Down & Dirty (40 page)

OK, fair enough, but what about beyond that? What if you get that, and Gore still doesn’t win? Are you prepared to call it
a day?

“Let’s get the votes counted and see where we go from there,” Klain says to me.

But which votes do they want counted?

Jack Young calls Gorebies Charlie Baker and Jill Alper in Tallahassee to talk about what to do, where his team of roughly
forty should go next.

There’s talk of going to Broward, to help out Sautter’s team. It’s pretty much a given that he won’t go to Palm Beach County,
where the Boston Boys—with whom Young has butted heads—are running things.

Let me take these people and send them out to other Opti-scan counties, Young says. Let’s tell other canvassing boards about
the Volusia experience. Judge McDermott—a Republican—has gotten a lot of good press, let’s capitalize on it.

Clearly there are votes in the overvotes, Young says. People fill in the circle for Bush and then write in Cheney and the
vote is discarded, unread by the machine. Lake and Duval Counties have a ton of overvotes, for instance.

But Baker and Alper are skeptical. Lake and Duval Counties are overwhelmingly Republican, they say. The plan is to count in
places where Gore won.

Young reiterates the point—the one he and Sautter made in
The Recount Primer
—that if you’re behind, you just increase the pool of possible
votes as much as possible. (Not to mention the idea that if you actually want to count all the votes, you don’t shrug off
doing so in some counties because they tilt GOP.)

If you go into those counties can you assure us that Gore will pick up votes there? Young is asked by the people he calls
“the politicos.”

“No,” he says, “I can’t.”

His team is sent south, to Broward and then eventually Miami-Dade.
^*
So much for “count all the votes.”

As the sun rises Wednesday morning, Palm Beach is set to do its recount, and Broward isn’t.

That switches.

The Broward County canvassing-board members seek legal guidance on what they’re permitted to do. They find that, since Elections
Supervisor Jane Carroll was the one who received Harris’s binding opinion—and not Judge Lee, the chairman of the board—they’re
not bound by it. So, impressed by Butterworth’s opinion, Lee switches his vote.

A GOP attorney says that they gotta listen to Harris. “Then let her go get her mandamus to make us stop,” Lee says, referring
to the Latin word for “we command” and the legal order from a superior court. And in the meantime, they plunge away—twelve
teams of counters, 609 precincts, 588,000 ballots. Two corners of the chad gotta be off in order for it to count.

From Austin, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, based on nothing, tells reporters that Lee’s change of mind is evidence that “officials
involved in the recount are succumbing to political pressure.” Lee finds this ridiculous. The other night, he had heard that
Democrats were saying that Jeb was promising him treats; now word on the street is that Gore had pledged to him a federal
judgeship. Both sides are going crazy, Lee thinks. He’s bent over backward to avoid contact with anyone.

“Scott,” he said earlier in the week to his partner of five years, “until this is over, let the machine pick up all the calls.”
He wouldn’t return any having to do with any of this. He told his secretary, Olga, to tell folks that he wasn’t returning
any calls until the storm had subsided.

Speaking of political pressure, the same Republican lawyer that Lee snapped at a few nights ago—Fort Lauderdale barrister
James Carroll—is today sharing the love in Palm Beach, where on behalf of the GOP he’s trying to get Carol Roberts disqualified
from the canvassing board. He says she’s been counting ballots as Gore votes that have “no hanging chads. She’s been observed
picking up numerous ballots from questionable ballot piles and interspersing [them] with the Gore ballot pile. She has been
observed bending, twisting, poking, and purposely manipulating ballots in a manner that compromised their integrity. Ms. Roberts
has been observed bending individual ballots approximately ninety degrees to determine whether the vote was valid.”

One of Gore’s Boston Boys, Dennis Newman, steps up.

“This motion is the most ridiculous, frivolous attempt that I’ve ever seen. Everyone in this room, this area, and all this
media have told you of every action that every member of the board made on Saturday. There are thousands of videotapes of
that. To say that one of the commissioners handled the ballots and looked at them in an unfair way is just a desperate attempt,
another desperate attempt, of the Republicans to delay the fair and accurate counting of the ballots of Palm Beach County.”

But it’s not just Republicans like the delightful James Carroll who are playing politics; political pressure comes from the
Democrats, too. Palm Beach County Democratic chair Monte Friedkin, pissed off at Burton, tells reporters that “he’ll never
get elected in this county. Not if I’m chairman.”

“It’s a political nightmare,” Burton will think when he hears of Friedkin’s comments.“Sure, there isn’t any direct pressure,
but I can read the papers, I can read quotes. Friedkin, shooting his mouth off, let him do what he wants—that’s fine. But
these things shouldn’t be on the judge’s mind.” He needs to focus on the law.

As if the world isn’t bass-ackward enough, Judge LaBarga rules in favor of the Dems on the standard by which the ballots are
to be assessed. The 1990 standard goes against Florida law, he says. “No vote is to be declared invalid or void if there is
a clear indication of the intent of the voter.” The 1990 standard “restricts the canvassing board’s ability to determine the
intent of the voter.” But it’s a confusing, vague order, as befitting everything in this mess. While LaBarga rules that “the
Palm Beach County Commission has the discretion
to utilize whatever methodology it deems proper to determine the true intention of the voter,” he also says that the board
doesn’t have the discretion to use the 1990 standard.“The present policy of a per se exclusion of any ballot that does not
have a partially punched or hanging chad is not in compliance with the law,” he rules.“The canvassing board has the discretion
to consider those ballots and accept them or reject them.”

Right. Well. OK. Thanks for clearing
that
up.

Harris receives the canvassing board’s requests for extensions of the certification deadline. She rejects them. The Steel
Hector & Davis attorneys have told her that the only excuses for late tallies are broken machines or acts of God. And though
there’s reason to believe that something’s really wrong with the Votomatics—whether it’s the fault of the machines or the
voters, who can say—none of the members of the canvassing board claim that their machines were broken. Not that Harris or
her legal staff gave them a heads-up that such would be an acceptable excuse.

Burton will later say about their excuse letter that he didn’t think she even read it.

Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala is on NBC’s
Today
show Wednesday morning. “She oughta recuse herself,” he says of Harris. “She hasn’t done so, which suggests to me she’s impervious
to public opinion. I mean, everybody who appears in public like she did yesterday, looking like Cruella De Vil coming to steal
the puppies, is not very interested in what other people think of her.”

Al Gore thinks this is hilarious. “Cruella De Vil!” he says. “Did you hear what Paul called her?”

Harris, of course, doesn’t find the remark all that funny. She likes Dalmatians. And how come no one makes fun of any of the
males in all of this and the way
they
look? Why aren’t
they
mocked on
Saturday Night Live
? Her staffers try to comfort her—Hey! You really have to make it big to be made fun of on
SNL
! But it hurts. Still, she’s addicted to it in a way. She stays up late, watching Letterman and Leno, to see what they have
to say about her.

Bobby Martinez is pissed off.

He just got a call to head to the Miami-Dade canvassing-board hearing. Martinez thought this shit was over with, but shortly
after he arrives, Miami Democratic chair Joe Geller offers the motion to reconsider yesterday’s decision. Without giving the
other side any notice. Without anything having changed.

After Geller springs his surprise motion on the board—after a different hearing on a recount involving a local race—King asks
Martinez if he wants to say anything.

Martinez doesn’t even want to concede that what Geller’s doing is even remotely appropriate.

Perhaps more important, Martinez is worried about the Cuban-American community, which has been exemplary so far in its behavior
during this incendiary mess, he thinks. But he knows that Miami-Dade, and its
Cubano
community, has the potential for chaos. If you want to set off a series of events to cause tensions to explode, you can do
it if you set out to do it, he thinks. And this reconsideration has the potential to do that.

Geller steps up to the mike. He tells the board that Broward County canvassing-board members have decided to go ahead with
the countywide hand recount, that they changed their minds, that they decided that the results after the 1 percent recount
indicate maybe enough to affect the outcome of the election.

“Why did they consider a full manual recount?” Lehr asks. “What prompted them to do such a thing?”

A judge told them they could go ahead with it and ignore Harris’s certification deadline, Geller says. He wants to reconvene
tomorrow at 9
A.M.
, so the board can reconsider.

“How much time do you anticipate,” King asks, “the presentation of at least—”

Geller’s cell phone starts ringing.

“Please turn your phone off, sir,” King says.

“I’m sorry,” he says, frantically punching the appropriate button. “Sorry.”

“How much time do you anticipate you’ll need?”

Geller says an hour.

Leahy says that the fact that Broward changed its mind isn’t enough. “I would need more than that to vote for a re-hearing,”
he says.

Geller reaches into his bag of justifications. Judge LaBarga ruled against Harris’s deadline, too, he says. And in addition,
he “issued an order striking down the Palm Beach County standards used by the canvassing board—the one-corner, two-corner
rule.”