Down & Dirty (16 page)

Christopher wonders if there’s a federal question here, if federal courts have jurisdiction.

“We haven’t ruled that out,” Coffey says. “But the eleventh circuit is tough on finding jurisdiction in election irregularity
cases.”

“What’s the Florida standard for invalidating election results?” Christopher asks.

Coffey says that the Florida Supreme Court will set aside an election “if there’s a reasonable doubt that the election did
not determine the true will of the people.”

“Was the form of the ballot illegal?” Christopher asks.

“Probably,” replies Coffey. “But it’s a close call.”

They talk about staffing, about getting people on board, getting them trained, what sort of resources they’ll need. The Florida
lawyers say that they have a whole network of attorneys and pols ready. Kuehne and Coffey say that they know Dave Leahy, the
supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade. They know that Broward’s supervisor, Jane Carroll, is retiring but aren’t
sure what that might mean. Everyone agrees that they need to get much more information about the members of the canvassing
boards.

Klain brings up the hand count. Sautter maintains that the Gore campaign push for all counties to be counted. But he’s shot
down.

Klain sees a need to limit the recount to the fewest possible counties, so they aren’t opening up random cans of worms. It’ll
be just Palm Beach and Volusia, where they have the clearest right to demand recounts in those counties. Daley agrees; to
do any more would look like they’re just shotgunning, like they’re trying to slow things down and they really don’t care about
the system. We have to be a little more judicious.

“We must stake our requests on principled reasons for wanting a hand count,” Christopher says.

Coffey agrees. “We have good cause in Palm Beach and Volusia.” Not so in the whole state, he argues. They go with those two.
^*

After the meeting, however, Nick Baldick comes over to the Governor’s Inn and grabs Klain.

“We have to count Dade and Broward,” Baldick says.

Klain says tough luck. “Look, these guys have decided we’re not going to expand this thing, we’re going to pinpoint targeted—”

“We
have
to
count
Dade and Broward,” Baldick repeats.

There are 10,750 undervotes in Miami-Dade—a county that went for Gore 328,808 to Bush’s 289,533—and more than 6,000 in Broward,
which went for Gore 387,703 to Bush’s 177,902. These are counties that went for Gore—overwhelmingly, in Broward’s case. And
the Gore political team suspects that undervotes come from Democrats. There are votes to be gleaned there. Uncounted Gore
votes.

Klain walks to Daley’s room, where Christopher is hanging out.

Look, the political people have come back and given us these reasons to push for hand recounts in Broward and Dade, Klain
explains.

After some discussion, The Flag agrees.

Soon enough, Democratic lawyers are fanned out to Fort Lauderdale, Miami, West Palm Beach, and DeLand, with one marching order:
Get the votes hand-recounted, ASAP.

Daley, meanwhile, thinks about the Miami lawyers, bright guys, smart guys. But this whole revote in Palm Beach? It’s madness!
“Well, they did that in Miami!” the lawyers would say. Gimme a break! Daley thinks. “Mayor of Miami?!” That’s like a separate
island
out there right now. And it’s not exactly viewed as the prototype of good government and good politics. Then this idea that
some of Buchanan’s votes could be allocated to Gore?! C’mon! It just doesn’t happen!

Throughout the campaign, Daley tried to be nonchalant about the fact that he saw the media as being soft on Bush and way too
hard on Gore. Bush would go before the world and claim to have worked with Democrats on a patients’ bill of rights, when the
truth was he’d vetoed such a bill in ’95 and then, presented with a veto-proof majority in ’97, let it pass without his signature.
Almost no one wrote about it. Meanwhile, Gore couldn’t fib a little about how much his dog’s arthritis medication cost without
it turning into Watergate. It would piss Daley off, but he’d been raised on politics, and he knew that sometimes one guy got
the breaks. In ’92, that guy was Clinton. In 2000, he thought, that guy was Bush.

And now, Daley thinks, Bush has been given the greatest gift of all: the networks had declared him the winner when, in fact,
the actual winner of Florida had yet to be established by elections officials. If Bush’s first cousin, fucking John Ellis,
^*
hadn’t declared him the winner on Fox, who knows what would have happened? The whole dynamic would have been different. The
headline woulda been “Too Close to Call.” Then everyone, led by the media, would be driven by the quest to find out what
really
happened, what
really
is going on. As opposed to Us trying to take it from Them, Daley thinks.

That puts Daley in a tough spot. He’s always tried to be temperate in his comments. But now there’s this impression out there
that Gore is trying to
take
from Bush. Plus, there are rumors that Colin Powell will be named secretary of state tomorrow.

“We have to stop this inevitability shit, or else we’re gonna get rolled,” he thinks. “We have to lay a marker down, we gotta
say, ‘Lookit, this is serious, we ain’t going away, don’t try to just roll over us.’”

In these first few days in Tallahassee, we journalists just sit in the hearing room in the state senate and wait for the news
to come to us.

Early afternoon on Thursday, November 9, Daley walks in, solid, stolid, and bald—but thinner than you’d expect. He looks like
he’s ready to tackle anyone at a moment’s notice. Then there’s the gaunt Christopher, who looks like he’s melting into his
expensive gray pinstripe suit. When he speaks, he’s barely audible.

“Secretary Christopher and I have been in Florida now for over twenty hours,” Daley says. “We’re here to report that what
we have learned has left us deeply troubled.”

Daley specifically cites the reports of the voters in Palm Beach County. “More than twenty thousand voters in Palm Beach County
who thought they were voting for Al Gore had their votes counted for Pat Buchanan or not counted at all,” Daley says. “These
logical conclusions are reinforced by the phone calls, faxes, and other reports from over one thousand residents of Palm Beach
County that have poured into us, saying that they believe they were victims of this ballot confusion,” he adds. He neglects
to mention that the Democrats have used staffers and paid telemarketers to call Democratic voters to alert these residents
to the problem. Out of thin air, Daley plucks a number of Buchanan votes that he would allocate to Gore. “Based on the totals
from other counties, there seems every reason to believe that well over two thousand of these votes were votes for Vice President
Al Gore, more than enough to make him the winner here in Florida,” Daley says.

“Those numbers cry out for justice,” adds Coffey.

“Here in Florida it also seems very likely that more voters went to the polls believing that they were voting for Al Gore
than for George Bush,” Daley says. “If the will of the people is to prevail, Al Gore should be awarded the victory of Florida
and be our next president.”

Of course, electoral victories are not built upon “the will of the people.” They are built upon 270 electoral votes garnered
from enough states where a plurality of voters cast their ballot—competently—for a particular candidate. In 1996, more than
fourteen thousand Palm Beach County residents also had their ballots thrown out. The Flag doesn’t point it out, but Palm Beach
County has had problems before the butterfly ballot.

Finally he announces what Team Gore is up to. “Here’s what we intend to do about this,” he says. “Today, the appropriate Florida
Democratic officials will be requesting a hand count of ballots in Palm Beach County as
well as three other counties: Volusia, Dade, and Broward. In addition, today I’m announcing that we will be working with voters
from Florida in support of legal actions to demand some redress for the disenfranchisement of more than twenty thousand voters
in Palm Beach County.

“In addition, we are still collecting accounts of other irregularities, voter intimidation and other oddities in other parts
of the state. And if substantiated and appropriate, they, too, will become part of legal actions.”

Whoa! Litigation-a-go-go!

“That ballot is completely illegal,” Coffey says of the poor little butterfly. “It confused voters. It led an unprecedented
number of voters—many of whom are elderly, who waited for hours—to have their votes disqualified, because it was very hard
looking at it to figure out exactly what to do.

“The law requires a simple linear listing so that the boxes are punched in the same order and you don’t have this massive
confusion,” Coffey says. “Florida election law is very clear.”

Actually it’s not so clear at all, but the Gorebies point to a section of Florida law that discusses placing “a cross (X)
mark in the blank space at the right of the name of the candidate for whom you desire to vote.” Since half the candidates
on the butterfly ballot require punching a hole to the candidate’s left, this would be a violation.

But whether they’re lying or incompetent or just innocently mistaken, it turns out that the Gorebies are grabbing an irrelevant
section of law. The relevant section, which applies to counties that use voting machines, says that, “Voting squares may be
placed in front of or in back of the names of candidates.” Nevertheless, Daley alludes to other possible legal challenges.

Asked about Baker, Christopher feebly says, “We’ll see if there’s some way we can cooperate with them. I must say, the cooperation
cannot extend to the point of our giving up justified legal challenges that are absolutely necessary to ensure the fairness
of the process.”

Daley adds that the Bush campaign has “blithely dismissed the disenfranchisement of thousands of Floridians as being the usual
Florida mistakes made in elections.”

True enough. The Bushies want this done. In Thursday newspapers, the Bush campaign has leaked the names of cabinet appointments—most
notably Powell.

They want this thing to be over.

Now.

“They’re trying to presumptively crown themselves the victors. To try to put in place a transition runs the risk of dividing
the American people and
creating a sense of confusion,” Daley says. “Let the legal system run its course. Let the true and accurate will of the people
prevail.

“And if, at the end of the process, George Bush is the victor, we will honor and obviously respect the results.”

With that, Daley, Christopher, and Coffey walk out of the room. After they become aware of Coffey’s involvement on the Gore
team, the Miami relatives of Elián González cancel a celebration that night in honor of their attorneys.

Anita Davis, Tallahassee NAACP president, has been called to Gadsden County. More than 12 percent of the 16,812 ballots cast
on Election Day weren’t read by the machine, so, in addition to conducting their machine recount, members of the canvassing
board there are going to review the 2,000-plus scrapped Opti-scan ballots. Republicans are there objecting to the whole process,
of course.