To many GOP observers, Gunzburger’s acceptance of any dimple—even ones she has to squint to see—says it all.

  After the shortest Thanksgiving weekend of his life, Boies flies to Palm Beach County, where he’s presenting witnesses before the canvassing board, who, he hopes, will help push Burton into loosening his standards.

  There’s retired Cal Berkeley mechanical engineering professor William Rouverol, eighty-three, who helped design the Votomatic. “No machine can be perfect,’’ he says.“Dimpled or pregnant chads, if the only discernible mark for a given race in a given column, should qualify as a vote.”

  There’s Yale statistician Nicolas Hengartner, who testified the week before in Miami-Dade. The Democrats needed someone to testify about what might exist in the undervotes, and after DNC staffer Jason Fuhrman had been rebuffed by two other academics—Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll and Yale statistics department chairman Andrew R. Barron—he found Hengartner.

  In his clipped Québecois accent, Hengartner says that Palm Beach has a higher rate of undervotes than elsewhere in the state, “seven times what I would obtain with an optical method. I would try to suggest that the reason this happens is because there’s a problem with first column.”

  Burton is cordial but doesn’t sound all that interested in this last-ditch push. “The legislature up in Tallahassee may be more interested in that,” he says to Hengartner.

  LePore’s reaction is altogether different, because one of the experts testifying today is her former mentor, Jackie Winchester, supervisor of elections from 1973 to 1997.

  “They get more wear in that first column because it’s the one we use most in elections,” Winchester says. “Because of that, we began not even to use that first column in municipal elections. We’ve never seen a pattern like this with so many not punching in the first row but punching in all the other rows. It’s just very weird to think that people came to the polls and didn’t vote for president.”

  Winchester had initially been supportive of LePore, defending her on the butterfly ballot, thinking it was a mistake, but an honest mistake. But then LePore began to make decisions that Winchester thought were wrong, ones she saw as favoring the Bush campaign. LePore must have known that if the canvassing board asked for the opinion from the secretary of state, it would be binding, Winchester thought. And it was obvious that Harris was going to say no. LePore let the voters down by doing that.

  Then, after the recount began, Winchester thought that LePore and Burton had been too hard-line against counting dimples. The 1990 standard had been adopted before it was clear that there were problems with some of the equipment, Winchester thought.

  Of course, Winchester knows LePore quite well, having groomed her for her present job, and she remembers the one criticism she had about LePore: “She needs to delegate some responsibility, so that she will not be overburdened,” Winchester once wrote on LePore’s annual job performance review. And here it was, just two days before the deadline, and LePore was still not delegating. She would do periodic audits of the ballots on her own, instead of letting someone else compile the stats. And every time she did this, the canvassing board would have to take a break.

  Then there are Winchester’s other main criticisms of her former protégé: she really isn’t all that organized, and she tends to panic. Winchester remembers the written instructions she’d once put together for how to conduct a manual recount in an expeditious and efficient manner—which is not, Winchester thinks, the way LePore’s done it. The undervotes and overvotes are supposed to be separated from the rest of the ballots immediately. You’re not supposed to have a situation where anybody could object to everything, which the Republicans immediately saw as a way to wreak havoc on the process.

  All of these things are helping to hand the election to George Bush, Winchester, a Democrat, thinks. Having made a mess of the butterfly ballot, it seemed to Winchester that LePore should have bent over backward to be fair to those voters who got screwed by counting everything.

  After all, Winchester has family members who were confused by the butterfly ballot. Her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, an honors student, who cast her first presidential vote. And her daughter-in-law, an attorney.

  “LePore never apologized to them,” Winchester will later say. “When I think of all the elderly Jewish voters so thrilled to vote for a Jewish candidate on a national ticket, voters who seemed genuinely anguished to have learned that they may have inadvertently voted for Buchanan. She has shown callous indifference to voters. Sure, she seems nice when you talk to her, but I don’t think it’s nice to treat people like that. These people are suffering just as much as Theresa is.”

  In the coming days, after the canvassing board refuses to allow a more lenient standard, Winchester will unleash her wrath upon LePore in a series of local interviews with the media. And LePore will sit there, inside the OEC, amazed and confused and stunned by the fact that her mentor has turned against her with such anger.

  In Tallahassee, meanwhile, Democratic lawyers are preparing to contest the election, which is still scheduled to be certified Sunday at 5 P.M. They plan on challenging the results from four counties, suing their canvassing boards for four different reasons. Two of the counties are no surprise: Miami-Dade, where the canvassing board never finished its hand recount; and Palm Beach, where Gore attorneys still think the canvassing board has been too stringent on its chad requirements.

  But there are two others that they’re thinking of including, kind of out of nowhere.

  At fir
st blush, when junior Gore attorney Jeremy Bash tells me about Nassau County, it sounds pretty promising. Nassau County, which is largely Republican, has decided to report its original election returns—rather than its recount tally—to the secretary of state Sunday, thus stripping Gore of 51 votes. The law says you have to take the recount number, Bash says, case closed.

  But after I phone up one of the canvassing board members, it’s clear to me that it’s not that simple. Nassau County commissioner Marianne Marshall tells me that just before 9 A.M. on Friday, November 24, she—as a temporary member of the canvassing board—was one in a 3 to 0 vote to use the original Election Day numbers. The vote came upon the recommendation of Supervisor of Elections Shirley King, a Democrat, who “felt that they [the original Election Night numbers] were more accurate” than the mandated recount numbers, according to Marshall. For whatever reason, during the Nassau recount, 218 votes weren’t pulled out of the box they were in. Forgetting to count them added a net gain of 51 votes to Gore’s total. But upon review, King realized what had happened and decided that those 218 voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised.

  “If she said that that’s the way she wanted to go, then I support it,” Marshall says. “Shirley King has been the supervisor of elections for Nassau County for twenty-eight years. She has always been very honest and served with integrity, and I respect her immensely,” Marshall said. Joining King and Marshall in the vote was Judge Bob Williams, also a Democrat.

  This one is clearly going nowhere.

  The other county the Dems are thinking of including in their contest? None other than Seminole County.

  14

  “This has to be the most important thing.”

  Andrew Jackson was the first American president propelled to power by a victory in the Seminole War; Bush needs to be the second.

  Back then, of course, it was a defeat of the Seminole Indians, slaughtered by ol’ Hickory and his troops in 1817. Jackson became a national hero, first governor of Florida, and President of the United States, elected in 1828.

  This Seminole County case is similar only in its guerilla tactics. And it all revolves around a guerilla GOP warrior by the name of Michael Leach.

  Leach is from Pensacola and is military through and through. His grandfather was on the U.S.S. Independence during World War II; his dad was in the navy during Vietnam; Leach went right into the air force after graduating high school in 1989. After his discharge, he served as a part-time deputy sheriff in Jefferson County while serving in the air force reserves.

  In 1996, Leach enrolled at FSU, where, ironically, he majored in criminology with a minor in political science. When he graduated in April, he got a job with the state Republican Party as one of the eleven regional directors for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving eight northern counties. His office in the Bush Building is resplendent with Nixon memorabilia.

  In October, state political director Todd Schnick came to Leach with a problem. The absentee-ballot applications that the state GOP sent out lacked a space for voters to include their voter ID numbers; apparently the vendor who printed them up just messed up. Most counties were accepting them anyway, filling in the numbers themselves. But Sandra Goard, the elections supervisor in Seminole County, has told Schnick that she has a pile of 2,200 or so of these applications in her office that she doesn’t have the time or the inclination to correct. Schnick was welcome to send someone to do the job, but the applications couldn’t be removed from her office.

  It was tedious work. Fifteen days, fourteen to fifteen hours a day. A couple other regional directors helped out a bit, but generally it was just Leach sitting there in Goard’s office, using his laptop and VictorySuite computer program, which had the name and information of every registered voter.

  Goard wasn’t always this accommodating. Not to a Democrat, at any rate.

  In March, Dean Ray, forty, who operates his own kitchen appliances sales-and-service shop in Sanford, Florida, submitted 831 signatures to Goard as part of the 1,862 he needed to secure his name on the ballot to run for county commissioner. Goard accepted 644 of them—while rejecting almost 200 of them for technicalities. Ray requested that she return to him the rejected ones so he could fix them; Goard refused. “They were turned into the office, and at that point they became public record,” Goard explains to me.

  Goard either became nicer between March and October or she has different levels of accommodation within her psyche depending on party affiliation. Leach camped out in her office for fifteen days. He made the fixes, putting the appropriate voter ID number on each absentee-ballot application—even if VictorySuite listed the voter as a Democrat, which happened in maybe fifty or sixty instances.

  On November 17, Leach was checking things out in Orange County, just south of Seminole, when he got a call on his cell phone. He had been named in the lawsuit seeking to throw out all 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County, because, the suit alleged, the absentee-ballot applications had been improperly tampered with. By Leach.

  On Saturday, November 25, while the Gore legal team considers disenfranchising 15,000 Seminole County voters—not one of whom is alleged to have done anything wrong—their political arm is holding a town meeting at the Palm Beach Airport Hilton for “disenfranchised” Palm Beach voters.

  After Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic delegate from Washington, D.C., compares the disenfranchisement of Palm Beachers to that of Washingtonians who pay taxes but have no representation in the House and Senate, one after another Palm Beach voter grabs the mike to tell her a tale of woe.

  Democratic operatives acknowledge that there’s no hope for a revote (though Berger still wants to include the butterfly ballot case in the contest trial), but they want to “put a human face” on what happened in Palm Beach County, they tell me. Only a couple of TV cameras come by, though, so how many people see—much less care about—this human face remains up for debate.

  A mile or so west on Southern Boulevard, at the Emergency Operations Center, LePore and her chums on the Palm Beach canvassing board—Burton and Roberts—are tearing through the 8,000 or so disputed ballots they have left to rule on.

  The county’s director of public affairs, Denise Cote, walks a few reporters through the task at hand. There were anywhere from 14,000 to 15,000 disputed ballots. Over the course of the original recount, somewhere around 4,000 of these were counted. The board got through 2,000 on Friday.

  Boy, that Thanksgiving break they took doesn’t seem so smart right now. How on earth will they be able to get through 8,000 more by Sunday at 4:59 P.M.? I ask.

  “They’re committed to finishing the process,” Cote says. “They’re going to quicken the pace. They indicated to me that they would work through the night if need be.” Anyway, she points out “it’s not going to be over” on Sunday, since SCOTUS will hear arguments over a Bush petition on Friday, there will be an appeal to the ruling against a revote in Palm Beach County, “and a potpourri of lawsuits going on here.”

  I ask how LePore’s, Roberts’s, and Burton’s moods are, slammed as they’ve been by the Republicans for even conducting the count, and by the Democrats for being too discriminating in their chad-love.

  “They seem to be quite jovial,” Cote says. “They work well together.”

  Burton rolls up a piece of trash and throws it at the trash can, hoops-style. He misses.

  “You almost hit it!” Roberts says.

  What of the Republicans who are quoting LePore’s chad ruling from 1990, when she was deputy elections supervisor and only accepted chad that had broken off from the ballot on at least two corners?

  “The policy is more extensive than that,” Cote says. Rather, she says, it’s up to the discretion of the canvassing board.

  “Undervote,” Burton says. Roberts squints and holds the ballot up to the light, then places it down on the table.

  “Undervote,” he says again.

  A couple different times, Burton becomes amused at the ballots themselves. He hol
ds one up for the cameras: “It’s punched out, and it says ‘This one,’” he says. At another point, on another ballot, the holes are unusually large. “This is somebody who wanted their vote to count. It looks like they used a shotgun,” Burton says. “I mean, talk about removing a chad.”

  Shortly before 10 P.M. on Saturday night, there’s a dispute between Burton and the GOP observers over a Gore ballot. When absentee ballots are covered with anything—lipstick, say, or maybe ketchup—they are often unable to be processed through the tabulation machine. So election workers will take a pink ballot—its “mate”—and punch the corresponding holes in it, running it through the machine and attaching it to the original ballot. But at some point a ballot and its mate have been separated, and now there’s a problem. Members of the canvassing board want to count a pink Gore “mate” as a vote, expecting to find its original ballot in one of the 186 precincts they have left to go through. Wallace and John Bolton object and want the board to track down the original ballot before counting the mate as a vote.

  While Burton and the Republican have at it, Roberts excuses herself and walks over to a few reporters. “We’ll finish by five,” she insists. “Because we understand that’s how long Katherine Harris is keeping her office open.”

  She shouts to the table that she wants to get back to counting.

  Boston Boy Newman, meanwhile, is pleasantly surprised. Hauling Burton’s ass before LaBarga and presenting Friday’s panel of experts seem to have had an effect on the standard he’s applying. Before the panel’s presentation on Friday morning, by Newman’s calculations Gore was down about 10 votes, with 40 percent of the undervotes counted. But now they’re picking up some. It’s still not the right standard, he thinks, but it’s better.