Down & Dirty (20 page)

Ken Mehlman and Randy Enwright—a Florida political operative who served as political director of the Florida GOP from 1995
through 1999—run the ground team. Tucker Eskew and Mindy Tucker—with advice from Tutweiler—work on communications, always
in conjunction with other Bush spinners in Austin, like Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett, Ari Fleischer.

The whole team is concerned. The powers that be worry that the floor is slipping out from under them.

After Palm Beach County’s machine recount, there’s been a 643-vote shift for Gore, one that the elections supervisor there,
LePore, cannot immediately explain. In Pinellas County, Gore gains 404 votes, and Bush loses 61. But then the elections officials
retract those numbers, too. Gore picked up 153 net votes in heavily Democratic Gadsden County—just
what
the
hell is going on?!

More bad news; Gore’s popular-vote lead now exceeds 300,000 votes.

And Broward, Volusia, and Palm Beach Counties are going ahead with the first steps toward a hand recount; the Miami-Dade canvassing
board
has announced that it will hear arguments about the matter on Tuesday. And after the state-mandated machine recount concludes
Thursday evening, Bush’s lead has been cut from 1,784 votes to 327. Baker, Ginsberg, and the other Bush recount team leaders
worry that at some point the lower fourth of the MSNBC TV screen will post a headline with Gore’s vote lead over Bush.

They all sit in the Bush Building, in the room they call the “bull pit.” Baker, Ginsberg, Olson. This is untenable, they think.
Many think that the election is being stolen from them.

Word comes from Austin that the team needs to prepare, to think about how to argue from a PR standpoint when and if the numbers
turn. Bush won, they say. Everything the Democrats are trying to do is a violation of preexisting Florida election law. Hand
recounts are for when there’s a problem, a malfunction, with the machines—not for when a candidate simply doesn’t like the
result.

GOP pols in the field report back to Tallahassee: “If they keep counting, we’ll be behind,” they say.

Additional worries come when Frank Jimenez hears that the Democrats on the ground are already making noise about the standards
by which ballots will be judged in any hand recount. They want the most generous standard available—even mere impressions
in ballots, so-called dents or dimples.

If this all keeps going on, Gore could win.

Baker won’t have it.

What about their own hand recount? The deadline’s Friday. They can cherry-pick a few of their own counties, glean some votes
that way.

But Baker wants to draw a line in the sand. No recounts. No nothin’.

When Terwilliger flies down from D.C. Thursday night, he takes notes on the plane. Note number one:“Federal Court—On What
Basis?”He’s skeptical that there was a role at all. But when he arrives, Ginsberg tells him to figure out how to get the matter
into federal court. Terwilliger and other lawyers talk about it, and the conventional wisdom is that this is a state issue.

“Not good enough,” Terwilliger says.

Florida courts are considered rather liberal, rather Democratic, especially the state supreme court. In 1996, Terwilliger
had represented John Walsh from TV’s
America’s Most Wanted,
in an open-documents, or “sunshine law,” case involving the police files surrounding the homicide of Walsh’s son. Walsh didn’t
want the file disclosed, because police and prosecutors were closing in on a suspect, and there were some details
in the file that might jeopardize the case, Walsh thought. The courts were liberal, more inclined to side with newspapers
than cops, Terwilliger learned. That experience, combined with the observations of Florida Republicans about the Florida courts,
convinced Terwilliger that this has to end up in federal court, where they have friends, especially at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Around this time, Berger receives a phone call from a colleague, Harry Jacobs, a personal injury lawyer from Longwood who’s
given Gore and the Democrats more than $50,000.

“We have a problem in Seminole County, too, Mitchell,” Jacobs says. “What do we do?”

Berger finds out the basic story. The state Republican Party screwed up the absentee ballot applications it had sent out,
forgetting to include a line on the form for the voter ID number. In Seminole County, Republican elections supervisor Sandra
Goard allowed Republican operatives to camp out in the elections office for ten days filling in these numbers on the voters’
behalf. Berger is outraged.

“You file a protest, Harry,” Berger tells him, walking him through the process.

Jacobs will eventually lie about this conversation. When asked by MSNBC’s
Hardball
host, Chris Matthews, on November 29,“Have you had any contact with Ron Klain or any of the attorneys for the Gore campaign?”
Jacobs will say, “No, sir.”

“None at all?” Matthews asks. “No contact with the Gore people at all in Washington or in Florida?”

“Well, I can tell you that I’ve talked to a lot of Democrats; I’ve also spoken to a lot of Republicans. Whether or not they
have some official capacity, that’s something unknown to me. I’m pursuing this case on my own.”

“Right,” Matthews says. “You’ve got no signal urging you on, for example; no cheering section from anybody connected to Gore?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Jacobs will say.
^*

Though we’ve heard all sorts of news reports here and there about results of the first machine recount, the world still has
no official number. At 6
P.M
. that evening in the state senate building, the three Florida officials in charge of the election certification who are now
supervising the state’s recount effort—Harris, Roberts, and Crawford, Bush supporters to a man—come before the cameras to
tell us that they don’t know, either.

“We will all remember these times as some of the most critical and defining moments in our nation’s history,” says Harris.
“A time when we as Americans are working to ensure the meaning and vitality of our democratic system.” Only fifty-three of
the state’s sixty-seven counties have provided her office with their official recount results, she says. Though Harris requested
all the re-tallies by Thursday, the fourteen remaining counties legally have until Tuesday, November 14, to provide her with
their results.

The unofficial results are as follows, she says: Her candidate, Bush, scores 2,909,661 votes; Gore gets 1,784 votes less than
that, 2,907,877. But these numbers mean nothing. They reflect a mishmash, a casserole, the new numbers from the fifty-three
counties that have recounted and certified their results
^*
plus the old numbers from the fourteen counties that have yet to turn their re-tallies in. And some of these fourteen counties
outstanding are unbelievably important for Gore’s hopes. Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties, for instance. Also unreported
is Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg and is near Tampa, and Orange County, which includes Orlando—major population
centers of the fabled Interstate 4 corridor. Old tallies have Gore beating Bush in both these spots, but not by all that much;
about 20,000 total. A small increase in any one of these places could completely flip the election results.

Harris says that some news organizations are calling the counties on their own and counting those as recount results. The
official standards, she says, are a bit more stringent. “Until we have the physical certification in our hands, they are not
officially certified,” she says. Absentee ballots from overseas, Harris reminds us, must be both received in Tallahassee and
counted by November 17.

Crawford seems to speak for all three when he says that his endorsement of Bush won’t affect his duties.“Anybody who’s going
to serve on this commission had to vote for somebody,” Crawford says, though he neglects to point out that Harris and Roberts
voted the same way. It does seem a bit much, all three of them being Bushies.

“Nobody ever said that democracy is simple or efficient,” Crawford says. “But this is democracy in action. If you want simplicity,
just go about seventy miles south of Florida, and you got Cuba, and they’re very simple, they have no elections.”

They leave the building, and none of us is any closer to knowing really much of anything at all.

I
n Fort Lauderdale on Friday, November 10, Judge Robert W. Lee, forty, is trying to keep things orderly.

Lee, appointed to the bench in 1997 by then-governor Lawton Chiles, had hated having to do the automatic machine recount two
days before. Having gone to bed at 5
A.M.
, he awoke Wednesday at 6:30 to run 588,000 Broward County ballots through the ten tabulation machines again.

Things got a little odder on Thursday, when Democratic lawyers petitioned the canvassing board, asking them to do a hand recount
of 1 percent of the county—roughly three precincts. Why? Lee wondered. The machines seemed to be functioning perfectly well.
What would be the justification for a hand recount? And now it’s Friday, and the canvassing board is voting on whether or
not to begin the 1 percent hand recount, to see if it’s needed countywide.

Supervisor of Elections Jane Carroll isn’t even there. Carroll, the Republican who’s retiring on January 3 after thirty-two
years as elections supervisor, is in Beech Mountain, North Carolina. She participates in the canvassing-board meeting by phone.

All eyes are on Lee here. Everyone knows Carroll is opposed to the very notion of hand recounts. Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger,
meanwhile, has voted for hand recounts as far back as March 1995, when a campaign for the Lauderdale Lakes city council was
lost by 2 votes, and another for Miramar commissioner was lost by 9. “I felt strongly then as I do now that we should bend
over backwards to protect this democracy,” says Gunzburger, a partisan Democrat elected city commissioner in 1982, county
commissioner ten years later. “Whatever we need to do to allow voters to
have their voice counted, it is our responsibility as a canvassing board to do so.”

There isn’t a whole lot of law in this area, Lee thinks. The statute for a recount—signed in 1989 by then-governor Martinez,
a Republican—is kind of vague, he thinks. Is the law for when there’s a problem with the vote counting? With the vote tabulation?
Lee turns to the county attorney.“This statute is extremely vague as to what it means. When do we have to do this manual recount?”

Leonard Samuels, a Gore lawyer, suggests that the board count just the county’s 6,686 undervotes. Carroll says that separating
the undervotes from the other 582,000 ballots won’t be easy; it will mean manually removing them all. Gunzburger makes the
motion that they do the 1 percent plus the undervotes.

Lee and Carroll refuse to second it. Not going to happen. They’ll stick with the three-precinct rule. If anything.

The law allows the petitioner to select the 1 percent he wants counted. Not surprisingly, Samuels presents three districts
that are almost laughably pro-Gore, the VP having won 91 percent of their 3,892 votes. Precinct 6-C, Sanders Park Elementary
School in the Pompano Beach neighborhood of Liberty Park, is so overwhelmingly African-American that only a dozen whites are
even on the voting roll. Democrats outnumber Republicans 1,755 to 78. On Election Night, there were 1,071 Gore votes, 19 Bush
votes, and 59 undervotes. The other two precincts are in the largely Jewish retirement condo community of Wynmoor Village
in Coconut Creek, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a 10-to-1 margin. In precinct 1-F in the
Wynmoor Village Entertainment Center, Gore racked up 1,308 votes, with, as was the case in precinct 6-C, more undervotes
than Bush votes, 80 to 62. Precinct 6-F in Wynmoor Village was similar: 1,175 Gore votes, 52 Bush votes, and 43 undervotes.