Down & Dirty (3 page)

One of them was a one-pager, as they’d always done in the past. But the twenty names meant that the type was really small.
This troubled LePore. She remembered the 1988 Senate race, when Republican Connie Mack defeated Democratic representative
Buddy MacKay by just 33,000 votes. During the recount, Democrats complained that 54,000 ballots didn’t register a vote for
Senate—a full 17 percent. A closer inspection of these undervotes, as they were called, brought blame on the ballot design.
Since the Senate race had been on the same page as the presidential race—a lot of names on one page—the race, written in small
letters at the bottom of the first page of the ballot, had apparently escaped some voters’ notice. Winchester and her equals
in Hillsborough, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties came under some heavy criticism for the 170,000 total undervotes in their
four counties.

That experience, combined with her work for a federal task force dedicated to making it easier for the blind, disabled, and
sight-impaired to vote, made LePore sensitive to the needs of voters who didn’t have the best vision. There had been numerous
complaints from older voters after all the referenda and initiatives appeared on the 1998 ballot in 10-point type. This time,
the names, she decided, would be better spread out over two pages. Like a butterfly. They called it a “facing-page ballot.”

Enos had two designs with that option. One listed five candidate tickets on the left page, all huddled near the top of the
page, with the other five pairs on the right page, near the bottom. But LePore didn’t like this design. She wanted the list
of candidates in essentially the same location on each page, with the holes to punch staggered between pages.

So it came down to Enos’s third option. Bush and Cheney listed first on the left page, with their hole first in the middle;
Reform ticket Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster first on the right page, their hole second in the middle; Gore and Lieberman listed
second on the left page, with their hole third in the middle, and so on.

In Miami-Dade County, the voting machines are being set up at two of the most Democratic precincts in the county, two places
where Gore’s gonna win big.

Precinct 255, Lillie C. Evans Elementary School, is located at 1895 NW 75th Street. Its voters are 89.8 percent Democratic,
95 percent African-American.

Precinct 535, Dunbar Elementary School, is at 505 NW 20th Street. Its registered voters are 88.48 percent Democratic, 93.25
percent black.

Before the voting machines leave the elections warehouse, they’re tested to make sure that they’re functioning properly. The
ten machines at Dunbar and the ten at Evans had both been deemed to be working fine. But at Evans Elementary on Tuesday morning,
poll worker Larry Williams does a test ballot, and a punch he attempts for Gore doesn’t register at all. Seven of the ten
machines at Evans miss punches when tested. No one ever tells precinct clerk Donna Rogers. When Rogers is asked about the
problems her precinct experiences today, she’ll say that no voter complained to her, no poll worker told her about anything
wrong, how was she to know. She’ll say that the
Miami Herald
and I are the only ones—including the elections commission—to tell her that there were undervotes in her precinct, so as
far as she’s concerned, it’s all hearsay.

But it’s true. By the end of the day, 113 out of the 868 ballots cast at Evans Elementary School will not register a vote
for president. This is a precinct that Gore will win with 98.81 percent to Bush’s .66 percent—of the votes that register.

Six of the ten machines at Dunbar miss punches as well in their morning tests. At Dunbar Elementary, 105 out of the 820 ballots
won’t register a vote for president. This is a precinct that Gore will win with 98.74 percent of the vote to Bush’s 1.12 percent.

These rates of discarded ballots—roughly 13 percent for both precincts—will be the highest rate of unread ballots in the county.

Liz Hyman, thirty-four, sits outside the Delray Beach Gore HQ. She’s a lawyer at Akin Gump in Washington, D.C., but she’s
also worked for the Justice Department, Gore’s office, and for the U.S. trade representative for the Clinton administration,
and she’s taken some vacation time to help volunteer with the Gore campaign. A friend has a house in Palm Beach, so that just
happened to be where she chose to do her volunteering.

Since 7
A.M.
, Hyman’s been sitting at a table outside the building where she’s trying to snag volunteers for various “Get Out the Vote”
activities. She
keeps hearing something weird about the ballot. Volunteers who have voted already complain that it’s difficult to understand;
many are upset. Word gets out: it’s a problem elsewhere in the county, too. Conspiracy theories start cropping up: it makes
it look like you’re voting for Buchanan; maybe someone tampered with it!

At around 8
A.M.
, Hyman busts out her cell phone and calls her dad, Lester Hyman, another D.C. attorney. “You’re not going to believe what’s going
on down here,” she says. It’s something that maybe people at Gore HQ in Nashville should know about. At the Justice Department,
Hyman was once deputy to Ron Klain, a hotshot Democratic attorney and Gore guy. Maybe call him?

Klain’s on his way to work that morning when he gets the call. Lester Hyman doesn’t really understand the problem—something
about people accidentally voting for Buchanan?—but says Liz is upset.

Klain knows that Liz does not upset easily. When he arrives, he goes into the “boiler room,” where Gore’s main on-the-ground
political adviser, Michael Whouley, is working away. Klain gives Whouley Liz’s name and number, vouches for her credibility.

Seconds later, Liz Hyman’s cell phone rings. It’s Joe Sandler, general counsel of the Democratic National Committee.

“I hear there’s a problem with the ballot?” he asks.

There is a problem with Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot. People are confused. Many are angry. At a Greenacres condominium
clubhouse John Lazet, sixty-six, votes the right way after a proctor gives him a second ballot. But he decides to take matters
into his own hands.

He calls the supervisor’s office but finds the man who answers the phone less than sympathetic. So he and two buddies drive
to LePore’s office. There they find her outside in the middle of a TV interview. Lazet starts verbally coming at her, but
that quickly ends when LePore says that she doesn’t have time to talk to him. She thinks it’s just a few cranky old men. Nothing
to worry about.

Assistant poll clerk Ethel Brownstein, seventy-one, arrives at the Lucerne Point Club from her home in Lake Worth at around
5:45
A.M
. By seven, there’s already a long line of voters, mostly seniors. She starts directing traffic: “You go here, you go here,
you go here.”

At around 8
A.M.
, a woman comes to Brownstein and tells her she’s having a problem.

“I put this thing in, but it doesn’t go in,” she says.

Brownstein enters the voting booth to see what she’s talking about. The rectangular ballot has gone in straight, in the slot
underneath the ballot, but for some reason the stylus to punch the hole isn’t going through.

“I want to vote for Mr. Gore,” she says.

Brownstein looks at the ballot. “This is confusing,” she thinks. Gore is listed second, but his is the third hole. And for
a lot of these voters, who are elderly, who don’t see so well, who are used to having the second hole correspond to the second
name, well, they might not really understand how to vote correctly, Brownstein realizes.

“The first hole is Bush, the second is Buchanan, and the third is Gore,” Brownstein says. Worried about crossing the line
between assistance and instruction, Brownstein quickly hustles out of the booth. But she thinks, “You know, something’s wrong
here. People don’t know how to punch these things.” She starts saying to voters, “Please be careful. The first hole is Bush,
the second is Buchanan, the third is Gore.” Repeatedly she warns people, “Be careful.”

Not everyone hears her or even with her advice can figure it out. Others just shrug off her warnings altogether; they’ve been
voting since Truman, they don’t need directions. The complaints start flooding in from the crowd: that the stylus didn’t work
properly, that they voted for the wrong person, that since there were two holes next to Gore and Lieberman’s box they punched
both holes. A couple women come to her in tears, afraid that they voted for Buchanan, knowing that it’s too late since their
ballots have been put into the box.

Brownstein’s husband, George, seventy-six, is going through a similar ordeal at the Masonic Temple, precinct 121-D, where
he’s serving as a poll clerk. People are having problems, but when he tries to phone the elections office, he can’t get through.

“This is unreal,” he thinks.

At precinct 154-G in Bethesda Health City, assistant clerk Bert Gluck, seventy-six, is also seeing the meltdown. From inside
the polling stations, voters are oohing and aahing, confused, punching more than one hole, griping that on some of the ballots
the arrows don’t line up with any holes. He cautions voters, don’t turn in your ballot if you’ve punched more than one hole!
Forty-nine voters take him up on the offer, turning in to him their double-punched ballots, which otherwise would have been
voided.

At 10:30
A.M
. in Nashville, Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway and Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus have already
heard about the butterfly ballot problems. In their first briefing of the day, Hattaway and Backus tell reporters to caution
Palm Beach County voters to look carefully at their ballot. At 11:24
A.M.
, Bobby Brochin, counsel for the DNC in Florida, faxes LePore a letter from his Miami office. The Democrats aren’t entirely
sure what the problem is, just that there is one. “Apparently certain presidential ballots being utilized in several precincts in
Palm Beach County are quite confusing,” Brochin writes. “They contain two pages listing all of the presidential candidates,
which may cause electors to vote twice in the presidential race. You should immediately instruct all deputy supervisors and
other officials at these precincts that they should advise all electors (and post a written advisory) that the ballot for the
presidential race is two pages long, and that electors should only vote for one presidential candidate.”

LePore doesn’t respond to Brochin’s fax.