Down & Dirty (45 page)

Fleming gives news of the memo to Stuart Bowen, a Bush attorney from Austin who’s supervising the absentee-ballot effort in
the Panhandle. On Friday morning, after making sure that Fleming obtained the memo legally, Bowen tells him to fax the memo
to Tallahassee ASAP.

At 11:42
A.M.
, the memo arrives in Unger’s office. He shows it to the senior attorneys running his shop, who have it run over to Bush HQ
at the Bush Building.

“This is gold,” Tucker says when it gets around to her. It’s a PR jackpot—it plays into an already existing perception that
the Democratic Party cares less about the military than the Republicans do. Plus there’s the hypocrisy angle. “Count every
vote”? Except for American soldiers?! The Bushies got ready for a full assault. From now on, they will refer only to “military
ballots,” not “overseas absentee ballots.”

Duval County, Clay County, Escambia County, Okaloosa County—the places where there is the highest concentration of military
voters—seem to be where it’s the worst. The Gorebies are after ballots for not having a postmark. They’re after military ballots
for having a U.S. postmark, though the military will later explain that several batches of these overseas ballots
were postmarked in the United States from various port cities. They’re after federal write-in ballots, which are for individuals
abroad who claim that they requested an absentee ballot but never received one. Along with their voting information, users
of federal write-in ballots have to swear in an affidavit under the penalty of perjury that they requested an absentee ballot
and didn’t receive one. The Gorebies are making elections supervisors check the names of the voters against their records
to see if, in fact, they did request absentee ballots.

Gore recount expert Chris Sautter is before the Broward County canvassing board when a team of three other Gore attorneys
comes in to disqualify absentee ballots. Sautter is not happy.

Like Young, Sautter’s a big believer in adopting a conciliatory tone with the canvassing board. And now here come these schmucks,
sent by Tallahassee, trying to eliminate votes. Sautter’s first instinct is to not even let them into the room.

Sautter has a brief discussion with them—not one of them has ever been involved in a recount before. They’re carrying the
Herron memo, which he has never seen before. They seem to be under the impression that their orders are to be stringent when
it comes to military overseas absentee ballots but not to overseas ballots in general. To Sautter, their attitude is “We’re
the pros, and we’re here to take over.”

This is a county that Gore won with 67 percent of the vote, Sautter tells them. They don’t use the Herron memo.

One of the Florida Bushies, state GOP finance chair Al Austin, is good friends with Norman Schwarzkopf, and he calls up ol’
Stormin’ Norman to see if he knows about the Herron memo. When he learns of it, the Persian Gulf War commander blows his top.
But Schwarzkopf is sick with the flu, so he can’t appear at any press event. Nevertheless, on the morning of Saturday, November
18, Schwarzkopf calls Tucker and dictates a statement. “These armed forces ballots should be allowed to be tallied,” Schwarzkopf
says. “It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger
on a daily basis, yet because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president
of the United States who will be their commander in chief.”

When Tucker and an aide go to the Tallahassee press camps Saturday morning armed with copies of the Herron memo, Schwarzkopf’s
statement,
and a few other documents, reporters attack them like locusts. On TV on Saturday, and in print on Sunday, the story erupts.

Ron Klain tries to point out that the rules the Herron memo details are just the same rules that Jim Smith spelled out on
Sunday, when the Republicans were fearful of sacks of absentee ballots coming S.W.A.K. from Tel Aviv. He runs over to CNN,
MSNBC, Fox News Channel, distributing copies of the transcript of Smith’s press conference. But not one media outlet mentions
Sunday’s press conference by Jim Smith or how the Bushies have shamelessly pulled a 180 on the issue, since rigorous application
of the law will now clearly affect armed servicemen and -women more so than Jews abroad in Israel.
^*
Instead, the focus is on the Gorebies’ nakedly hypocritical love for election law hypertechnicalities in their mad rush to
disenfranchise American soldiers. And on the fact that of the 3,733 overseas absentee ballots that have come in since Election
Day, 1,527 of them have been scrapped.

In Austin, Montana governor Marc Racicot—a friend of Bush’s and longtime supporter—sits in with the brain trust and hears
this business. Racicot (pronounced Roscoe), once the chief prosecutor for the largest U.S. military jurisdiction in Europe
back when he was in the judge advocate general’s corps, volunteers to go point on this.

Armed with anecdotes that have come from the organized, information-gathering infrastructure that Enwright, Mehlman, and Eskew
have assembled, on Saturday Racicot gives a televised press conference to lash out at the hand-recount process and the Democrats’
absentee-ballot disqualification campaign.

Racicot is a perfect pick for this. His low-key manner combined with his prosecutor’s taste for the jugular will allow him,
over the next few weeks, to make the most ugly of allegations while seeming perfectly reasonable. As one of the leaders of
the Libby High School basketball team in its first and only state basketball championship season, student body president Racicot
set a record that still stands for the most assists in a hoops game: 32. He will give Bush a big one as well.

More important, he knows how to try a case, having earned a 95 percent conviction rate over an eleven-year stretch. He became
Montana’s twentieth governor in 1993, and he will be retiring this year, mentioned frequently as a possible member of a Bush
cabinet.

“There is something, obviously, that is terribly, terribly wrong with what has been occurring,” Racicot says. “We now have
clear and convincing evidence—in fact, in my judgment, it’s beyond that—that in Palm Beach County and Broward County, the
hand counting of the ballots that is ongoing is not only fundamentally flawed; it is becoming completely untrustworthy.”

The attempt to discredit the hand-recounting process by mocking the chad has not gained enough steam—especially since everything
is televised and witnessed by members of both parties—so the Republicans have decided that they have to just start lying,
fibbing, exaggerating, and insinuating.

They had tried. On Thursday and Friday in Palm Beach, Eskew’s complaints weren’t finding many takers among the reporters who
were there, who saw that absent a few minor incidents of human error—all corrected—there wasn’t much to gripe about. Everything
was pretty orderly. So Eskew passed off his charges to Tallahassee, and a new Big Lie begins, and the campaign the otherwise
respectable Racicot begins to aggressively wage here on behalf of the Bush team henceforth consists of nothing short of a
goulash of truth, lies, and innuendo—most offensively against the judiciary—and served to the American people with a sprinkle
of concocted moral outrage.

Right off the bat, Racicot says that the Miami-Dade canvassing board consists of “two Democrats and one Republican.” That’s
not true. King is a Democrat; Lehr and Leahy are independent.

Racicot refers to “the taping of chads to ballots.” He refers to witnesses who “have completed affidavits that indicate that
a taped chad has been taped over the hole where the ballot or the notation could be made for a vote for Governor Bush.” It
is true that some of these ballots exist, but in every case the chad was apparently taped by voters. There is no evidence,
and there are no witnesses to anyone else doing the taping.

Racicot goes on to make hay out of the mixing of piles of Gore votes and Bush votes, reading conspiracy in bureaucratic ineptitude,
just as Democrats did with minority voters turned away from the polls on Election Day.

“Ballots have been used as fans,” the former military prosecutor alleges. “In fact, the chairman of the Palm Beach canvassing
board, Judge Burton,
had to warn counters not to use the ballots as fans.” This one is true; Mehlman himself saw it. Burton told them to stop fanning
themselves; the fanning stopped; but not one chad was ever seen falling out as a result of the fanning. Of course, Racicot
doesn’t mention that inconvenient fact.

Racicot harps on: “On Thursday night at one
A.M.
, an elderly counter dropped twenty to sixty ballots over the floor, creating a huge scene. Other observers stepped on the
ballots as they were lying on the floor. Just for a minute, imagine that you have a seventy-year-old man at two
A.M.
in the morning trying to count thousands of small cards, many of which stick together, to see where these tiny holes are
located.

“In Broward County, there’s chad on the floor, on the counting tables, on the chairs,” he continues. Of course this is true.
When ballots with hanging chad are handled, sometimes the partially punched chad falls from the ballot. But anyone who has
handled and seen these ballots knows that the chad doesn’t fall out unless it was already at least partially, usually almost
entirely, punched. And in all the allegations the Republicans will allege, not once will they ever produce evidence—or even
one convincing story—of someone punching the chad from a ballot during the counting.

Anyone who sees the process knows that it is organized, and highly supervised, with bureaucrats and county workers slaving
away, trying to do the right thing while under the watchful eyes of the media as well as political operatives from both sides.
But the Bush team doesn’t want America to know this. Harping on the changing standards alone isn’t doing the trick, so they
begin alleging fraud and corruption.

“I think when the American people learn about these things, they’re going to ask themselves, ‘What in the name of God is going
on here?’”

One might say the same thing about Racicot’s press conference. It’s a pretty shameless episode in an otherwise respectable
career.

But Racicot is not done, and only now does he hit on the heart of the matter.“Last night we learned how far the vice president’s
campaign will go to win this election,” he says. “And I am very sorry to say, but the vice president’s lawyers have gone to
war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces in an effort to win at any cost.

“Last night across Florida, they threw out between nine hundred and eleven hundred votes cast by military men and women. In
Duval County, for example, forty-four votes, mostly military, were thrown out. The man who would be their commander in chief
is fighting to take away the votes from the people that he would command.” Even with those ballots tossed, Bush picks up 1,376
votes, Gore 750. Bush is now ahead by 926 votes.

In the Bush Building in Tallahassee, one senior member of the Bush team has a realization.“Boy, they could really use Jim
Smith’s words against us,” the strategist says. Luckily for them, neither the Democrats nor the media do so. In fact, only
one media outlet—a Web magazine—even points out the contradiction.