by Jake Tapper
After the press conference—which steps on a previously scheduled conference by the Gore recount team in which further voting “victims” were trotted out—Jackson et al. hold a sparsely attended afternoon rally outside the state supreme court.
“Who can vote a butterfly ballot anyway?!” asks Conyers, apparently unaware that more than 93 percent of the voters of Palm Beach County figured out how to use the ballot correctly. Of the Justice Department, Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said, “They’re asking us to send them the evidence. Well, you come down here and find the evidence! Then we’ll have a fair vote.” Rabbi Jacobs of Los Angeles adds that one woman who felt that her ballot wasn’t counted correctly “said that it reminded her of standing in line at the concentration camp, waiting for a piece of bread.”
Perhaps the Democratic zeitgeist is best summed up by the raspy-voiced Rangel. Asked about the approaching December 12 deadline, Rangel says, “Those of us who fought so hard for Al Gore to become the president of the United States, we still want to believe that there is plenty of time for the judges and the courts” to complete the process. “What could we do in the Congress? As a member, I think the first thing I would do is apply for my pistol.” Yowza! Hard to imagine a conservative congressman getting away with such a comment.
Almost every single Republican governor has been in Florida arguing Bush’s case. Wednesday morning the Dems send four of their own before the media (one of whom—Pedro Rosello of Puerto Rico—isn’t even from a state). They wander into the state senate hearing room to tell the media that they, too, support Gore’s latest legal gambit.
“We’re here in support of Vice President Gore’s very principled position that all the votes legally cast in the Florida presidential race should be counted,” says Gov. Paul Patton of Kentucky, president of the Democratic Governors’ Association. Using the Gore recount team’s latest in a series of coulda-woulda-shoulda vote calculations, Patton says that if the votes from Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties had been counted, it would have left Bush with a “one-hundred-fifteen-vote margin.” With such a slim margin, Patton argues, who knows what would happen when and if the court counted the 10,750 Miami-Dade ballots that haven’t registered a presidential choice.
Both Iowa (which went for Gore) and New Hampshire (which voted for Bush) reportedly registered more than 10,000 undervotes in this election, and their two governors, Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, are half of the Democratic gubernatorial force here on Wednesday. Both of those masses of ballots could have swung either state the other way. So I ask Vilsack and Shaheen: Are you as concerned about those ten-thousand-ballot chunks as you are about the mass from Miami?
“I can speak only, obviously, to the Iowa situation,” Vilsack says. “There is no accurate count of any undervote for the state of Iowa. The figure that you’re quoting, I believe, is a guesstimate on the part of the Iowa state Republican Party….I’m not certain, and I’ve not seen any specific definitive proof that indeed undervoting took place.”
There were, in fact, almost 13,000 undervotes in Iowa, a state that Gore won by 4,144 votes. And while Florida’s undervotes amount to 2.86 percent of the total votes counted, Illinois, Idaho, and Wyoming had even higher percentages.
“The state Republican Party was invited if they felt that there was an inadequate vote count, or inadequate attention paid to the voters in the state of Iowa, to have a recount,” Vilsack continues. “We were prepared to have a recount. They chose not to have a recount. I think that’s a fundamental difference here.
“We do know, in the state of Florida, and in Miami-Dade, there are ten thousand seven hundred identified ballots that are apparently on their way to this very city that have not been counted,” he continues. “I think of the people that cast those votes. We don’t know who they are. But there’s the possibility that a Congressional Medal of Honor winner could have cast one of those votes. Or a mother with two children who took the day off from work just because she felt strongly about this election could have cast that vote….Their vote does,in fact, matter.”
Yeesh. This is what it’s come down to. Hypothetical Congressional Medal of Honor winners.
Shaheen then steps up.
“I am in fact concerned that every vote in New Hampshire be counted,” she says. “We have a process to recount votes…. We’ve had twenty-six recounts as a result of this election in the state, and we’ve just finished those up this week. That’s my concern about what’s happening here in Florida. There has been a process to recount, and that’s been delayed, it’s been obstructed, through partisan political maneuvering.”
Patton returns to the mike. “We’re here to support the principle that every vote counts,” he says.
Every vote in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia Counties, that is. Not necessarily those in the other sixty-three counties in the state. And the fact that this is their position allows the Bushies to slam it—again and again and again. As Cheney tells Larry King on CNN,“every single vote in Florida has been counted. Every single vote in Florida has been recounted. Now, there are some that were not marked for president, and therefore didn’t register on the machines, but that’s not at all unusual in Florida. They’ve focused in on the ten thousand votes in Miami-Dade County that supposedly are unmarked. But there are some thirty-four counties in Florida that have a larger percentage of unmarked ballots for president than those in Dade County….
“What he wants to do now is go back in, in one heavily Democratic area—two counties—and direct these election supervisors, most of whom are Democrats, who have already made their own independent decisions to redo the whole process in a manner that will favor him. And that’s clearly inappropriate.”
Cheney’s comments that the 10,000 undervotes are just simply not votes isn’t true, and he must know that. But the fact that the Gorebies still haven’t formally called for a statewide recount of the 175,000 unread ballots is now not only indicative of the disingenuousness in their call to “count all the votes,” it is a major political miscalculation.
Sauls allows a few random citizens to intervene in the case on a limited basis. There’s Larry Klayman, of course, but there are also random Bush-backing Floridians and their hack attorneys—the GOP equivalent of the myriad butterfly ballot citizens, shysters, and suits. Which is maybe why no one pays much attention to any of them. Which may be too bad, in at least one case.
On Wednesday, November 29, Tallahassee attorneys R. Frank Myers and Lawrence Gonzalez—on behalf of Stephen and Teresa Cruce, Terry Kelly, and Jeanette Seymour—make a motion that if the court orders any recount, they order a full statewide recount of all the undervotes and OVERVOTEs. “In a statewide election with national implications,” they write, “it is self-apparent that ‘the will of the people’ means the will of all the people of the Great State of Florida, not just those who happen to live in a particular county.” Myers and Gonzalez set forth a few ground rules, notably that the court sets “the objective and uniform standards to be applied state-wide,” as well as a deadline. But the brief just joins a stack of others like it in an endless room of papers no one reads.
From: Mark Fabiani
PROPOSED GORE SCHEDULE
Daily Model
Daily Goals
• Gore personal appearance for television to communicate his message of the day
• Move news about disenfranchised voters in FL
• Offensive move against opposition (beginning with voter intimidation off of today’s Washington Post story and tomorrow’s pending New York Times stories)
• Demonstrate Democratic solidarity
Daily Events
• One Gore statement for television, articulating the message of the day
• At least one major Gore sit-down television interview
• One event focusing on disenfranchised voters in FL
• One event focusing on offensive message against opposition (voter intimida
tion)
• One event demonstrating Democratic solidarity
Proposed Gore Schedule
Tuesday
• Gore lunch with Larry Summers
• Gore statement in front of his house. Message: Gore has instructed his legal team to file a schedule with the court that would allow his challenge to be decided in advance of the December 12th deadline
• Gore interview with Today Show
• Pretaped today for airing Wednesday morning
• Claire Shipman
• Walking around NAVOBS with Mrs. Gore
• Ten minutes
Wednesday
• Gore meeting with Roy Neel *
• Gore statement in front of his house, or in front of the White House, articulating the message of the day.
• Gore network interviews, taped Wednesday for airing Wednesday night, with all three network anchors and CNN.
Thursday
• Ted Koppel/Nightline day in the life, taped Thursday for airing Thursday night
• Gore availability, if necessary
• Gore White House meetings
Friday
• Gore public statement on the message of the day
• Barbara Walters interview, taped Friday for airing on Friday night’s 20/20 broadcast
• Supreme Court argument
Weekend
• Instead of the Nightline/Walters combination, Gore could do 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl on Sunday
Fabiani thinks that there are just two targets for presidential communications: the front page of the New York Times, and NBC’s Today show. Both dictate to every other reporter what is “important.” If Today producer Jeff Zucker gives you time on his show, Fabiani thinks, then every other TV producer throughout the land notices. Thus, the taped interview with Claire Shipman.
“Did you win this election?” she asks.
“I—I certainly believe that I did,” he says. “I—I—I understand that there is considerable doubt about that, and that’s why this…”
“Do you think you should be president-elect right now?” she asks. “Do you?”
“Well—well, look, no, because I—I—the votes haven’t been counted. I think that a clear majority of the people who went to the polling places and tried to—to vote, did vote for—for Joe Lieberman and me. That happened in the country as a whole. I think it happened in Florida. But, the votes have not all been counted yet.”
Shipman points out that there are 1.2 million undervotes across the country. Gore dodges the question. When asked how he’s dealing with it all, he says, “I sleep like a baby. I’ve been getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night. And I’m—I am not tortured over what-ifs at all. And, in fact, I—I believe we’re going to win this election.”
In Tallahassee, Dorrance Smith, a freelance TV producer in town to help the Republicans coordinate media—he was President Bush’s assistant for media affairs from 1991 to 1993—watches Gore being interviewed by Shipman. Not a bad media hit, he thinks. But what greater indication is there that Monday night’s speech—CLICKCLICKCLICK—was a disaster than the fact that here’s Gore again, still pushing the issue, still trying to seal the deal?
In the Bush Building, producers start calling Smith. Gore has put out the word that he’s willing to sit for an interview with almost anyone—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC. Who does Smith have to offer, they ask. Can we get Bush?
Smith talks it over with Bush’s Austin triangle—Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, and Don Evans. They agree: Gore can go door-to-door trying to sell his case, but that doesn’t mean they have to follow suit. Christopher has disappeared, Daley’s in D.C., Boies is buried in legal work when he’s not doing TV. They decide to let Cheney go out there, bop Gore on the head a few times, but they’re not going to try to compete with Gore on his media plan.
Watching Gore’s interviews bears this out.
“I’ve never used the phrase ‘steal the election,’” he tells CNN’s John King. “I think that’s an intemperate phrase.”
“Mr. Vice President, if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against you on Friday, will you then give it up?” CBS’s Dan Rather asks.
“Mr. Vice President, there are another one hundred and sixty thousand of those ballots in the state of Florida, and you’re not asking for them to be recounted,” says NBC’s Tom Brokaw.
This is going great, Smith thinks. They’re kicking the shit out of him. The clincher is Peter Jennings on ABC. “You have not, sir, been completely clear or consistent about a date certain on which you will no longer continue the legal challenge,” Jennings says. “Do you believe that date is December the twelfth?”
“I think this is going to be over with by the middle of December,” Gore replies.
“The twelfth of December is indeed the middle of December,” says Jennings, perhaps a bit irritated.
Jeez Louise, Smith thinks. Gore’s like Captain Queeg on the deck of the Caine. When your principal becomes your surrogate, you’ve lost.
He brings a tape of the Jennings interview to Baker.
“I want you to watch this,” says Smith. “It helps our case. It shows you how desperate they really are.”
Baker soon stops by Smith’s desk.
“Yeah, that was tough,” he agrees.
That night, Wendy Walker Whitworth, senior executive producer for CNN’s Larry King Live, calls Smith.
“Who do you have for us tomorrow?” Whitworth asks the Republican.
“We have Gore!” Smith laughs.
“This case has to move on a fast track. I think all parties have to agree to that,” Sauls says, as he takes up Albert Gore Jr. v. Katherine Harris et al.
But for the Gorebies, it’s nowhere near fast enough.
The Gore legal team starts filing motions, pulling out stack after stack of papers like one of those term-paper factories that advertises in the back of Rolling Stone. They want the trial put on the fastfastfast-track. They want the ballots brought up and counted. Yesterday.
On Monday, the Gorebies present Sauls with a proposed schedule that Zack has devised that can have it all done in time for him to issue his order on December 9 at the latest. This they file, despite the fact that Sauls has already fashioned a schedule of his own.
Joe Klock—still purportedly Harris’s attorney, though he might as well get a red phone to Austin—points out that the “Expedited Trial Calendar” doesn’t give Harris enough time to respond under “minimal due process” requirements. Moreover, Klock rightly points out in his brief, the Gorebies’ deadline problems “are entirely of the plaintiffs own making”—(well, theirs, and Harris’s zombielike obedience to whatever is best for Bush)—“having demanded a greatly expanded protest period at the expense of the evidentiary contest period.”
’Tis true. The clock’s TICKTICKTICKing in the contest is precisely because the Gorebies deemed it so important—primarily for PR reasons—that they fend off the certification date until they squeezed all the votes they could out of the southeastern tip of the state.
On Tuesday Team Gore files to have the 10,750 Miami-Dade undervotes and the Palm Beach 3,300 disputed ballots brought up to Tallahassee and counted immediately. They propose that the ballots be inspected and counted by the clerk of the circuit court, or by the clerks from those two counties, or by “Special Masters” named by Sauls. But the Boies Klain team wants “the count of the contested ballots (to) begin immediately by whichever of these procedures the court elects.”
Phil Beck and Barry Richard, of course, object to any of these ideas, arguing that no one’s proven that anything needs to be looked at at all, much less counted.
Sauls is exasperated.“Have you attempted to confer, and have there been any matters at all, has anybody even been able to agree on the time of day?” he asks Tuesday evening.
“Yes, sir!” Douglass says. “We agree that it’s twenty minutes ’til six.”
We know we’re filing a lot of papers, Boies says. But we need to get the ballots examined A
SAP. “And to get that process started… we have been pestering the court with as many papers as we have submitted.”
“A little bit like getting nibbled to death by a duck,” Sauls says.
Douglass points out that the Bushies are trying to stall, and every time Sauls rules with them, he’s standing in the way of the process resolving itself. But Sauls says that “at this junction I have just about stripped the defendants down to the bares of due process.” He doesn’t know how much more he can expedite this.
Murray Greenberg’s on the speakerphone, and Sauls asks him about transporting the ballots up. How long will it take?
“Is it supposed to come up regular mail, UPS, FedEx, security?” Greenberg asks. “We need to know that, please.” Sauls says that whatever Leahy thinks is best is fine.
Richard still wonders why the ballots need to be brought up. Is Boies claiming that there was an abuse of discretion by the Miami-Dade and Palm Beach canvassing boards?
Boies says no. “Our argument is that those ballots were voted for Vice President Gore and Joe Lieberman. We think the court needs to look at those ballots—directly or indirectly—and conclude whether we’re right or wrong. It has nothing to do with canvassing-board discretion.” Miami-Dade didn’t count, so there was no discretion exercised, Boies says. And with respect to Palm Beach, “it’s a question of what are these votes.”
In the end, Sauls decides to split the difference. He’s going to order the undervotes shipped up, but he’s going to keep the schedule the same. “I think that this is the best that I can fashion to at least be unfair to both sides—equally,” Sauls says.
Beck rises. He says that voting machines need to be brought up with ballots.
“Well, there’s my friend Mr. Greenberg to the rescue perhaps,” Sauls says about the accommodating assistant county attorney. “Let’s find out.”