Down & Dirty (39 page)

The counters in Miami-Dade take around four hours. They’re interrupted to hear King read an announcement that Harris is delaying
the preliminary certification until tomorrow, and will consider reasons for late tallies if faxed to her by 2
P.M.
Wednesday.

Before 8
P.M.
, the board issues the news: Gore gained a total of six votes.

Now: Should they count all 653,963 ballots?

Six votes? Martinez says. “They have not met the threshold requirement….We have to follow the law here. What happened today
does not rise to the level of an error.”

Coffey points to the 10,750 undervotes. “Some think that there could be eight thousand disenfranchised voters who did not
strike it right. Take
six percent of that in the mind-boggling closeness of the election. The outcome shows that indeed there are additional votes
in favor of Al Gore. We are in a situation right now where it just wouldn’t be right to stop the process, the process of getting
to the truth.”

De Grandy has a different take, of course. “It is time to reach closure,” he says.

“We need to follow the law,” Martinez adds. “I can talk for hours about Dickens or
2000-and-whatever-it-was Space Odyssey
. I read fiction. That’s not what you want to hear from me. I’m a lawyer, and you are a canvassing board that has to follow
the law.”

De Grandy knows recounts firsthand. In 1988, during his first run for public office, he beat Carlos Valdez by 9 votes in the
GOP runoff for a state legislative seat.
^*
After the absentee ballots were counted, however, De Grandy and Valdez were tied. An automatic recount had Valdez picking
up a vote, De Grandy losing one, so De Grandy asked for a hand recount. The canvassing board voted 2 to 1 to conduct the count—Leahy,
of course, voted against it—and while they found De Grandy’s missing vote, they also found another one for Valdez. De Grandy
didn’t appeal.

King calls for a vote. He exercises his chairman’s prerogative and asks Leahy to vote first. Leahy’s been doing this for more
than a generation. He’s a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, a milquetoast moustachioed man of impeccable credentials and zero charisma.
He believes in his machines. When he votes no, few are surprised.

Lehr’s the wild card here. While King, a Democrat, has made it pretty clear that he favors a countywide hand recount, no one
knows what Lehr’s going to do. She’s quiet. Born in Brussels, Belgium, she’s married to a big GOP honcho. All eyes on her.

Lehr votes no.

King votes yes.

No hand recount in Miami-Dade. Though they do want the additional Gore votes added to the certification.

Good, Martinez thinks. He’s glad. The rule of law prevailed.

Ticktock, ticktock.

Miami-Dade’s a goose egg, Palm Beach starts tomorrow, Broward’s waiting to see what the Florida Supreme Court says about the
conflicting opinion… what about Volusia?

Volusia’s done. And the new tally is good news for Gore. Gore picked up 241 votes in the hand recount, Bush 143, a net gain
of 98 for the vice president.

Jack Young smiles.

In Tallahassee, Baker enters the state senate hearing room, where a bunch of us media idiots are sitting. He then rhetorically
urinates in Gore’s ear while announcing to the world that it’s raining.

Offering “a proposal that we think is very fair,” Baker says that the Bush campaign will change its position on manual recounts,
accepting them as valid, as long as the counties engaging in the manual recounts finish their task by Tuesday at 5
P.M.
“We are offering to accept the manual recount up to the time of the statutory deadline,” Baker says.

This is of course a clear physical impossibility, as declared by the Palm Beach County canvassing board, which has said it
would need six days for the operation. Additionally, whatever hand-counting the board could have accomplished Tuesday was
shanked when Harris issued her opinion questioning the legality of the hand recount, thus suspending it. Nonetheless, Baker
pushes this forward as a “compromise that both campaigns [could] enter into in good faith,” knowing full well that the Gore
team will reject it on its face. (Which happens a few minutes later, when Daley, in Washington, issues a Chicago-style deep-dish
No Way.)

It is imperative, Baker argues, that the Gore team accept his offer. “More and more we see uncertainty in financial markets
and we see uncertainty abroad,” Baker says, insinuating that Gore may be responsible for an impending apocalypse.

Oh, sweet Moses.

Baker, his comments actually written by Zoellick, slams the Gore campaign for suing Broward County when it refused to continue
with its hand recount. “The Gore campaign, which placed great weight on Florida law when it thought the provisions served
its tactics, does not like
this
Florida law,” he rightly says. “In sum, the Gore campaign has been unwilling to accept any finality,” Baker continues, “after
the vote, after the recount, after the manual recount tests in selective favorable counties, or even after the
larger selective manual recounts within the time established by Florida statute. Indeed, the manual recount in Palm Beach
County is at least the fourth count of these votes, because the county also undertook a third machine count.”

Baker neglects to mention that the third machine count came at the request of the Republicans. Since the first one was just
the regular election count, and the second was the law-mandated recount because the margin of victory was so slim, that would
mean that the Democrats and the Republicans have one recount apiece done at their respective requests, the one done at the
Democrats’ request being manual, and uncompleted, the one done at the Republicans’ request being that third machine recount.

But Baker’s counting on you not knowing that.

Baker is asked how this is in any way a compromise. The Palm Beach hand recount has no chance of being concluded by close
of business Tuesday, while Bush still leads by an estimated 388 votes. And—according to the Bush team—Bush will be the anticipated
winner of the absentee ballots due by midnight Friday. How does this not give Bush a distinct advantage?

“How can you say that?” Baker asks, seemingly almost wounded. “There’s no assurance he will win those [absentee ballot] votes.
Traditionally, they have favored the Republican candidate, and we should say that; I’ve already said that. But there’s absolutely
no assurance. So if you’re suggesting that we take no risk by this proposal, I would argue with that rather strongly.

“I think for them to reject it just on the grounds that it locks in a victory for us is simply not right,” Baker says.

In the midst of this nonsense, Baker does make some of the legitimate, cogent arguments on his side. It is true—and somewhat
disturbing—that the Democrats have yet to offer any sort of timeline for when the recount process might be over to their satisfaction.
On Thursday morning on NBC’s
Today
show, for instance, Lieberman was asked if his ticket would cease gumming up any finality to the Florida recount process
if it got its manual recounts, and he hedged. “We have a wait-and-see attitude about that,” Lieberman said, playing right
into the Bush campaign’s argument that the Gore team is going to keep challenging the Florida results until it finds an outcome
it likes.

Baker is asked: If the Bush team objects to the “subjectivity” of the largely Democratic counties from which the Gore team
wants recounts, would he therefore agree to a statewide hand recount?

“I reject that categorically, and let me explain why,” Baker says. “It took fifteen hours to count four precincts in Palm
Beach County. There are six thousand precincts in the state of Florida. It would take an inordinate amount of time to count
six thousand precincts manually. Furthermore, we have made very clear since we’ve been here our problem with the fundamentally
flawed process of manual counting. How it could lead to human error or even mischief—those concerns are well known.

“Many people around the country have urged both candidates to reach out to one another with a fair proposal to resolve this
divisive and unfortunate process,” Baker concludes. “We are doing just that.”

For a woman who doesn’t seem to think we have a second to spare before the winner of Florida’s presidential contest is declared,
Harris sure takes her time getting to her 5
P.M.
press conference tonight.

Finally, at 7:35
P.M.
she walks in—dress, lipstick, and pumps all precisely coordinated to the same regal maroon hue.

Harris has taken her share of hits in the last few days, receiving gator-size rhetorical chomps from Dems up and down the
peninsula. That said, Harris seems calm and collected as she walks in to tell the world that all sixty-seven counties have
filed their returns as of Tuesday at 5
P.M.
, and according to those returns, Bush leads Gore by 300 votes—2,910,492 to 2,910,192.

Harris acknowledges Lewis’s decision and leaves open the possibility that she might, in fact, accept later hand-recount totals
if they come—though she offers no guarantee. “Within the past hour, the director of the Division of Elections”—Clay Roberts—“faxed
a memorandum to the supervisors of elections in these three Florida counties,” she continues. “In accordance with today’s
court ruling confirming my discretion in these matters, I am requiring a written statement of the facts and circumstances
that would cause these counties to believe that a change should be made before final certification of the statewide vote.”

This is bullshit, of course. She didn’t even want to give this extra day, but attorneys Klock and Kearney seriously recommended
that she do so. An open mind cannot be mandated by law—though the pretense of one can, I suppose.

The final certification will come Saturday, after the midnight Friday deadline for overseas absentee ballots. The deadline
for the excuse letter from the three counties is 2
P.M.
Wednesday, Harris says. “On advice of counsel, I will not take questions because of pending litigation,” she says.

And the litigation does indeed pend. Running alongside the Democrats’ legitimate arguments in favor of a full and accurate
manual recount lurk the darker impulses of trial lawyers, who envision even more possible lawsuits beyond an extended deadline
for hand recounts. So Tuesday I ask Klain what other lawsuits there might be. Will the Gore campaign sue Palm Beach County
for its confusing butterfly ballots? Will the Gorebies claim that the ballots were illegal, thus necessitating a revote in
the county? “Our options are under review there,” Klain says.“Our first option is trying to get these votes counted.”

I try again. What would he say to the American people who, according to polls, think there should be a full recount, by hand
if necessary, but aren’t prepared to go beyond that?

“I would just say to the American people that the ballots would be counted in Florida today if not for the legal and political
issues to stop the count, the responsibility for which lies at the feet of the Republican Party,” Klain says.