Down & Dirty (38 page)

In Tallahassee, in Courtroom 3-D at the Leon County Courthouse, GOP attorney George Meros is vigorously objecting. And in
his objection, and perhaps as well in his subsequent bout with laryngitis, there lies a symbol of the bipartisan nonsense
playing out in Florida.

Elections supervisor Ion Sancho, a forty-nine-year-old Democrat, has called a special meeting of the county canvassing board.
Since Election Day, twelve absentee ballots had turned up, and Sancho wants them included in the county tally before the 5
P.M.
deadline.

Since Leon County had gone for Vice President Al Gore over Gov. George W. Bush 60 percent to 40 percent, Meros, a Tallahassee
attorney representing Bush, clearly thinks the twelve absentee ballots would favor Gore by a similar ratio. So he tries to
have them scrapped.

You have no proof of receipt by seven o’clock on the night of the election, as the statute requires, Meros says. You have
no proof that the ballots were in the safekeeping of the board, which is also what the statute requires.

But where Meros argues the rule of law, Sancho sees overzealousness. “He’s treating the proceeding as if it’s a criminal proceeding,”
Sancho thinks. Sancho had in fact investigated how the ballots ended up at the polling warehouse where the ballots are taken,
and he ascertained that the ballots were legit. He explains this; Meros doesn’t buy it, calling Sancho’s investigation “hearsay.”

Sancho explains that seven of the ballots had been filled out by county employees who had been running the polling precincts
on Election Day, and therefore didn’t have time to show up to their precincts and vote. The county employee who collected
these seven just happened to forget to turn them in to the county’s “AB,” or absentee ballot, department. There were two ballots
that had been sent to Sancho’s office through interdepartmental mail, which—in the mail crush leading up to November 7—no
one had opened until after the election. Then there were three absentee ballots
from voters who had recently changed addresses; the ballots were then hung up in the bureaucracy of the addressing office.

Meros does everything he can to block the admissibility of the ballots. Led by county judge Jim Harley, the canvassing board
overrules him, pointing out that Sancho had the authority to accept them. Meros is not happy.

Then they open the ballots, right there, before Meros and the judge and about a dozen others.

Ten votes for Bush; 2 for Gore.

Meros and the other Republicans in the room start smiling.

“Are there any more objections, George?” Harley asks knowingly. Everyone laughs.

“I’m not saying another word,” Meros says, thanking the canvassing board for its time and walking out of the room.

“I see it all across the state,” Sancho will later say to me.“Each side is simply trying to achieve its ends, uncover votes
it believes will be favorable and suppress votes it believes will be unfavorable.” In the process, neither party is doing
much to elevate the dignity of this process much above your average Panama City wet T-shirt contest.

Carol Roberts is fired up. “I never would have agreed” to seek an opinion from Clay Roberts “had I been told it was binding,”
she says, “because I believe we in Palm Beach County ought to be making that decision.” She wants the team to ignore it.

Burton now wants to do the count, inspired at least in part by Wallace’s annoying object-object-object stall tactics, Kerey
Carpenter’s suspected shiftiness and Harris’s stalwart partisanship. But as turned around as he feels, the judge is not quite
on Roberts’s program when it comes to ignoring the law.

“As a county court judge and as a chair of this board,” Burton says, “I think it is my obligation to follow the law, and the
law tells me that this opinion is binding on this board, and the law tells me we have to follow it. And so based on this,
it would be my motion that the manual recount be suspended.”

Burton calls the vote to suspend the countywide hand recount before it even begins. LePore—now taking guidance from county
attorney Denise Dytrych, not Montgomery—votes aye. Roberts votes nay. It’s Burton’s motion, so he’s automatically with LePore.

At this point the board can’t even certify the results it has because of a restraining order granted last week in the butterfly
ballot case. In the afternoon, circuit court judge Jorge LaBarga—the poor dude forced to contend with the butterfly ballot
revote case—dissolves the restraining order and also tells the board that it is “permitted” to conduct the full hand recount,
though Harris has discretion as to whether or not she’d accept the late returns. “If she decides to accept them, fine,” LaBarga
says. “If she doesn’t, then you need to talk to her about it.”

So can the board go ahead with the count after all? The canvassing board debates the matter. Dytrych says that they shouldn’t.

“What happens?” Roberts asks, at the height of her you-go-girlness. “Do we go to jail? Because I’m willing to go to jail.”
Democrats in the crowd cheer.

“If we start, and the supreme court tells us to stop, that’s what we’ll do,” Burton says. He and Roberts have made up after
he accused her of sandbagging him, but he’s still unhappy when she goes into campaign mode.

Wallace is furious. “The entire world is watching you all and the action that you take,” he says. “The chief elections officer
of the state of Florida has told you that you cannot act lawfully and conduct a manual recount. What we suggest and what you
suggested this morning—and nothing has changed since your hearing this morning—is that you wait for a court decision telling
you it’s legal or not legal to continue with the manual recount.”

Roberts acts as if Wallace’s microphone isn’t on and calls for a vote on the recount.

All three vote aye.

“What happens if the supreme court says that the canvassing board is acting illegally by conducting this manual recount?”
Wallace continues.

“Then we’re going to abide by any ruling of the court, of course,” Burton says. A lot of Burton’s statements to Wallace include
an “of course.” The kid is getting really annoying, Burton thinks.

“And what would you do to preserve the sanctity of those ballots?”

“I think the same thing that’s always done, Mr. Wallace.”

“What is that?” Wallace asks.

“You have been in there,” Burton says.

“No, this has never been done before,” Wallace presses. “I don’t understand what’s to be done.”

“All right, do we need to address anything else?” Burton asks.

“I don’t have anything else,” says Roberts.

Wallace is fired up. “Is the judge refusing to answer the question?”

“I think the judge answered the question,” Burton says. “We have kept those ballots under security, and they’ll continue to
be kept in the same manner that we’ve done to protect the sanctity of them.”

They break and agree to start the counting at 7
A.M.
tomorrow, Wednesday.

Bush spokesman Eskew gripes to reporters, who await his every word. “Machine counts are accurate. Let’s not forget, we’ve
had three of them,” Eskew says. “What on earth rationale is there for going to a less accurate accounting, other than to come
up with a different result?”

Good question. Maybe he should ask Bush why he ever signed that 1997 Texas law.

LePore is starting to come to terms with her naïveté. She is no longer listening to Montgomery, favoring instead Republican
county attorney Dytrych, whom she likes and respects and, more important, knows. And the judge. She’s listening a lot more
to the judge these days.

But it’s not as if she thinks that the Democrats are the only ones with agendas. She’s clearly resentful of Kerey Carpenter
and all her lobbying. And now there’s the matter of Katherine Harris and Clay Roberts. LePore is bending over backward to
be as impartial as she can; she cannot believe how Harris and Roberts are behaving. “As an election official, you need to
have at least the appearance of being nonpartisan and treating everything that you do in a nonpartisan manner,” she thinks.
She remembered when she heard that Harris was actively involved in Bush’s campaign; she thought it was inappropriate then.
Now it is totally out of hand. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Every year, the association of elections supervisors
has a reception for legislators in Tallahassee. In this past one, the association was to hold a news conference announcing
its statewide “Get Out the Vote” campaign with its GOTV foundation. The organizers of the campaign wanted Harris to appear,
but—LePore remembers—Harris kept having it rescheduled because she was on the pro-Bush “Freezin’ for a Reason” tour for the
New Hampshire primary.

Elections have never been a priority for Harris, LePore thinks. Even though she’s constantly a font of promises—telling the
association, “We’re gonna do this” and “We’re gonna do that”—when it comes time to do it, she’s never there. Harris didn’t
cough up the cash she’d pledged for the association’s GOTV campaign, she barely worked with the association
at all on voter registration, she’s been a nonentity. Most of the time Harris didn’t even attend the association’s conferences,
though she is—as she reminds the world now—the chief elections officer in the state.

And now, the way she’s acting, so transparently pro-Bush, so unwilling to let them do a hand recount, forced by a judge to
consider reasons why vote tallies might come in late… LePore just didn’t understand it.

LePore has an opinion on Clay Roberts, too, whom she’s worked with a lot: “Clay knows who his boss is,” she says.

While Harris is coming at the board from the right, telling them that they can’t count, Gore attorney Ben Kuehne is coming
at them from the left. On behalf of the Florida Democratic Party, Kuehne files a motion before LaBarga to seek injunctive
relief and make the canvassing board scrap that 1990 standard and start to loosen it up, to “review ballots based on voters’
intent.”

The law Kuehne cites is good ol’ 102.166 (7) (b): “If a counting team is unable to determine a voter’s intent in casting a
ballot, that ballot shall be presented to the county canvassing board for it to determine the voter’s intent.”

In Fort Lauderdale, the Democrats are suing the Broward County canvassing board, too. It seems that where the canvassing boards
do what they want, the Dems claim the hegemony of the canvassing board. All hail! Where they don’t, they sue. Mean old board!

Meanwhile, local Democrats are spreading rumors about Lee, about the fact that Jeb appointed him, that some big circuit court
judgeship is awaiting him in return for yesterday’s vote. The Democratic lawyers’ take on Burton is even far more angry and
suspicious.