Down & Dirty (10 page)

In Austin, Bush calls John Ellis. “Gore unconceded,” he tells him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ellis says.

In Austin, the rain is unrelenting.

In Tallahassee, Jeb Bush’s acting chief counsel, Frank Jimenez, is watching CNN at Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan’s home. At 3:50
A.M.
, Ed Kast, the assistant director for the state division of elections, does a phone interview with CNN anchors Judy Woodruff
and Bernard Shaw and analysts Jeff Greenfield and Bill Schneider.

“OK, Mr. Kast,” Greenfield says, “I just want to review the bidding because we may be talking about the outcome of the presidential
election here. Right now, Governor Bush is leading Vice President Gore by we think—it’s thirteen hundred ten votes if Judy’s
math is right. You’ve got, roughly based on the past, a couple of thousand overseas absentee ballots,… I’m not trying to put
words in your mouth, but is it a fair statement that we do not yet know who has won the state of Florida?”

“We’ve got George Bush ahead,” Kast says. “But it’s not—those are preliminary and unofficial figures. They’re not by any means
official.”

Jimenez places a call to Kast’s boss, Clay Roberts.

“How long would it take to conduct a recount, Mr. Kast?” Woodruff asks.

“If we’re thrown into a recount, or if there is a recount, they’ll start that just as soon as we notify them, which will probably
be first thing tomorrow morning,” Kast says.

The anchors ask Kast how long that would take. But while they’re talking, Clay Roberts tells Kast to get off the phone.

“Wouldn’t there still be a ten-day separation?” Shaw asks.

Pause.

“Did we lose Ed Kast?” Shaw asks.

“We may have,” Woodruff says.

“He certainly was a lot of information,” Shaw says.

Exactly the problem. Jimenez and Roberts do not want an elections officer going on TV and saying that Bush is actually not
yet the official winner of Florida.

Bush attorney Ben Ginsberg, former counsel for the Republican National Committee, is in the streets to rejoice. With the rest
of the crowd, the bald, bespectacled, neon-orange-bearded attorney waits and waits for Gore to concede and Bush to take the
stage.

He waits. And waits.

It doesn’t seem quite right, he thinks. Something’s off. On the jumbotron TVs set up for the crowds, CNN’s Candy Crowley
reports that Gore has retracted his concession.

Ginsberg’s cell phone goes off. It’s Rove’s assistant.

“You better get back here,” she tells him.

Back at HQ, Ginsberg’s sitting at a desk when Don Evans, Bush’s oil-slick good-ol’-boy campaign chair saunters by.

“Think it’s a recount?” he asks Ginsberg.

“Yep,” Ginsberg says.

“Better start gettin’ people to fly,” Evans says.

Others are already on it. Ken Mehlman, thirty-four, the national field director for the Bush campaign, was standing—waiting—on
Congress Street when he soon enough realized something was up. He hightailed it back to HQ and, working with Tony Feather,
figured out who needed to get to Florida ASAP. They decided on Brian Noyes, the regional political director whose territory
included the Sunshine State; Coddy Johnson, a regional political director who had the central states; policy guy Joel Kaplan;
Kristin Silverberg, and attorneys Kevin Murphy and Kevin Martin. All are notified: go back to your apartments and get maybe
two days’ worth of clothes. They have a 6
A.M
. charter flight to Miami.

In Nashville, Daley calls an executive at CBS, tells him to take back the premature call that Bush won. Feldman calls the
political director at ABC, tells him the same thing. NBC soon declares Florida “too close to call.” On CNN, the check mark
remains by Bush’s name. But not for long. At 4:05
A.M.
, CNN removes the check mark from Bush’s name. The electoral count becomes: Gore 249, Bush 246.

Within the hour, Daley and Evans make their respective announcements to their respective perplexed crowds.

Daley says that he’s “been in politics for a very long time, but I’ve never seen a night like this.” The networks called the
election, Daley said, but “it now appears that their call was premature…. Until the result is official, our campaign continues,”
he says to cheers in Nashville. Daley says that Gore and Lieberman are ready to concede—but only after the Florida tally is
official.

In Austin, Evans addresses the sopping-wet crowd. “We hope and we believe we have elected the next president of the United
States,” Evans says. “They’re still counting, and I’m confident when it’s all said and done, we will prevail.” He leaves the
podium and returns to the shelter of the campaign HQ.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice says from the loudspeaker. “Thank you for coming. That concludes the program.”

If only.

I
n the wee hours of the morning, as Tuesday morphs into Wednesday, the Election Night that will never end gains power. Outside
Florida, political and legal soldiers are being recruited for the tumultuous thirty-six days that will follow, while within
the Sunshine State itself, chaos, confusion, and conspiracy take hold.

Strange things are afoot in Volusia County, for instance.

In one precinct, Socialist Workers presidential candidate James Harris racks up 9,888 votes. The fact that Harris has only
received 19,507 nationwide, and that the precinct only has around 350 voters, seems to cast doubt about his new 10,000-vote
stronghold in one tiny Volusia County precinct.

More significant, in the city of DeLand, Volusia County elections workers have realized a big glitch in the computer programming
that transmits results via modem from precinct 216 to the elections superviser’s office. Gore had 16,000 votes that just vanished
in the night. The problem has since been discovered and ironed out, but Democrats are all fired up. What else, they wonder,
could have gone wrong?

At around 3:45
A.M.
, an elections worker named Deborah Allen, forty-seven, and her younger brother Mark Bornmann walk out of the elections supervisor’s
office to go home. Bornmann, forty-three, a volunteer who has spent the last three hours in the elections office napping,
is carrying his sister’s bags: a briefcase and a small bag containing casual clothing she’d been wearing at her day job, as
well as some toiletries.

After Allen and Bornmann leave, operatives from both the Democratic and Republican parties freak out, wondering if she’s heisting
some ballots, telling the deputy sheriff on the scene to apprehend her. Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe is sure that everything’s
kosher but feels compelled to make sure nonetheless.

Other sheriff’s deputies are notified. A “bolo” (be on the lookout) is put out on the two. On International Speedway Boulevard,
a cop recognizes Allen’s brown Wagoneer as she and her brother make their way back home to Ormond Beach.

They’re stopped and told they have to come back to DeLand. They won’t tell her where she’s going or why she’s being asked
to turn around and drive back to DeLand escorted by two sheriff’s cars.

“Do you remember us hitting anything?” Allen worriedly asks her brother. She’s in a panic. She’s afraid that in the elections
office parking lot maybe she collided with someone, maybe someone’s dead.

At around 4:20
A.M.
, Allen and Bornmann arrive under police escort back at the elections supervisor’s office. The contents of the bags are poured
out onto the pavement near the parking lot and photographed.

No ballots.

In the wake of this mess, the Volusia County office of elections is sealed, surrounded by yellow police tape and armed deputies.

In Nashville, meanwhile, Gore asks Daley to phone up former secretary of state Warren Christopher, to recruit him for the
recount effort. In addition to being an attorney with O’Melveny & Myers, a diplomat, and a respected Democrat party elder,
Christopher is in many ways responsible for helping Gore segue from senator to vice president, having helmed then-governor
Clinton’s 1992 search for a running mate. In 2000, Gore called upon Christopher to help find him a Gore of his own, a process
that ended up in the selection of Lieberman.

At 3:30
A.M
. Pacific time, Christopher’s wife is shaken from her sleep when the phone rings.

“It’s Bill Daley,” she says.

Christopher takes the call. It’s brief.

“The election’s so close in Florida there’s going to be an automatic recount,” Daley says. Gore wants Christopher and him
to run it.

The seventy-five-year-old springs out of bed. A 6
A.M
. Pacific time flight to Nashville is arranged. He shaves, showers, and packs. On the morning
shows, the Gore campaign is able to announce the selection of their éminence grise to project that the recount will be a dignified
and orderly event.

In Gore-Lieberman HQ in Nashville, things are not so dignified or orderly. It’s downright scrappy.

Most of the crew has spent the night waiting outside the Nashville War Memorial in the rain on an emotional roller coaster:
overjoyed when Gore was awarded Florida, then despondent when it was taken from him, then mortified—almost in mourning—when
it was given to Bush. After the networks took Florida away from the GOP governor, they were overjoyed again, chanting the
Gore mantra “Stay and fight!”