Down & Dirty (2 page)

So as not to disrupt the narrative flow of the book, news scoops contained within are seldom attributed to an individual.
Two examples: Bill Daley chewing out Bob Butterworth, and Katherine Harris wanting to certify the election results on November
14 despite Judge Lewis’s order but being advised not to by her lawyers. Except where noted, such stories always came from
one or more individuals present at the time of the incident
and have been checked against the recollections of other participants in the event and either confirmed or at the very least
not contradicted.

I owe a debt to the following individuals for taking their time to talk with me about what happened in this whole mess, while
it was going on and afterward.

Deborah Allen, Jill Alper, Jennifer Altman, Eli Attie, Jenny Backus, Rep. Kevin Bailey, Nick Baldick, Brenda Barnett, Mickey
Barnett, Fred Bartlit, Jeremy Bash, Katie Baur, Phil Beck, Mitchell Berger, Achim Bergmann, Harold Blue, David Boies, Kathy
Bowler, Daryl Bristow, Rep. Corinne Brown, George and Ethel Brownstein, Judge Charles Burton, Carretta King Butler, Kerey
Carpenter, Michael Carvin, Warren Christopher, Judge Nikki Ann Clark, Rep. Garnet Coleman, Barbara Comstock, Jack Corrigan,
Denise Cote, Jim Cunningham, Bill Daley, Anita Davis, William Davis, Miguel De Grandy, Rep. Peter Deutsch, Russell Doster,
Dexter Douglass, Herman Echavarria, Tony Enos, Randy Enwright, Tucker Eskew, Mark Fabiani, Mike Feldman, Rep. Harold Ford,
Jr., Donnie Fowler, Rep. Lois Frankel, Sean Gallagher, Joe Geller, Bert Gluck, John Giesser, Ben Ginsberg, Sandra Goard, Sen.
Bob Graham, Murray Greenberg, Peter Greenberger, Jan Crawford Greenburger, Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger, Armando Gutierrez, Douglas
Hattaway, Nicolas Hengartner, Mark Herron, Ed Hollander, Karen Hughes, Harry Jacobs, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Bill Janklow,
Frank Jimenez, David Johnson, Ed Kast, Deborah Kearney, Gov. Frank Keating, Sen. Bob Kerrey, Ron Klain, Joe Klock, Justice
Gerald Kogan, Ben Kuehne, David Lane, Henry Latimer, Michael Lavelle, Michael Leach, David Leahy, Judge Robert Lee, Chris
Lehane, Theresa LePore, Judge Terry Lewis, Nan Markowitz, Roberto Martinez, Scott McClellan, Jim McConnell, Judge Michael
McDermott, Mayor Patrick McManus, Terrell McSweeney, Ken Mehlman, George Meros, Dennis Newman, John Newton, Tom Nides, Mayor
Alex Penelas, Dean Ray, Barry Richard, Gerald Richman, Commissioner Carol Roberts, Bruce Rogow, Don Rubottom, Ion Sancho,
Joe Sandler, Cindy Sauls, Chris Sautter, Ned Siegel, Judge William Slaughter, Dorrance Smith, Doug Smith, Mark Steinberg,
Mark Steitz, Graham Streett, Ray Sullivan, Irv Terrell, George Terwilliger, David Treece, Larry Tribe, Mindy Tucker, Steve
Uhlfelder, Jason Unger, Mayco Villafana, Mark Wallace, Craig Waters, Willie Whiting, Michael Whouley, Jim Wilkinson, Quiounia
Williams, Jackie Winchester, Anne Womack, Jack Young, Steve Zack.

I would also like to thank those brave souls who agreed to help me get to the bottom of it all but for understandable reasons
preferred to keep their names out of it.

Special notes of thanks to:

My editors at Salon.com, Kerry Lauerman, Joan Walsh, and David Talbot, and publisher Michael O’Donnell for all their support.

Daryl Kessler, Dan Karp, John Scully, Chris Haber, David Dimlich, Dan Weiss, and, especially, Nancy Ives for their love and
friendship.

The inspired Geoff Shandler and the wonderful Pamela Marshall at Little, Brown and Company and my gorgeous, brilliant agent,
Christy Fletcher, for making this book a reality.

Mom, Aaron, Stone, Shelly, Lisi, Becky, and Debby, for being so wonderful. And of course my father, to whom this book is dedicated.

Jake Tapper

Motel 6

Apalachee Parkway

Tallahassee

January 2001

A
t 5:55
A.M
. in Tampa, Florida, on Election Day 2000, Vice President Al Gore makes a run for the Florida Bakery.

It’s his third stop of the day—he’s already headlined a South Beach, Miami, midnight rally alongside Robert DeNiro and Stevie
Wonder, as well as made a visit to a Tampa hospital. At the bakery, Gore meets up with his running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman,
D-Conn.

The Sunshine State is so critical to his victory, Gore earlier in the year had thought about picking Florida’s Democratic
senator, Bob Graham, as his running mate. Instead he went with Lieberman, who has demographic pluses as well: an Orthodox
Jew is a big hit in southern Florida.

The two are offered small Cuban coffees in teeny plastic sample cups.

“L’chaim,”
Gore says to Lieberman.

“That’s good. That feels like eight hours of sleep,” Gore says, downing his coffee. He’s been going for more than thirty hours
now.

“What do you recommend instead of doughnuts?” He asks the woman behind the counter what a nice Cuban pastry would be.

Too little too late. Ever since April, when the Clinton administration sent Immigration and Naturalization Service officers
to seize Elián González at gunpoint from the bungalow of his Miami relatives in Little Havana, Gore’s been struggling for
Cuban-Americans to give him a chance. And in this tight, tight race in Florida he needs their support. Any way he can get
it.

The woman behind the counter recommends guava and cream cheese.

“We’ll get some of those instead of doughnuts,” Gore says. Gore gives her a $20 bill for the $14.45 check. “Keep that as a
tip,” he says.
“Gracias.”

At 6:10
A.M.
, Gore’s motorcade arrives at the local Democratic HQ, in a small cement building in a Cuban section of Tampa. Lieberman—with his
hound-dog mug and subtle, bubbly glee—jumps onstage.

“Do you get the feeling that Florida might be important in this election?” Lieberman jokes. “The dawn is rising on Election
Day, right here in Tampa Bay.”

“This is the last official stop of Campaign 2000,” Gore adds. “It’s not an accident that it’s here in Tampa. It’s not an accident
that it’s in west-central Florida, because Florida may very well be
the
state that decides the outcome of this election.”

He tells the crowd about his South Beach rally. “Just before I went out to make the speech, somebody had one of the cable
television networks on, and it was reporting news at the top of the hour, and it was a roundup of the campaign activities.
And it said, At this hour, George W. Bush is asleep, and Al Gore is preparing to speak to twenty-five thousand people in Florida.’”
The crowd goes wild.

A napping Dubya was not exceptional, especially after a campaign day as busy as was Monday, spent flipping the political bird
to Gore and President Clinton, swooping in on his campaign plane to stump in their respective home states of Tennessee and
Arkansas. Bush finished up his campaigning Monday night with an airport rally in Austin, and then it would be bedtime. Bush
likes sleep. He hits the sack by 9:30
P.M
. He carried a down pillow—nicknamed “pilly”—with him on the campaign trail.

“Well, it’s almost 5:30
A.M
. Texas time, and George W. Bush is STILL asleep and I’m still speaking to people HERE IN FLORIDA!!” Gore says. The crowd
again goes wild.

Soon enough, Gore and Lieberman leave the Tampa rally, head to the airport, and fly to Tennessee to watch the returns. Now
it’s in the hands of the people.

People like Theresa LePore.

LePore, elections supervisor for Palm Beach County, has been awake for three full hours. At 2:30
A.M
. she eased herself out of bed. She was at work by 3:45
A.M
. Voters start calling her to make sure they know the proper place to vote at around 4:30
A.M
. or so. LePore feels like crap; she has a sinus infection; she didn’t get home the previous night until around 10 p.m.; she
hasn’t really slept. But she’s jazzed.

LePore loves elections. Lives for them. Says elections are in her blood. At the age of eight, she helped her Republican dad
lick envelopes for his favorite candidates. In the summer of 1971, at the age of sixteen—when most girls in her school had
their sights set on less lofty pursuits—LePore walked into the Palm Beach County elections office and took a job as a part-time
typist, making $1.75 an hour, under good ol’ boy elections supervisor Horace Beasley, aka Mr. B. She wasn’t even old enough
to vote.

LePore’s now worked at the elections office for twenty-eight years. Originally she had registered to vote as a Republican,
like her dad, a disabled Korean War veteran who never told her just how he injured his left arm. But he never really was about
partisan politics, and in 1979 LePore reregistered as an independent. When a third-party formally registered as “Independent,”
she changed her registration to “no party.”

LePore earned her associate degree from Palm Beach Junior College and even attended Florida Atlantic University for a spell.
But she never got her bachelor’s. She really wasn’t all that interested in pursuing an education; she’s not even a political
junkie. She’d found what she wanted to do. And she’d found a mentor in Jackie Winchester, the Palm Beach County supervisor
of elections, appointed to the position after Mr. B died in office in 1973. Winchester was first elected to the post in 1974,
and not long afterward, Winchester handpicked LePore to be her chief deputy.

When Winchester announced her retirement in January 1996, it was only natural that LePore would take her place. Soon after
Winchester told her of her plans, in the fall of 1995, LePore registered as a Democrat and ran. LePore won by 25,000 votes,
and in 2000 she has the best kind of reelection match: she’s running unopposed. So she’s not even on the ballot.

But LePore’s job this time was a little tougher than it had been in the past. Historically, Florida had been a tough place
for third-party candidates. To get on a ballot, third-party candidates had to secure the signatures of 3 percent of all voters
in the district on a petition. Democratic and Republican candidates had a much easier time, enjoying the option of either
securing the signatures of 3 percent of just local members of their party or paying a qualifying fee. But in 1998, Libertarians
launched a campaign to level the playing field, proposing Amendment 11 to the state constitution, “grant(ing) equal ballot
access for independent and minor parties” by allowing members of those parties to pay the ballot-access fee instead of getting
signatures. On that Election Day—the same day that Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota as a Reform
Party candidate—Amendment 11 passed overwhelmingly, with 64 percent of the vote. As a result, instead of the most restrictive
ballot-access requirements in the country, Florida now had one of the loosest. LePore had no fewer than ten presidential candidates,
and ten vice presidential candidates, to put on her ballot.

In September, LePore went to voting systems manager Tony Enos, thirty-six, and asked for help. Enos was, like her, an experienced
elections board employee—he’d been there for eighteen years, since he was eighteen. He soon gave her three ballot options.