Down & Dirty (57 page)

“Until the demonstration stops, nobody can do anything,” Leahy says.

Bushie Joel Kaplan says, “I suspect that if the announcement was made—”

“That announcement needs to be made by someone from the party,” Villafana insists.“I don’t think at this point in time they
are willing to listen to anyone that represents either the government or the media.”

“Would the board be able to issue a couple of sentences?” Bushie Conolly asks, stalling.

“You can express that, and if you like, I will be there as well,” Villafana says, “but as long—they will listen, I think,
to someone from the party.”

“I don’t know if they would listen to us or the other side,” Conolly says, “but if the board decides affirmatively, we will
reconvene at X time, and we can tell them that—the board—they will respond.”

“This is being driven by both parties, and I have been out there already, and it’s gotten somewhat pretty dicey,” Villafana
says.

“We were both crushed up against the door,” Conolly says.

Young pipes in, “I will say for the record that I don’t believe that there’s anyone that is associated with my client who
is involved with this matter. And if there is, it is because they have violated an express order from the highest authority
of my client. And if there is anyone representing the Democratic party involved in these activities, it is highly unauthorized,
and we will deal with it, but I don’t believe it is both parties.”

“I would simply request that the board affirmatively state that it intends to come downstairs as soon as possible and tell
us what time,” Conolly says, knowingly.

The board adjourns.

But they can’t go downstairs. The security personnel have decided that they want to make sure that everything’s secure on
the eighteenth floor. They tell the canvassing board that they’ll let them know when they’re ready for them to meet down there.

It’s county Democratic chair Joe Geller’s misfortune that in the thick of the insanity, he decides to take the elevator to
the nineteenth floor to obtain a demonstration ballot to show someone how the problem of the 5’s and 7’s could happen.

From behind the glass window, a clerk hands Geller the demonstration ballot. It says “
SAMPLE
” on it.

House staffer Duane Gibson spots Geller tucking the sample ballot into his pocket.

“This guy’s got a ballot!” Gibson yells. “This guy’s got a ballot!”

The masses swarm around him, yelling, getting in his face, pushing him, grabbing him.

“
ARREST HIM!
” they cry. “
ARREST HIM!
”

With the help of a diminutive DNC aide, Luis Rosero, and the political director of the Miami Gore campaign, Joe Fraga, Geller
manages to wrench himself into the elevator.

Rosero, who stays back to talk to the press, gets kicked, punched.

A woman pushes him into a much larger guy, seemingly trying to instigate a fight.

In the lobby of the building, a group of fifty or so Republicans are crushed around Geller, surrounding him—though thankfully
a handful of cops are there to keep them off him, protecting him.

The cops escort Geller back to the nineteenth floor, so the elections officials can see what’s going on, investigate the charges.
Of course it turns out that all Geller had was a sample ballot. The crowd is pulling at the cops, pulling at Geller.

It’s insanity! Some even get in the face of seventy-three-year-old Rep. Carrie Meek.

Democratic operatives decide to pull out of the area altogether.

Young and Kaufman return to the eighteenth floor; they’re wondering what’s taking the canvassing board so long to come back
downstairs. In the meantime the Gorebies conduct a quick retraining on undervotes, as led by Chuck Campion and others. They
get the computer system up and running. And Young tells them to prepare for a bad day and a half. We know that the next couple
hundred precincts are Republican, Young says. So be forewarned; we’re going to lose votes for a while, maybe for the next
day and a half. We’ll come back in the following few hundred, and end up netting maybe 150 votes. But we’re gonna go through
the hard part of this, and the politicos are gonna flip out.

Where is the canvassing board? Young wonders. They’ve been missing for a while. Young’s concerned. You got these protesters
out near the elevators raising hell, you got the clock ticking and a Sunday deadline, you got Leahy saying that they can’t
count all the votes, who knows what’s going on here?

At 1:30
P.M
., the Miami-Dade canvassing board finally reconvenes on the eighteenth floor, in the larger room. “The reason and purpose
for our meeting here at this hour after we previously had decided that we felt we could reasonably meet the deadline of the
Supreme Court of Florida for an expedited yet accurate count has been somewhat changed,” King says, “and that’s why we wanted
to hear from counsel.”

Murray Greenberg is upstairs in his office, passed out on the floor from exhaustion. His boss, county attorney Robert Ginsburg,
steps up to address the question Leahy puts to him: “whether or not this canvassing board could request or submit a petition”
to the state supreme court to ask for a deadline extension.

“I will advise you,” Ginsburg says,“the supreme court opinion in its conclusion specifically negates any kind of petition
for rehearing.” The Sunday, November 26, deadline is “final,” Ginsburg says.

“Based on that advice, we have no option but to not press forward with a full manual recount, and that was our decision this
morning,” Leahy says. But now, even with the task to count just the 10,750 undervotes, “I can’t sit here and tell you that
if we begin the process, it will be concluded,” Leahy says.

King now seems to have second thoughts about just doing the undervotes, that the hand recount should be of the entire county’s
ballots. That combined with the fact that they may not meet the deadline makes King think that “that does not meet the test
that the citizens and the residents of our county would expect of me or the rest of this board.” After they moved to the tabulation
room, King says, “it became evidently clear that we were in a different situation… than we were this morning when we made
that decision.”

The protesters have accomplished what they came to do.“A radically different situation,” King says.

In Tallahassee, Klain has left one cubicle in Berger’s office to go to another cubicle where lunch is being served. He walks
by a TV and sees a meeting of the Miami-Dade canvassing board. “This must be taped,” Klain thinks. After all, Kendall Coffey
has been great about reporting in religiously about any kind of proceeding there. But it says “LIVE” on the screen.

“Kendall would have called me,” Klain thinks.

He listens in. He starts to panic when he hears what they’re saying. He grabs the phone.

“Kendall! Why aren’t you at the proceeding?!” he asks.

“What proceeding?” Coffey asks. For the first time, the board never notified him.

When Judge McDermott in Volusia County sees this nonsense on TV, he shakes his head. These younger judges are too soft. Too
nice. You have to be tough. That’s the reason they’re all having these problems. One of the reasons they succeeded in getting
the count up and running and done on time in Volusia is because he wasn’t afraid of hurting anyone’s feelings. Not that he
enjoyed being a hardass, but if you have a job to do, and you have the authority to put an end to all the nonsense, then that’s
what you do.

There were obnoxious protesters in Volusia, too. Both Bush people and Gore people. When McDermott heard them yelling outside,
he told
the deputy: “Move ’em across the street. I want them off this property now.”

There’s a time and a place for everything, and a canvassing-board meeting is not Woodstock, not the Million Man March. If
McDermott were in charge at Miami-Dade, he thinks, he would not only have ordered the GOP protesters out of the hallway, he
would have ordered them out of the building. He’s surprised that Judge King didn’t. Even the editorial board of the
Orlando Sentinel,
which endorsed Bush in the election, praised McDermott in an editorial entitled “Thank You, Judge,” which couldn’t have been
nicer if McDermott had written it himself.

You can’t be afraid to be a sonofabitch. It’s the only way to get anything done amid all this nonsense.

De Grandy and Young are asked to speak.

Both of them are under the impression that the canvassing board has already made up its mind to end it all. De Grandy thinks
that his voting rights argument from the morning has finally sunk in. All three members of the canvassing board will say that
De Grandy’s voting rights argument played no role whatsoever in their decision—since they were starting all over again, they
never thought it was relevant. But that won’t stop De Grandy from telling reporters that it was his argument that saved the
day.

Young, for his part, has no idea what the hell’s going on—and is suspicious about where the board was for the last hour, and
just what the hell they were doing.

De Grandy refers to a count of just the undervotes as illegal, as King himself seemed to think just a few days ago. “Nowhere
in the forty-some-page order of the supreme court does it direct any canvassing board to violate the law in order to complete
a recount,” he says. He begins to go step-by-step through the mercurial history of the canvassing board’s rulings on a countywide
hand recount, on whether counting the undervotes is enough.