Down & Dirty (42 page)

In Palm Beach, Mark Steitz and Jeff Yarborough have been crunching numbers for Gore.

Undervotes in Palm Beach: 10,582. In Miami-Dade: 10,815. In Broward: 6,686.

If one assumes a 12 percent “revival” rate on these undervotes, that means that there are 1,269 uncounted votes in Palm Beach,
1,297 in Miami-Dade, and 802 in Broward.

Applying the proportion of the vote that Gore and Bush got in each county—64 percent to 36 percent in Palm Beach, 53 percent
to 47 percent in Miami-Dade, 69 percent to 31 percent in Broward, that means the following number of net Gore votes as yet
uncounted: 730.

Other charts are assembled, with other revival rates—10 percent, 14 percent—and other proportions of Gore votes, if one assumes
that those who undervote are slightly more Democratic, as they tend to be minority or elderly or inexperienced voters. Crunching
these numbers, the net Gore votes range anywhere from 615 to 1,175. The Gorebies think that the Bushies are crunching these
numbers as well—which is why they’re doing everything they can to stop the process.

Patrick McManus, the mayor of what was once punch-card ballotville, Lynn, Massachusetts—with eighteen recounts in twenty years,
’til the secretary of state phased cards out in ’98—has been down in Palm Beach since Monday, with a group of about a dozen
others. He, of course, knows Whouley and Newman and Corrigan and the rest. McManus, a CPA and a lawyer, knows these machines,
knows that as they get older, they’re tougher to vote with. The rubber on the base of the machine breaks down, ending up
with incompletely punched-out ballots. So McManus believes that Palm Beach County’s revival rate should be much higher. They
should pick up anywhere from 200 to 500 votes in Palm Beach, he thinks. If not more. If they used the
Delahunt
standard, it would be anywhere from 1,000 to 1,200.

“What would happen if we had a statewide recount?” Whouley asks.

It would depend on the standard, McManus says. And also it would depend on what ballots we’re looking at. You guys are just
focused on the undervotes, but there are 22,000 overvotes in Duval County, mainly from black precincts. Sometimes there are
votes that can be discerned in overvotes; for example, a voter might acknowledge that he mistakenly punched the ballot for
more than one candidate and attempted to rectify the problem by marking in pen whom he wanted to vote for.

If we counted all the ballots though, Gore would win, McManus concludes. Using the “intent of the voter” standard, he’d win
by maybe 20,000 or 30,000. Using the stricter standard they’re applying in Palm Beach, he would still win, but by maybe 2,000
or 3,000. But, he understands, the statutory deadline for calling for any more recounts has passed.

Whouley tells him to talk to Steitz.

Steitz at first worries that this is just some crackpot Whouley pawned off on him. Soon he realizes that he’s not, that he
knows what he’s talking about. Why don’t you let me put this in a spreadsheet for you? he asks McManus.

“Ah, you yuppies and your spreadsheets,” he says. He tells Steitz that if it were up to him, he’d push for a statewide recount.
It would be a risk, but one worth taking.

More important, McManus doesn’t quite understand what’s going on with the stopping of the hand recounts, with the Republican
challenges to the very notion of hand recounts. Hand recounts are totally normal. He thinks it inconceivable that there’s
a presidential election being decided by a handful of votes, and the votes aren’t being recounted. The Republicans are mocking
the notion of hand counting? This makes no sense to the mayor of Recount-land.

And as if things weren’t bad enough for LePore attorney Bruce Rogow, who thinks the hand recount should continue, he’s got
Alan Dershowitz on the phone yapping at him.

You should tell your client to start counting, Dershowitz says, you’re going to cost Gore the election, you need to get her
to start counting now, she shouldn’t pay attention to the secretary of state.

While Dershowitz is yelling at him, Rogow’s partner, Beverly Pough, starts waving to him.

“Warren Christopher!” she whispers, pointing to the phone. “Warren Christopher!”

Rogow hangs up on Dershowitz.

“Bruce, this is Warren Christopher,” Rogow hears from the other line. He thinks that’s odd. “Bruce”? He doesn’t know him well
enough to call him “Bruce.” Doesn’t know him at all!

“Hello, Mr. Christopher,” Rogow says.

“I want to thank you for everything you’re doing for us,” Christopher says, apparently referring to a brief Rogow filed for
the Palm Beach canvassing board, asking the Florida Supremes to resolve the conflicting advice offered by Harris and Butterworth.

This offends Rogow.

You’ve got it all wrong, I’m not doing anything for you, Rogow says. I’m representing some other client.

Christopher seems to sense that he ruffled Rogow’s feathers, and he gets apologetic and diplomatic. But still, the message
is: It would really help us if the count would begin.

It can’t begin until we hear from the Supreme Court of Florida, Rogow says. Which I think will be this afternoon. The Florida
justices will want to step in here.

Christopher apologizes again, asks what Rogow’s views are on all of this. On the federal track, the Bushies have appealed
Middlebrooks’s Monday ruling to the far more conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Christopher says that
his people say that they don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will take it up.

Rogow doesn’t know about that. There are a few justices on that twelve-judge bench whom the Gorebies better be wary of, he
says. My views are that you’ve got to watch out for the Eleventh Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, because that’s where
the Republicans want to be, Rogow says. You need to be in the Supreme Court of Florida, and that’s where I’ve put this now.

The call ends. Rogow considers the whole thing to have been entirely inappropriate.

Hearing that Harris has asked the Florida Supremes to consolidate all the cases, Bush legal chieftain Ginsberg calls Joe Klock
to tell him that the Bushies are not happy. If the Florida Supreme Court takes the case, then
Gore will be playing on a Democratic field, Ginsberg says. The Bush team wants to play this game in Atlanta, at the Eleventh
Circuit, or in D.C., with the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States). But not here, in Tallahassee, with an all Democrat-appointee
court.

This is where you want to feel sorry for Klock and his client. It isn’t like Klock hasn’t been trying to steer the secretary
of state down what he thinks is a safe path. He had told Harris that there was no basis in Florida election law to allow hand
recounts because of voter error. But by consolidating the cases, at least, if there is a hand recount, it can be statewide,
with one uniform standard for the ballot.

Of course, that’s not what Klock wants to have happen. His concern is more with all the people who voted correctly, not the
ones who didn’t. The way Klock sees it, the Democrats are maneuvering any way possible to get Gore more votes than Bush. The
instructions were quite clear, he says:

AFTER VOTING, CHECK YOUR BALLOT CARD TO BE SURE YOUR VOTING SELECTIONS ARE CLEARLY AND CLEANLY PUNCHED AND THERE ARE NO CHIPS
LEFT HANGING ON THE BACK OF THE CARD.

If the Bush folks are turning on Harris over this, then she’s really going to be without friends. What Strep Throat and left-leaning
pundits and Leno and Letterman are doing to her is fairly cruel, slamming her appearance and constantly ridiculing her heavy
layers of makeup. Even the
Washington Post
—the paper of Woodward, Bradlee, and Bernstein—writes about her in ways that seem not only mean but even obsessive: “Her lips
were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick—the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on a shirt collar.
Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner
and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogeneous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall
with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double check—before reading—her latest ‘determination.’

“One wonders how this Republican woman, who can’t even use restraint when she’s wielding a mascara wand, will manage to… make
sound decisions.”

Meow.

But it’s tough to muster an iota of pity for Harris. It’s hard to feel bad for a woman who feels the necessity to block votes
from being counted every step of the way, who’s being sued by Judge McDermott, a Republican, for what he views as disenfranchisement.
There are 175,000 ballots—undervotes and overvotes—that Florida vote-tabulation machines did not read. Certainly some of
these folks found the Gore-Bush choice untenable and opted for no one, and surely a lot of these people fucked up their ballots
with incompetent voting, and that’s too bad. But it’s also pretty clear that there are at least
some
votes in there, some Floridians who had a choice that wasn’t recorded. Considering that Bush’s presidency comes down to a
300-vote margin of victory, how can the country ever feel confident about who actually got more votes if we don’t look at
them? Harris wants the world to feel bad for her, wants the world to understand that she’s just doing her job. But then she
turns around and does exactly what Bush would want her to, gumming up the works as much as possible. Maybe Stipanovich isn’t
telling her what to do, as coordinated with the Bush team. But it almost doesn’t matter—she’s on their program with or without
instructions. From almost any angle, her behavior is outrageous. Yes, the Gorebies’ ploy to look for votes only in three Democratic
counties is disingenuous. Gore’s “offer” the night before for a statewide recount had a real used car–salesman feel to it.
Both sides are plotting, and neither is behaving as if they truly want a fair fight. It may well be that the biggest difference
between Bush and Gore at this point is that Bush has a Katherine Harris, and Gore doesn’t.

In any case, this one move to take the matter to the Florida Supreme Court will be the first, last, and only time that Harris
does anything that isn’t completely in George W. Bush’s best interests. It also happens to be the last decision Harris makes
without the guidance of Stipanovich.

On Friday, November 17, everybody’s wondering what the Florida Supreme Court will do. The Gorebies have appealed Lewis’s ruling
that Harris acted within her discretion, and Palm Beach has appealed LaBarga’s ruling on hand recounts, which involves both
whether to count and the chad standard.

I’m an impatient man, so I call former Florida Supreme Court justice Gerald Kogan to see what he thinks.

A registered Democrat first appointed to the bench in 1987 by then-governor Bob Martinez, a Republican, Kogan says that in
his personal
opinion, “any recounts [that] registrars feel are necessary to get an accurate tabulation certainly should prevail.” This
isn’t politics, he explains, it’s Florida law. Of course it’s Florida law as interpreted by the state Supreme Court, which
is thought to lean left. The late Gov. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, appointed six of the court’s seven justices, and the seventh
was appointed by then-governor (now senator) Bob Graham, also a Democrat.