Down & Dirty (58 page)

Judge King, De Grandy points out, “is quoted on page ninety-six and ninety-seven of the transcript stating clearly that in
your opinion, sir—”

“I’m well aware of what I said, Mr. De Grandy,” King breaks in. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but we know clearly that the vote
was taken, and that we ordered a hand recount of all of the ballots in Dade. And in—”

“Sir,” De Grandy says, “either I can argue my client’s position or I can’t.”

“We’re not here for that,” King says. “We’re here to ask your input with respect—”

“I’m not arguing it to
you,
but to the other two members, sir,” counters De Grandy.

In De Grandy’s mind, he’s shoving King’s words back in his face—and also serving them up for Lehr and Leahy to contemplate.
King’s been totally testy during the process, accusing his buddy Martinez—one of the sweetest, gentlest guys on the planet,
De Grandy thinks—of
looking at him
the wrong way; accusing De Grandy himself of grandstanding. That’s enough, De Grandy thinks.

“No, I’m not trying to cut you off. What I’m saying is—”

The Republicans in the crowd boo.

“— I concur with you wholeheartedly, sir, that the board did what it did at those times,” King finishes. “But now we’re faced
with a new challenge, and we’re asking for your input on that.”

De Grandy continues his statement as he wants. “Today there was a motion made to change the process to something which this
board has determined, and which we strongly believed and had argued consistently in every hearing, to be illegal. You cannot
count less than all votes. You either count them or you don’t.”

Young gets up to speak, though he’s clearly fighting the tide. “There are ten thousand seven hundred fifty citizens out there
whose vote has not been seen by man, woman, or machine,” he says. “That is simply an error. It’s a systematic error. It’s
nothing more than the way machines and the process are designed. I believe that the statute tells you to correct the error.

“The question, I think, is then one of simply ensuring that all concerned see a process that is transparent. Well, that seems
to me to be something that we can do. For example, in a northern county, Volusia, Judge McDermott had one pool camera in his
counting room and allowed everyone to share off that, so the media saw precisely what the board was doing.

“My experience in recounts in large states, in statewide recounts, is that where there is a will, there is a way,” Young says.
“And I believe that ten thousand votes can in fact be counted accurately between now and Sunday.”

King takes the mike again. He is bothered by the fact that he had spoken against doing just the 10,750 undervotes and today
voted for it. But the logistical concerns are primary.

“I vote no,” he says. “I believe we should stop at this time. We cannot meet the deadline of the supreme court of the state
of Florida. And I feel it incumbent upon this canvassing board to count each and every ballot and to not do a hand recount
that would potentially—potentially, Mr. De
Grandy; not guaranteed but
potentially
—even under the proposed plan of this morning, could disenfranchise a segment of our community.”

Leahy’s turn. “I’m going to also vote no for two reasons,” he says.

There is loud applause.

“In my opinion, there was no requirement, or it wasn’t warranted, that we do a full manual recount, based on my administrative
reading of the law,” Leahy says. “When the board voted last week to have a full recount, I supported the decision. I’ve done
everything I can do to carry out that decision of the majority of the board. But at this time I do not believe that there
is time to carry out a complete, full manual recount that is accurate and that will count every vote, because of the limitations
put on this board in terms of time.”

The thing is, it would take a whole other canvassing board for them to finish. He had said they could do it only if they went
through 300 ballots an hour. But upstairs they were managing only between 60 and 100 max. They just weren’t going to make
it.

“Judge Lehr?” King asks.

“I, too, am going to vote no,” Lehr says.

The Gorebies are demoralized. Some from their number weren’t sure that there were votes in Miami-Dade, but Whouley had anticipated
that they would glean anywhere from 150 to 350 votes there. So they now know that there is no way Gore will be certified the
winner on Sunday; if there’s an election contest, now they will be the ones who have to file it.

Moreover, they are convinced that something strange is afoot.

“The idea that they could not complete a count of the undervotes in four days is just factually incorrect,” Klain thinks.
They file a mandamus brief before the appellate court that night, to force the canvassing board to count the undervotes, confident
that the district court of appeals will rule in their favor.

They are wrong.

The court agrees that the canvassing board has no discretion to decide to stop a count before they’ve finished it; but the
court also rules that they cannot force the board to do the impossible.

Thursday, Thanksgiving, the Gorebies try to get the Florida Supreme Court to force the board to count.

They lose that one, too.

Boies will tell me in January that the lowest moment of it all was “when Dade suspends, and we can’t get it restarted, we
can’t get those votes
counted. If we had, it would be even harder for the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the election. If we could have
gotten the votes counted in Dade, so that at the time it went to the U.S. Supreme Court there were actual canvassing-board
returns that put Gore ahead, I think that would have changed things.”

A lot will be said and written about the Miami-Dade canvassing board’s 180-degree turn. Some of it will be lost amid the Wednesday-morning
news of Dick Cheney’s fourth heart attack.
^*
Much of it will be speculation. And as David Boies will tell me on January 15, 2001,“I don’t think anybody who hasn’t interviewed
the canvassing-board members with truth serum will know precisely why they stopped.”

That doesn’t mean that Democratic pols won’t try.

Lieberman will come forward on Friday to give his trademark sanctimonious wince. “I am deeply disappointed by reports of orchestrated
demonstrations on Wednesday inside a state building—a
government
building—in Miami-Dade County…. These demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate and to prevent a simple count of
votes going forward.”

“What happened in Miami-Dade was illegal,” Deutsch tells me.“Out-of-town paid political operatives came to South Florida to
disrupt a federal election,” he charges, alleging that such actions violate a law that prohibits crossing state lines to “intimidate”
parties supervising a federal election.
^†
Congressman Deutsch will take those charges a step further, from rhetoric
into the terrain of demagoguery, in a letter to the U.S. Justice Department’s division of elections, calling for a federal
investigation.

But all three canvassing-board members—and, indeed, spokesman Villafana, who was no fan of the protesters—will insist that
they weren’t intimidated. King, in particular, comes from a pretty tough family—his judge father ruled against drug kingpins,
and his sister prosecutes them. Leahy will tell me, point-blank, that he was never intimidated.

What about a story in the
New York Times
that implied that he had been intimidated? “He misunderstood something I had said,” Leahy will say to me. The Republican
observers
had
clearly been an impediment to the process, he says, but not through intimidation. “They attempted to delay everything we
did,” Leahy says. Once again, trying to find the truth floating at the bottom of this Florida swamp is near impossible.

Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the Bush recount team who was present at the protest outside the Miami-Dade canvassing room,
says to me that there was nothing orchestrated about the protest. “There were between eighty and a hundred of us” outside
the room, Wilkinson says,“and it was a very emotional group of young people. But they thought the election was being held
behind closed doors.”

Wilkinson observes that the Democrats have their share of protesters in Miami, too. “Al Gore has union volunteers that they’ve
bused in from out of town to down here in Miami,” he says. “Jesse Jackson brings a thousand or ten thousand volunteers to
Florida, and they have no problem with it. All of a sudden, we have a hundred people and we’re intimidating. Republicans are
using Democrat protest tactics, and they don’t like it.”

Jesse Jackson’s a hack, but his demonstrations in Florida (which never approached the ten thousand mark), while increasingly
irresponsible in rhetoric, weren’t even remotely like the ugliness on the nineteenth floor. And off the record, even Bushies
acknowledge that this was not their team’s proudest hour. Some are worried about a PR backlash. Then there are those like
Ken Mehlman who are just happy that the count ended.

In any case, there’s an immediate attempt by the Republican Party, and their media allies, to pooh-pooh any acknowledgment
whatsoever that the mob was hostile and tried to be intimidating and clearly played some role—if only as an obstacle, or as
a last straw—in stopping the hand recount. “In my life I have never found anything more frightening than a mob of young Republicans,”
jokes Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume on Sunday, November 26. “They have on light green corduroy pants, and they’ve got on little
belts with little frogs on them, and little pink shirts and everything.
And, I don’t know about you, but those Republican preppies just scare the daylights out of me.”
^*

On the other side of the Coin of Crap, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes forward on November 25 to refer to the GOP protest
as a “riot,” charging that “a whiff of Fascism is in the air.”

“A mob threatened them [the members of the canvassing board], banged on their doors, roughed up people, threatened them, and
they succumbed to the mob violence and the intimidation,” Nadler says at a press conference. “That is frankly un-American
of the mob to do that, it’s un-American of the Republican leaders to lead that, and it’s un-American for the Dade County board
of canvassers to succumb to that threat.”

Nadler’s overheated demagoguery is an insult not only to his constituents but to the memory of anyone who ever came face-to-face
with actual Fascism. While it’s true that Benito Mussolini once said that “Fascism is reaction,” that’s where the comparison
ends. For Nadler to compare a bunch of obnoxious Republican protesters who probably deserved to get roughed up a little by
some of Whouley’s pals from Southie (a thought that crossed Whouley’s mind more than once) to Fascists is nothing short of
sickening. Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco, Adolph Hitler—these are men responsible for slaughter, for mass murder, for genocide.

On November 22, 2000, on the nineteenth floor of the Miami-Dade County Government Building, fifty or so Republican activists
got obnoxious, and hostile, and violent, and clearly some of them should have been escorted out of the building if not arrested.
On November 21, 1920, outside the Bologna, Italy, City Hall, ten newly elected Social Democratic councilmen were slaughtered
in a hail of gunfire by Fascists, who soon began patroling the countryside, taking over villages and murdering labor leaders
and leftists. These events couldn’t be more different; Nadler should be ashamed.

Those nonpartisans who were actually there, however—as opposed to those who seldom leave the confines of the Beltway—have
a slightly more nuanced take on it all.

“Was it meant to be intimidating?” asks Villafana. “I believe so. Did they intend to disrupt the process? Yes.” The canvassing-board
members are “in
the public spotlight, and they know how to handle it,” he says, but “I think the protesters accomplished their goal. They
had a victory party after the vote was stopped; they felt jubilation.”

Villafana is even more offended, perhaps, by the Republican Party’s lies about what was going on inside the government building.
“As an American, I personally believe in hard-fought contests, but there comes a time when essentially misinformation to the
public should not be part of the process,” Villafana tells me. “Confusing the American people as to what a community’s attempting
to do should not be part of the process, and that’s an issue of ethics and what you believe in.”

In the end, the Democrats’ attempt to argue that the Republicans intimidated the canvassing board into quitting is at least
unproven. There certainly were other possible factors. Political pressures may have played a role; De Grandy’s continued references
to the area’s Hispanic vote—as subtle as a battalion of armed INS agents storming into a Little Havana hovel before sunrise—could
certainly have weighed on the minds of the elected judges on the panel.

Then, of course, there’s the question of where Mayor Alex Penelas was during the whole deal.