Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  “Next question,” he says.

  Was there a moment when he realized that they weren’t going to make the deadline? asks a reporter, seeking drama.

  No, Burton says.“As the afternoon went on, we realized we weren’t going to make it.”

  Why did he ask Harris for an extension?

  “Given what this experience has been, I was hopeful they’d say,‘Fine,’” he says, pointing out how hard they’ve all worked. He says that his Democratic critics, who say that the board has been using excessively strict dimple standards, are wrong. “You simply can’t count every dimple on a ballot,” he says. “We didn’t count every ding on a ballot card.” On the other hand, he adds, “we certainly came across an awful lot of ballots that were not counted by the machine.”

  Any ramifications from it all, other than who will be president?

  “I’m sure every state’s going to revisit its election laws,” he says.

  And then he leaves and goes back to work.

  Inside, the three keep counting, under the watchful eyes of high-profile supporters of Gov. George W. Bush, like Republicans Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Governor Janklow, Gov. Jim Gilmore of Virginia—the latter of whom is being escorted around by Phil Muster, who just a day or so ago was telling me he was just a “volunteer” handing out T-shirts at the protest outside the Broward County courthouse.

  Muster doesn’t seem to care that he might be recognized, which again raises the question: why do the Bushies refuse to tell the truth about their role here? They’re certainly legally allowed to hand out free T-shirts, or to protest peacefully.

  Deutsch walks in and sits across the aisle from Hutchison, Janklow, and Gilmore. No pleasantries are exchanged. No friendly acknowledging glances. Rep. Ed Markey also wanders in. Then he wanders out. Soon Rep. Corinne Brown, D-Fla., joins Deutsch.

  “Hey hey! Ho ho! Al Gore has got to go!” chant the pro-Bush protesters outside the Emergency Operations Center.

  “Thou shalt not steal,” reads one sign. “Who let the chads out? Who? Who? Gore Did!” reads another.

  A smattering of pro-Gore protesters is here as well. “Bush hates all minorities,” reads a sign from their number.

  Subtle.

  “One-ninety-three-C,” Burton says inside.

  “Who’s got one-ninety-three-C?” Roberts asks.

  As I walk from my car to the Emergency Operations Center, I pass a woman who has camped out on the sidewalk, waving a Bush-Cheney sign for the motorists who pass by. I ask her how she’s doing.

  “Good,” she says. “Who are you with?”

  “Salon.com,” I reply.

  “Oh,” she says. “You’re one of those.”

  The Bushies know that their man will be certified the winner of Florida in a couple hours. Now they have to decide whether or not they’ll continue to press ahead with their case in the U.S. Supreme Court. They got their certification, Bush is the official winner, why keep fighting? Why take the risk that the SCOTUS will do something wild and unpredictable? Bush’s own case is buying Gore time, giving him cover to contest the election results. Why not just pack up and go home? It’s a real dilemma.

  The arguments on both sides are outlined for Bush in a thirty-minute conference call with Austin. Zoellick and Bush domestic-policy adviser Josh Bolten are worried—what if they lose? Then the Florida legislature will be completely demoralized. But others—Olson, Carvin—are more optimistic. We’re right on the law, they say. We’re going to win it. The toughest thing is to get the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the case to begin with, so we’re over that hurdle. Plus, it’s good to have the SCOTUS out there, hovering around. It will keep the Florida Supreme Court on its toes.

  Bush considers it the toughest choice he has to make.

  “We’re going to stick with the appeal, because it’s the right thing to do,” Bush finally says.

  When Harris, Clay Roberts, and Agricultural Commissioner Bob Crawford walk into the cabinet room at the state capitol and step up to officially declare victory for the man all three of them endorsed, the news is watched with angry eyes in Palm Beach County.

  “I think it’s over,” says Crawford. “It should be over.”

  Then he botches the famous Yogi Berra quote “It’s not over ’til it’s over” (Yogi said “ain’t”) but makes a cogent point. “Both sides have enough legal talent to keep this tied up through Christmas,” he says. “But the one thing the lawyers can’t do for us is to bring this country together.”

  Of course, one wonders if Crawford would be saying that if he were declaring Gore the winner. One wonders what decision Harris would have made about late returns from Palm Beach County if Bush had needed them to win.

  No, one doesn’t, actually. One knows.

  Harris “hereby” declares that “our American democracy has triumphed once again,” and gives the certified vote results for Florida: Bush beats Gore by 537 votes—2,912,790 to 2,912,253.

  In Washington, Lieberman is there to immediately rain on the parade, lest anyone think that there’s a chance that his side finds this decision final. “How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good-faith effort to count every vote?” Lieberman asks. Good question. One he might put to his own lawyers and pols down in Florida who are decidedly not putting forth any serious effort “to count every vote.” “Vice President Gore and I have no choice but to contest these actions.”

  At 9:30 P.M. EST, bookended by American flags, a somewhat presidential-looking Bush appears before the cameras and waxes bipartisan. So much of the Bush strategy, dating back to before the primary season, has been about inevitability, about declaring himself the winner. And tonight—despite reports that he’s been sulking about his 500,000-person popular-vote loss—Bush is on top of his game. He wants to work with Democrats and Republicans alike, he says, on education, tax reduction, Medicare reform, a prescription-drug benefit for seniors. “I will work to unite our great land,” he says. “Now that the votes are counted, it’s time for the votes to count.” He says that Cheney will set up the transition team in Washington, and former transportation secretary Andy Card will be his chief of staff.

  Bush says that he’s heard Gore’s lawyers are talking about contesting the election. “I respectfully ask him to reconsider,” Bush says. “Now that we are certified, we enter a different phase.” Protesting votes before the certification is one thing, Bush argues, but “filing a contest to the outcome of the election—that is not the best course for America.”

  Ginsberg does a conference call with reporters. “It’s impossible to overstate the importance of having the certificate,” Ginsberg says. “Governor Bush and Secretary Cheney have been declared the winners of this contest,” and now the burden is on the Gore team to overturn that—not an easy task.

  In Berger’s Tallahassee office, Klain and Boies are doing the math. They have a conference call with Gore scheduled for Monday morning, 9 A.M., and they need to decide what will be in the contest lawsuit.

  Boies is downing Diet Cokes, and Klain is popping M&M’s, as they tear through the figures.

  How can they make up the 537-vote gap?

  When I call Bash to find out what’s up, I get a strange comment.

  “We won!” he tells me, based on the Gore team’s new math.

  First off are the 192 votes that Palm Beach County handed in about two hours past the Florida Supreme Court–mandated deadline, though it did get them in before Harris’s announcement. Why not count them? the Gore team asks. Shouldn’t Harris have used her discretion to count votes?

  But when I ask Ginsberg about them, he responds that it’s the simple question of a deadline missed. The Palm Beach canvassing board knew what the deadline was and followed through with typical Democrat incompetence. So tough shnoogies.

  Then, the Gore folks say, there are the net 157 Gore votes from the partial hand recount of Miami-Dade County that was never completed. Those are 157 votes that the world alre
ady knows belong to Gore.

  C’mon, says Ginsberg. “The law makes it clear that partial-recount results can’t be included in election certification, for any number of reasons. If you were going to accept partial returns, you could just recount the most Democratic precincts in a county, then call off the recount and say, ‘OK, we win.’ It’s just not done,” Ginsberg says.

  The final tally should also include 51 Gore votes from Nassau County, the Gore team says. “The law says we have to have it,” Klain says.

  But in Nassau County, Ginsberg counters, “the Election Night votes were counted and reconciled. In the recount, the votes for both candidates were lower. So rather than disenfranchise voters, the board decided to go back to their Election Night statistics.”

  With those three figures—192 + 157 + 51—that’s 400 votes right there, the Gore attorney goes on. That means just 137 more to win! And, the Gorebies say, there are more!

  But this is nonsense; the Gorebies are talking crazy talk. Do they really think that the Bushies can’t counter with votes to chip away of their own? It’s precisely this shortsighted, desperate approach to the vote count that has completely lost me. Bush has now won the certified election. The only vote total that could replace tonight’s in legitimacy is one that comes with a statewide recount of all the undervotes and overvotes, by all the canvassing boards in all the counties. The Gorebies original plan—to enter the contest phase with as many new votes on the board as possible—is now lost amid a pathetic scramble—here a vote, there a vote, everywhere, a vote vote. The clock is TICK TICK TICKing in their ears, and they can’t think of anything but how to get Gore votes on the board. But that means this isn’t about “counting the votes”—it’s about counting all the Gore votes.

  Like the dimples. According to Democratic observers of the Palm Beach hand-recount process—the one that didn’t count—there’s a net gain of 846 dimple-chadded ballots that belong to Gore. If the 846 dimpled Gore votes counted, Gore would lead Bush by 709 votes, Bash says.

  Then there’s the rest of the Miami-Dade hand count that the Gore team thinks should have proceeded. After all, the net gain of 157 Gore votes came after only 20 percent of the 400,000 or so ballots were recounted. Since Gore won Miami-Dade 53 percent to 47 percent, that 6 percent edge could provide enough votes for Gore to eke out a win. But to include this 20 percent—largely Democratic precincts—without the other 80 percent is completely unfair. Not to mention, as De Grandy pointed out, a possible voting rights violation.

  “The ten thousand ballots that they claim were the subject of an under-count, they were counted,” Ginsberg says. “First on Election Night, then in a machine recount, so those ballots have been counted at least twice already.”

  Okay, that’s not quite true either. The Bushies have now taken to referring to undervotes as “no votes,” as if there’s nothing there at all. By that logic, the ballots were counted; it was just that the Floridians in question didn’t want to vote for any of the presidential candidates. And further, a hand count or any other sort of recount is a waste of time, because there’s nothing to find.

  As of Sunday evening, the Gore legal team is leaning against suing Seminole County. “Our legal papers will be about just trying to get the votes counted,” Bash says to me. “We don’t want to deal with mischief—although clearly this was mischief—but we want to keep the argument clean: Just count the votes.” They’re still thinking of challenging some of the more dubious military absentee ballots that were allowed by counties that were, at the time, being sued by the Bush campaign. They call these ballots “backwash,” before eventually deciding on a nicer name, which the Bushies are using, too: “Thanksgiving stuffing.”

  By now, I can’t really truck either side. Klain and Boies conclude that they’d support a statewide recount, but their energy and their rhetoric is devoted elsewhere—to plucking up Democratic votes wherever they can find them. After all, Gore offered a statewide recount on national television—twice—and Bush refused both times, they say. We’ve been reminded again and again that Florida law lacks a mechanism for a candidate to legally compel a statewide recount, so the only way to get one is to go to all sixty-seven canvassing boards individually, and ask them, individually, to agree. And the only way to make that happen is if both parties agree—otherwise, there would be sixty-seven separate lawsuits to file.

  So what seems to be left for Gore? Sketchy vote plucking that makes the Gorebies seem like desperados, scrambling for a vote here, a vote there, with no strategy focused on counting all 175,000 of the state’s undervotes and overvotes.

  Is there a Gore vote in that garbage dump at the edge of town? Quick! Berger! Get over there!

  That said, at least the Gorebies support a statewide recount, at least they acknowledge that there are unread votes that need to be examined. The Bushies stand in the way of votes being counted, an extremely offensive notion on its face. They demean, they deride, they insinuate, they lie. They’ve fought tooth and nail to maintain the status quo, to keep us in limbo. “Limbo” is a good word for it, if only because it happens also to be the name of a party game, the object of which is to see how low you can go.

  As the country sinks deeper into the quicksand of torts, one man, at least, emerges outside the Palm Beach Emergency Operations Center to offer a solution. To reporters and real people alike, an entrepreneur hands out T-shirts. They say: “Just Keep Bill.”

  From: Bush communications team

  Talking Points for Monday, November 27, 2000

  Rather than give the American people the finality that they deserve, Al Gore has chosen to take the extraordinary step of contesting the presidential election in Florida, the first in the history of our nation. Gore should reconsider, do the right thing and respect the outcome of this election.

  Gore says he is contesting this election because every vote should be counted. But every vote has been counted, and recounted. And some votes have been selectively counted three and four times. As Governor Bush said last night, the votes have been counted, now it is time for the votes to count.

  Al Gore is not interested in counting every vote, he’s simply interested in selectively recounting the votes he thinks will help him overturn the results of this election.

  Gore wrongly claims that 10,000 ballots weren’t counted in Miami-Dade County. These ballots were counted and recounted, as required under Florida law. The voters who cast those ballots did not cast votes for President, so now Gore is seeking permission to have those selected ballots “interpreted.”

  Thousands of these “undervote” ballots exist in other counties in Florida and in other jurisdictions around the nation. Yet Gore is not interested in those ballots, he’s only interested in “interpreting” the selective ballots that he thinks can overturn this election.

  If Gore truly believes that every vote must be counted, then he shouldn’t be actively pursuing cases to have legitimate votes thrown out. In Nassau County, Gore is trying to get 218 valid ballots thrown out. In Seminole County, Democrats * have filed a lawsuit to have thousands of valid absentee ballots thrown out….

  Opening more ballots up for more interpretation by Democratic canvassing boards would simply open up this process to more human error and mischief….

  Every campaign must have a conclusion. After the votes in Florida were counted, Governor Bush was declared the winner. After they were recounted, Governor Bush was declared the winner. And after some Democratic counties performed manual recounts, Governor Bush was again declared the winner.

  Elections should be decided in voting booths, not in courtrooms. It is time for the lawyers to go home. The people of Florida have voted, and deserve to have some finality.

  Thing is, there are Gore lieutenants who—if not agreeing in full to the more-than-a-little disingenuous and hypocritical Bush talking points—concur with at least one cutting observation: Whatever happened to “count every vote”?!

  Tonight, Gore lieutenants are disappointed that the co
ntest isn’t statewide, as they’d been led to believe it would be. Some of the middle-tier politicos who had told ground soldiers like Jack Young to focus on the four Democratic counties did so with the understanding that sooner or later all 175,000 ballots as yet unrecorded would be checked by hand. The decision came down from above, however, by those whom the lieutenants would refer to during the campaign as “The Matrix,” in reference to the superb 1999 sci-fi thriller about an evil artificial-intelligence computer power that controls the world autocratically. And in this case, The Matrix—Klain, Whouley, Shrum, Eskew, Daley, Christopher, Lieberman, and Gore—is disillusioning some of its deputies who actually thought there was meaning behind the empty rhetoric.

  15

  “Like getting nibbled to death by a duck.”

  Al Gore thought that this would be over by now.

  “The Friday after Thanksgiving at midnight we all turn into pumpkins,” Gore said to a friend on the night of Wednesday, November 15—after he’d made his first, half-hearted offer to abide by a state recount if Bush wanted one.

  But that was centuries ago, it now seems, and throughout Thanksgiving weekend it became clear to all involved that Gore was going to go through with the contest. The morning of Monday, November 27, the last and final pre-contest conference call finally comes.

  Gore, Lieberman, Daley, and others are in D.C., Christopher is in L.A, the legal team of Boies Klain is in Tallahassee.

  What to contest? A few things are no-brainers: the Miami-Dade undervotes, the Palm Beach late returns, and 846 dimpled net Gore votes, according to the Boston Boys, that the Palm Beach canvassing board deemed to not be votes. There are the 51 net Gore votes from Nassau County that Boies is hyperbolically betting his law license on.

  Berger’s still all over the butterfly ballot. Donnie Fowler and Whouley’s shop in Palm Beach have ten thousand affidavits on hand. There’s no question that voters were confused. And if they can’t get a revote, there are alternative solutions, Berger says. Allocating some of Buchanan’s votes for Gore, for instance. The law can create a remedy. And being that the Gorebies think of themselves as within 100 votes, any remedy could be significant.