Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  On November 8, Bush led Gore by 1,734 votes. The state-ordered machine recount brought this down to 357. On Wednesday, November 15, Harris’s partial certification put his lead at 300. Then absentee ballots brought the margin back up to 930. After Broward County’s hand recount, the tally was then certified with Bush up by 537.

  But the Florida Supreme Court has just ordered 157 votes from Miami-Dade and 215 from Palm Beach counted.

  Bush’s lead has dropped to 154 votes.

  One-hundred-and-fifty-four fucking votes! Yikes!

  Even if you factor in the real number of votes Gore won in Palm Beach, that’s still a Bush lead of only 193. Who knows what will be found in the 60,000 or so undervotes out there? Duval County went for Bush 57 percent to 41 percent—but Democrats insist that many of the county’s 4,967 undervotes come from black precincts. A lot of the undervote counties are Bush counties: Collier County with 2,082; Hillsborough with 5,531; Indian River County has 1,058; Lee County 2,017; Marion County 2,445; Katherine Harris’s home county, Sarasota, has 1,809. But there are Gore counties in there, too. Pinellas County, which Gore won by 15,000 or so votes, has 4,226; Pasco County 1,776; Orange County with 966; Osceola with 642…

  Anything could happen. Anyone could win.

  For the second and last time, Ron Klain actually thinks that Gore might really end up the forty-third president.

  In Washington, D.C., the chieftains of the Gore team go out to celebrate at the Palm Restaurant.

  Their underlings, and Bush’s, spend the night arranging for chartered planes full of hundreds of observers to zoom in at once, to supervise.

  Richman and Jacobs are appealing Seminole to the Florida Supreme Court. “Jesus Christ,” Daley says. A message is left with Richman to call Daley. He wants to put an end to this nonsense. But Richman refuses to call him back. He calls Berger—a friend—instead.

  “Tell them: the vice president wants to count votes,” Daley says to Berger. “He does not want to be not counting votes.”

  This is the most difficult task of Berger’s whole experience. In his heart, he wanted Seminole to be part of the contest. He thinks that the law was seriously violated. And Berger knows how hard Richman and Jacobs and Richman’s partner—and Berger’s close friend—Alan Greer have worked on the case, essentially without their help. It’s actually a painful experience for him. He thinks of himself as the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan, a captain doing what he’s told, sent off on a mission he doesn’t agree with. He meets with them and shares Gore’s thoughts.

  “We can’t drop the case,” Richman tells him. “The only way we would even consider it is if Gore personally asks us to do.”

  Richman still feels good, that if he looks the Florida Supreme Court justices in the eyes, they’ll do the right thing. Chief Justice Wells is an old law school classmate of his. They simply will not be able to deny giving us relief, Richman says. The disparate treatment is so clear in the record.

  The Florida Supreme Court order for the undervote recount is shipped back to Sauls, but he isn’t going to have anything to do with it. No, siree. Those liberal fools want to make up another law, fine, but he sure isn’t going to play a part in it. Not when he doesn’t think it’s constitutional.

  So Terry Lewis gets called back into the game and commences a hearing at 8 P.M.

  Beck, who has been preparing to argue standards almost since he started on the case, scurries with his briefcase full of chad-related notes back to circuit court. He says that he’s “concerned that this is a proceeding that’s fraught with peril constitutionally and otherwise.”

  Douglass, conversely, wants everything to start as soon as possible. There are going to be counties that aren’t going to do a thing ’til they get a court order from Lewis telling them to do so. “That’s all that we have to offer, really, is to get this going.”

  Klock objects, of course. He objects to Lewis supervising the counting of the Miami-Dade ballots when they’re to be counted by a three-person canvassing board, he objects to the overvotes not being counted, he objects to the fact that all the votes aren’t being counted. He’s right about the overvotes, of course. But no one’s listening.

  “This is how we believe you ought to proceed, Your Honor,” Beck says. “These votes or these ballots need to be evaluated using a consistent standard, because if instead you let several people start evaluating ballots using a purely subjective standard that varies from person to person, you’ve guaranteed yourself several legal problems.”

  “Let me stop you for a second,” Lewis says again. “Didn’t the supreme court indicate exactly what standards apply?”

  Not really, says Beck. “The supreme court said, look at the voter’s intent. And what we had was a two-day trial, and much of the evidence went to how one would ascertain voter intent from indentations and dimples on a ballot. And so we have a wealth of evidence on that, Your Honor, and unfortunately Judge Sauls has recused himself. And so we’re frankly going to need to educate you.” We’re going to put together a presentation tonight and maybe show it to you tomorrow, Beck says. Keep slowing it down.

  Lewis now comes face-to-face with one of the complaints Olson, Carvin, et al. filed in their complaint to Middlebrooks way back when. “What’s the legal standard in Florida for determining” the intent of the voter? he asks. After Beck refers to the 1990 Palm Beach County standard, Lewis asks,“was that a statewide standard?”

  No, Beck says. He catches himself on one of the Bush campaign’s own right-hook, left-hook combinations. He says there is no legal statewide standard, then says that coming up with a new one would be changing the rules in the middle of the game.

  “You’re confusing me,” Lewis says.“I thought you said there was no standard, so how can I change it?” Regardless, “the standard is what the supreme court says it is, because that’s what I’m bound by.”

  “What I think you ought to do, Judge, with the other counties… is tell these counties that job number one is to segregate the undervotes in a way where they keep records, accurate records, this time around, of how many votes are being recorded for Bush and how many are being recorded for Gore and how many are being recorded as undervotes.”

  The Gorebies think Beck is stalling. “We think the court meant immediately when it said immediately,” Boies says.“Hours make a difference here.”

  Beck doesn’t see it that way. He tells Lewis that he’s being “cooperative.” They don’t want the counting to occur, but if it does, they want it to be sound. They want it to be able to pass constitutional muster. Their field guys—Mehlman, Enwright—insist that with their idea of a real standard, Bush will win, even statewide.

  But Beck also wants this standard reapplied to Gore votes he thinks are sketchy. The Broward County surge, for example, should be reexamined. He also suggests that when Lewis supervises counting the Miami-Dade undervotes tomorrow, he should start all over again since the 20 percent that were counted were done so with a loose standard, and at the very least a different standard from the one Lewis will probably use. Otherwise,“a lot of Hispanic voters who tended to vote Republican in this last election are going to have their votes evaluated under a standard that’s different than was used for the Democrats. That creates big problems under the Voting Rights Act for a protected group like Hispanic-Americans.”

  But Lewis is not going to take Beck’s advice. He wants the Miami-Dade ballots to be counted starting at 8 A.M. tomorrow at the local library; he puts out word to Leon County judges that he’d appreciate their help. The other sixty-three counties have until 2 P.M. Sunday to finish and by noon Saturday to fax him information on what their plans are. He gives out his fax number on international TV; big mistake. Faxes start humming in from all over. Cartoons. Angry letters. Jokes about chad and Palm Beach County voters.

  Beck continues to talk about standards. About hanging chad. About patterns. About how just dimples cannot be considered votes. On and on. He agrees that if all the votes on the ball
ot are just dimples, that should count as a vote, but he asks Lewis to check out any questionables.

  Lewis, of course, has seen that the Florida Supreme Court has begged off the opportunity—not once, but twice—to set standards. He’s certainly not going to infer that they want him to come up with something. But Beck’s not even talking to Lewis anymore. He figures that canvassing-board members have their TVs on and are watching, and worrying, and wondering what the hell they’re supposed to do tomorrow, what standards they’re supposed to apply. He’s hoping that they’ll take his advice. After all, he’s the only one offering any. And even if they’re not watching, well, he’s confident that a U.S. Supreme Court justice or two might be watching the Phil Beck show right about now.

  20

  “Boy, that was some Election Night, huh?”

  It’s 6:22 A.M. Saturday morning, and I’m on my way back to Tallahassee. My cab driver is from St. Lucia, and he doesn’t understand just what the hell’s going on with the elections here.

  “It is much simpler there,” he says of voting in St. Lucia. “It is one man, one vote. We count all the votes by hand.”

  St. Lucia stands in stark contrast with St. Lucie County, Florida, this morning. In St. Lucie County (Bush 34,705, Gore 41,559), there are 537 undervotes that have yet to be inspected. According to my cabbie, at least, that never would have happened in St. Lucia.

  There are three Democrats on my plane into town—two from Boston, one from D.C.—all of whom have been asked by the Gore recount team to fly down to the Panhandle and help supervise the statewide hand recount of the undervotes. After the connecting flight from Atlanta lands in Talli, about a dozen Democrats converge near the Avis rental car counter, where they are given car keys and instructions on where to drive. As with teams of Republicans, they’re being farmed out to supervise the recount efforts across the state, from Pensacola to Naples.

  Peter Greenberger, twenty-seven, worked under Baldick for Gore in New Hampshire during the primaries and then helmed the western Pennsylvania effort for Gore-Lieberman, but he’d spent the recount period in D.C., waiting to be sent to Iowa or Wisconsin in case those states had recounts. They didn’t, so Greenberger watched it all on TV. Until Friday afternoon, that is, when three different DNCers called him, attempting to draft him into three different assignments in three different Florida counties.

  Saturday morning at 6 A.M., Greenberger shows up at the Signature Airlines terminal at D.C.’s Reagan National Airport. It’s a sea of Republicans. Two hundred, maybe 250. All with orange “W.” caps, better dressed than the few Democrats, sporting far more pearls. Greenberger huddles in the corner with the other six Democrats. It’s easy to pick them out—two of them are black, one’s Native American, you got Greeny, a Jew, and two others.

  When their seven-seater charter plane lands in Tallahassee, they’re met by a staffer who throws them rental-car keys and a map. Greeny takes the I-10 to Madison County, on the Georgia line, drives into the town of Madison, and instinctively looks for the clock tower. When he finds it, he learns that the canvassing board has already finished up its review of the 31 undervotes—plus 4 for Gore, plus 2 for Bush. So he calls in to Tallahassee, and is sent to the town of Mayo in Lafayette County. He drives there, looks for the clock tower. When he finds it, he learns that Lafayette didn’t have any undervotes, so there’s nothing to do here, either. There are overvotes in Lafayette, but the Florida Supreme Court didn’t order anyone to inspect those, so again, nothing to do here for Greeny. He calls in again. This time he’s sent to Suwanee County. All that Greeny knows of Suwanee County is Bugs Bunny singing that “Way Down Upon de S’wanee River” song. He’s about to learn a whole lot more.

  When Greeny walks into the county seat building, in Live Oak, and announces that he’s with the Democratic Party, he’s greeted with silence. The canvassing board and four Republican observers are about a third through the Opti-scan undervotes. Greeny’s told that Bush has picked up 4, Gore 1. Greeny asks to see the five newly discovered votes. Two of the Bush votes are fine, good, exactly why these things need to be looked at. But what the… ?

  One of the new Bush votes has solid checks by the name of every Democrat in every race except for president, and no vote for either Gore or Bush. There’s a slight pencil mark near Bush’s name, but certainly nothing like the definitive checks for this voter’s picks elsewhere on the ballot. Greeny objects to this. I mean, the voter went for all Democrats! All Democrats plus Bush?! That’s crazy to think that, Greeny says.

  “Well, you’re looking at someone who did that,” Greeny is told by Judge William Slaughter, the chairman of the canvassing board. In fact, all three members of the Suwanee County canvassing board are Democrats. Old-school Southern Democrats, to be sure. But Democrats nonetheless.

  The other questionable Bush vote has check marks by the names of two or three presidential candidates—but, in Greeny’s view, just a slightly bigger check mark next to Bush’s name.

  “This is an overvote,” Greeny says. “I want to protest these two.”

  “You can’t protest them, we’re not in the ‘protest’ phase anymore,” Slaughter says. “This is the contest phase.”

  “Well, then I want to contest them,” Greeny replies. But he’s told he can’t do that, either.

  Greeny is hit with two emotions. One is suspicion: What would this board have counted if he hadn’t shown up? The other is sympathy. So this is what it must have felt like for Republicans when they were before what they perceived to be hostile canvassing boards, he thinks. Shit happens in situations like these, and if no one representing the candidate you didn’t support is there—if the GOP or Democratic observer is clueless, or lost, or stuck in traffic, or late—why wouldn’t someone fudge a bit on two or three ballots? And if that happens in sixty-seven counties, with Bush having a winning margin of only 154 votes, well, there’s your election right there.

  While it was the Republicans who had to play catch-up in those first few days after the election, the GOP now has the state wired. The Florida Supreme Court issued their ruling at around 4 P.M. on Thursday, and within five hours, at least 120 Republicans were on the ground in Tallahassee.

  That night, on the first floor of the Bush Building, Enwright, Mehlman, Mark Wallace, and a few others spent ninety minutes training them on what to do, what to expect. The room was overflowing. Suitcases outside the room were lined up, a scene that reminded Enwright of the first day of summer camp. By 1:30 in the morning, everyone was ready to go. Minivans shipped the observers around; by 7 A.M. Saturday morning, they have observers in each of the sixty-three counties where hand recounts are scheduled.

  Drafted by Enwright the night before, Tallahassee GOP consultant David Johnson is at the Bush Building by 6:30 A.M. He’s sent to Gadsden County, but the canvassing board there isn’t quite ready to get started yet, so he returns to Tallahassee, where he picks up another local pol, Steve Madden. Johnson’s in the Republican uniform: blazer, white shirt, tie, khakis. Madden, a burly giant of a man, overslept, so he’s cutting quite a different figure with his unshaven face, black sweater, jeans, and hiking boots. Johnson and Madden’s destination: Liberty County.

  As Johnson and Madden shoot west on Highway 20, they figure they’re gonna arrive in the county seat, Bristol, right on time. It’s 10:15 A.M., and

  Liberty County’s set to start counting at 10—but Liberty’s in the central time zone, they figure, so they should be pulling up right when the undervotes come out. As they approach the town, Madden phones the courthouse in Bristol to get directions.

  “You can’t miss it, we’re having our winter festival today, and it’s all taking place in front of the courthouse,” Madden’s told. “But we started a few minutes ago.”

  “You did?” Madden says. “But I thought you weren’t going to start until 10.”

  “That’s right,” he’s told.

  And then it hits both Madden and Johnson: Bristol isn’t in the central time zone, it isn’t west of
the Apalachicola River—it’s in the eastern time zone, just like Tallahassee. Kind of weird that they didn’t realize that, they think. Maybe they were overcompensating for the networks screwing up on Election Night and forgetting that any of the state was in central time.

  Anyway, they get there. Five Gore operatives are there, and they sneer at Johnson, instantly making the guy in the tie and khakis as a Republican. Hilariously, however, the Gorebies approach Madden, introduce themselves to him, apparently assuming that such a big ol’ slob could only be a Democrat.

  When it’s all over, inspecting Liberty County’s 29 undervotes will end up netting Gore a grand total of 1 new vote.

  Jackson County, on the Panhandle and the Alabama border, doesn’t have a lot of citizens like Joshua Green, who flew in from New York, N.Y., to supervise the goings-on for Gore. The Jackson County courthouse this morning is not a hospitable place, Green thinks. Especially after he starts to wonder about the weird white stickers on hundreds of the county’s Opti-scan ballots.

  “What’s this?” Green asks the supervisor of elections, Sylvia Stephens, and her deputy, Vicki Farris.

  Stephens explains. As Jackson County has been doing for years, before elections workers put the county’s 17,000 or so ballots through the machine for the final Election Night count, they separated the 1,400 or so ballots that the machine didn’t read—undervotes and overvotes. Where the elections officer could determine the intent of the voter—say, someone filled in both the Bush oval and also the write-in oval next to which he or she wrote “Bush”—the officer covered the superfluous oval with a white sticker so the machine could read the ballot.

  Farris tells Green that they did this to 300 or so ballots. Green looks around; the only ballots he sees fixed like this are Bush votes.

  This is a county that Bush won 9,138 to 6,868.