Down & Dirty (17 page)

As the board reviews the ballots, Davis deflates. Some of these voters have filled in every circle
except
for Gore’s. Some had filled in Gore’s circle and put an X through Nader’s. Some are discernible, however, and the board ends
up finding 187 votes—170 for Gore and 17 for Bush.

Ken Sukhia, of the Tallahassee Republican law firm of Fowler, White, Gillen, Boggs, Villareal, and Banker, is objecting. This
is not what the secretary of state ordered the canvassing board to do, he says. County GOP chair Russell Doster understands
Sukhia’s suspicion—this is the most Democratic county in the state, so he could see how at first blush this looks bad—but
he knows the members of the canvassing board, he respects them, and he has faith in their ethics. Moreover, Doster has seen
these newly approved 187 votes, and he agrees with their assessments. He assures Sukhia that everything’s on the up-and-up.

But Davis has a larger concern. “We’ve fallen short,” she thinks. “We’re registering people to vote but failing to educate
them on the use of the ballot. And we’ve been doing it this way for twenty years!”

Soon Baker walks in. And with the appearance of this former world leader, who carries with him a far greater sense of command
than Daley and Christopher combined, the room falls silent.“I’ll take a few questions, but I can’t be here too long,” he says.

He’s asked about the butterfly ballot. “The ballot in Palm Beach County that has been alleged to be confusing is a ballot
that has been used before in Florida elections; it is a ballot that was approved by an elected Democratic
official; it is a ballot that was published in newspapers in that county and provided to the candidates, to the respective
political parties, in advance of the election in order that complaints, if any, could be registered. And, hey, guess what?
There were no complaints until after the election.” He accepts a few more questions, and then he takes off.

It’s a difficult task to figure out what really is going on.

The idea of a “revote” seems ridiculous on its face—the Constitution requires that the presidential election be held on the
first Tuesday following the first Monday in November; it makes no allowances for re-doing it for any reason. Even if all 425,000
Palm Beach voters joined hands and yelled “do-over” at the top of their lungs.

And Daley, Christopher, and Coffey seem more than a little desperate in their “support” for voter lawsuits, in their insistence
that the butterfly ballot was “illegal.” Confusing, sure. But illegal?

The Bushies, however, have decided that they’re not even going to acknowledge that anyone was confused. This despite the fact
that that morning, Buchanan—in a rare moment of statesmanship—tells Charlie Gibson of ABC’s
Good Morning America
that, “Yes, I did get thirty-four hundred votes. But I also agree that many of those very probably and almost certainly were
intended for Al Gore.

“The ballot is confusing to those who move through it very rapidly,” Buchanan agrees. “There’s Bush and Gore as the first
and second names on the left, but if you vote for the second dot, you vote for me, and my name’s on the right. I can understand
how people have made that mistake, and people coming out were very anguished in chagrin, and I don’t think they’re acting.
I think they probably voted for me mistakenly.”

“So what to do, Pat?” Gibson asks. “What’s the remedy, do you think, in fairness for this?”

“There is none, Charlie,” Buchanan says, before calling for Gore to concede. “That ballot was agreed upon. That ballot’s been
used before. And they used it again. There is no remedy for that. It happened. It was done.”

That afternoon, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer—who is known by reporters to have an on-again, off-again relationship with the
truth—tries to explain why Buchanan did so well in the heavily Jewish community of Palm Beach.

“New information has come to our attention that puts in perspective the results of the vote in Palm Beach County,” Fleischer
says. “Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold, and that’s why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there.”

I call up Buchanan’s Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, and read him Fleischer’s comment.

“That’s nonsense,” McConnell says.

McConnell says that he and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County’s Reform Party, estimate
the number of Buchanan activists in the county to be between three hundred and five hundred—nowhere near the 3,407 who voted
for him. “Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do,” says McConnell. “We
have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere.” Says Cunningham of Buchanan’s actual number of supporters in Palm
Beach County: “It’s in the hundreds; it’s not a significant amount.”

Asked if the county is “a Buchanan stronghold,” as the Bush campaign has asserted, Cunningham said: “I don’t think so. Not
from where I’m sitting and what I’m looking at. They can say that because they would like to believe that. Because the votes
we received they would like to believe were not mistaken votes.” Heck, the Buchanan campaign decided not to even advertise
in the area, nor in most of southeast Florida, Cunningham says, adding that “the percentage of people down there who would
be receptive to our message is much smaller than in other parts of the state.”

Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, Cunningham says, “I think a thousand
would be generous.”

In any other business, liars are called liars. There are penalties for perjury in the law, fines for inaccurate claims in
advertising, libel laws against journalists and publishers. But many political spokespeople take to lies like mutts to kibble,
knowing that their bosses are rarely held accountable for such lies. Politics, of course, by necessity utilizes spin, obfuscation,
and a degree of hyperbole. But lines can still be crossed—when speakers say things for political purposes that are just plain
false, whether aware that the matters were not true or simply indifferent to what the truth is. And the media rarely calls
them on it. Democrats and Republicans both know this and exploit it in desperate circumstances. Perhaps because Gore already
had a reputation for misleading voters and overstating his record, the Bush people got away with it much more. So by November
9, they’re emboldened to say whatever the hell they want to.

After Fleischer’s widely distributed nonsense, Bush strategist Karl Rove appears before the cameras in Austin to bolster the
untruth, which he calls in great Orwellian fashion, “set(ting) the record straight.”

“There are 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County who registered as a member of the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the
American Reform Party, which were the labels borne this year by the reform effort in Florida,” Rove says.“This in an increase
of 110 percent over the registration totals for the same party in 1996.”

About the ballot itself, Rove says that “the Gore campaign has been handing out a somewhat hazy and fuzzy copy of it, so we
are making available to you, and can do so electronically as well, a relatively clean and clear copy of the butterfly ballot,
which indicates that this is not as susceptible to confusion as Chairman Daley indicated.”

“The Bush campaign is inflating the numbers of Reform Party members to the limits of gullibility,” McConnell says after hearing
Rove’s comments. “They’re including everybody that can in any way be assumed to be members of the Reform Party.” Members of
the American Reform Party and the Independent Party “are absolutely not Buchanan supporters.” The American Reform Party “is
largely made up of people who supported [former Colorado governor] Dick Lamm against Ross Perot for the 1996 nomination,”
McConnell says. He doesn’t even know what the Independent Party is.

Cunningham says that the Independent Party didn’t
have
a presidential candidate on the Palm Beach County ballot and endorsed Buchanan’s Reform Party rival, John Hagelin. And the
American Reform Party split with Reform, and this year endorsed Ralph Nader for president.

In Nashville, Fabiani is shaking his head. Daley was too hot at the press conference, way too hot. He’d wanted Daley to say
that the butterfly ballot story in that day’s
New York Times
—one that the Gorebies had been working on with its author, Don Van Natta—was astonishing and proved beyond any doubt that
Bush, had all the votes been counted accurately, had lost Florida. It was time for Bush to stand up and explain to people
how he could claim the throne when he’d seemingly won because people were confused about the butterfly ballot.

Keep saying it was the media making the allegations—that was Fabiani’s plan. But instead, Daley had gone out there and read
a statement Klain had written for him, this one about the lawsuits and all. The press conference had moved the issue away
from people talking about who really won and who really lost to whether or not Gore was a spoiler trying to win the presidency
by suing.

“Speaking of automatic recounts,” Bush campaign chair Don Evans says, before the press throngs in Austin,“I want to alert
you that there are at least three other states in which automatic recounts are likely.” Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico—all
of which went for Gore—may have recounts as well.

Rove is asked if the Bushies are going to ask for recounts in those three states.

“We are waiting to see the results of the canvass Tuesday night in Wisconsin, and to be guided by Governor [Tommy] Thompson,”
he says.

Rove adds that any comments by the Gorebies about their man’s popular-vote win are premature. Just as he claimed before the
election that Bush would win by 6 or 7 percentage points, Rove again offers a prognostication that in hindsight couldn’t end
up being further from the truth. Rove says that a vote count in Colorado, as well as the continued tallying of absentee ballots
in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, has made his team “confident that this will carry with it the likelihood of
an increasing amount of popular votes for Governor Bush and a diminishing margin between the two candidates.”

Bush communications director Karen Hughes is asked about Gore’s rising 200,000-vote lead in the popular tally. “I would point
out that Governor Bush, in this election, has received more popular votes than President Clinton did in either of his two
elections, in either 1996 or in 1992,” she says. For that matter, Bush also garnered more popular votes than George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Just not more than Al Gore.