Down & Dirty (65 page)

And the Republicans keep coming. Bush staffers like Mehlman, media coordinator Megan Moran, and spokesman Ray Sullivan walk
the halls and express concern to the media. “It’s clear to anyone who closely observes Broward County that the majority of
the canvassing board, particularly Commissioner Gunzburger, is throwing all standards aside to arbitrarily increase the number
of votes for Vice President Al Gore,” Sullivan says.

Democrats are there, but they are smaller in both stature and number. Representative Nadler of New York, Rep. Alcee Hastings
of Florida, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland enter the courtroom, then exit. A Gore Recount Committee aide explains that
Hastings is here to appeal to black voters, Mikulski to women, and Nadler to Jews. Typical clueless Democrat balkanization.

Inside the courtroom, the board—surrounded by party observers—tries not to pay much attention to the in-and-out of reporters,
the media, and the half-dozen or so members of the public.

“That’s a Gore vote,” says Gunzburger.

“I agree,” says Lee. “OK, that’s [ballot number] A024, plus one Gore.”

I ask Keating why he’s here.

“As all of us, we’re here to encourage that the process be fair and final,” he says. “It will be final, but it can never be
fair when you are re-recounting exclusively Democratic counties with almost exclusively Democratic supervisors.”

Keating also has harsh words for the process of assessing voter intent by studying the chad.

“They are attempting not just to divine the intent of the voter, but to invent,” he says. “Listen to the language in there.
They say ‘intend to vote Bush,’ or ‘intend to vote Gore.’ How do they know?

“It’s one thing to intend to vote, and quite something else to vote,” he says, adding that he “saw chad on the table.”

Janklow, sipping a Coke and wearing a clearly underused Champion work-out suit, expresses astonishment at Florida’s county-by-county
standards.

“How can you have one standard in Fort Lauderdale and another standard in Miami?” he asks. “And the three different [Broward]
officers have three different standards,” Keating points out.

This is true. Gunzburger counts every dimple. Lee counts them only if
three or four other major races on the ballot also have dimples. Rosenberg counts them only if about half the ballot is dimpled.
This does, of course, end up meaning that only ballots with a pattern of dimples are counted as votes. But the problems that
could come with Florida’s lack of a specific standard have never been so well illustrated.

Outside, the crowd is chanting.

“Na na NA NA, Na na NA NA, Hey, hey, hey, Gore lies!”

A Republican state senator from western Maryland, Alex Mooney, twenty-nine, bellows on his megaphone. “We carried almost the
whole darn country except for a few cities!” Mooney yells, apparently unim-pressed that Gore actually won the popular vote
by more than 500,000 votes. Mooney proceeds through a list of states Bush won—“Who won Alabama?!” “BUSH!” “Who won Mississippi?!”
“BUSH!”—before arriving at “And who won Florida?!”

Another “volunteer” (read: Bush campaign staffer too chickenshit, or embarrassed, to admit who he is) distributes dozens of
free T-shirts that read “GOREY Mess.”“I’m just a volunteer,” he says when I ask him who he is and who paid for the shirts.
“I just bring ’em.”

The black hecklers from “Freedom Fighters International,” who shouted down Rev. Jesse Jackson a week and a half ago, suddenly
show. Their leader, Michael Symonett, denies that they have been paid to shout down Democrats. Symonett says that he’s rich,
owns his own Jaguar, and no one could pay him to be there if he tried.

Inside, a controversy erupts when the Broward County public-information officer mistakenly refers to a batch of absentee ballots
that haven’t been counted yet. These are actually ballots that have already been counted, lumped together since absentee ballots
aren’t segregated by precinct. The plan was to recount all of them at the end. But the public information officer makes it
sound far more mysterious, and rumors swirl throughout the courthouse and on conservative media outlets that Broward just
“found” 500 new votes from Israel.

Rosenberg makes a motion to allow GOP representatives to argue that the absentee ballots should not be reexamined. The motion
dies for lack of a second. Scherer and Governor Racicot object. Lee is already annoyed with Racicot, having seen him on TV
bad-mouthing Lee by name as inventing votes for Gore. “I’ve been on the canvassing board several years,” Lee tells Racicot.
“I’ve had so many speeches from so many of you folks that I don’t care to hear any more, with all due respect.”

Scherer erupts.

Lee and Gunzburger are totally confused by Scherer’s behavior, have been as the week has progressed and Scherer’s gotten increasingly
angry. Republicans like Shari McCartney and Ed Pozzuoli have been vociferous advocates for the Republican side, but they’ve
remained human. Scherer, on the other hand, with whom Gunzburger worked closely, has been losing it, they think. Today he
outdoes himself.

“Your attempt, constant attempt to stifle us, the Republicans, from giving you our side and to give you reasoned analysis
is overwhelming and is astounding, as you are trolling for votes here,” Scherer fumes. “It is obvious that you know you can’t
get this election any other way, so what are we going to do? Recount all of these votes again?! And I understand you’re going
to be bringing precincts in that we didn’t know anything about in a few minutes. Precincts that you didn’t tell us about.
Precincts that you did not discuss on this record in public that you had left out.

“You’ve told these lawyers to go bring you more votes, and I assume we’re going to keep bringing them to you until such time
as you’ve got a thousand votes. I think that’s what you’re looking for!”

Lee can barely contain his anger. It is unimaginable that Scherer will ever again appear in Lee’s courtroom to argue a case.

“All right, Mr. Scherer, you’re out of line,” he says. “OK, and we’ll go ahead and recess. I’ll ask the deputies to clear
the courtroom, and Mr. Scherer is not welcome back in this room. He can watch the proceedings from outside. OK, thank you.
We’re in recess.”

As the deputy approaches him and steers him toward the door, Scherer holds his wrists out, as if he’s about to be handcuffed.

“That’s not necessary,” she says, continuing to guide him out.

“Unless you’re going to arrest me,” Scherer warns, “don’t touch me, ma’am.”

Scherer’s anger isn’t show. He is genuinely outraged.

Republicans have been watching this board very carefully, and there have been comments—most notably by Gunzburger—that indicate
to them that there’s clear Democratic bias afoot.

In precinct 14-J, Lee announces that there’s only one disputed ballot in the pack.

“No reasonable certainty on that ballot,” Rosenberg says.

“I believe I can see light on three sides, and it’s a clear vote for Gore,” Gunzburger says.

“I agree with Judge Rosenberg,” Lee says.

To many GOP observers, Gunzburger’s acceptance of any dimple—even ones she has to squint to see—says it all.

After the shortest Thanksgiving weekend of his life, Boies flies to Palm Beach County, where he’s presenting witnesses before
the canvassing board, who, he hopes, will help push Burton into loosening his standards.

There’s retired Cal Berkeley mechanical engineering professor William Rouverol, eighty-three, who helped design the Votomatic.
“No machine can be perfect,’’ he says.“Dimpled or pregnant chads, if the only discernible mark for a given race in a given
column, should qualify as a vote.”

There’s Yale statistician Nicolas Hengartner, who testified the week before in Miami-Dade. The Democrats needed someone to
testify about what might exist in the undervotes, and after DNC staffer Jason Fuhrman had been rebuffed by two other academics—Johns
Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll and Yale statistics department chairman Andrew R. Barron—he found Hengartner.

In his clipped Québecois accent, Hengartner says that Palm Beach has a higher rate of undervotes than elsewhere in the state,
“seven times what I would obtain with an optical method. I would try to suggest that the reason this happens is because there’s
a problem with first column.”

Burton is cordial but doesn’t sound all that interested in this last-ditch push. “The legislature up in Tallahassee may be
more interested in that,” he says to Hengartner.

LePore’s reaction is altogether different, because one of the experts testifying today is her former mentor, Jackie Winchester,
supervisor of elections from 1973 to 1997.

“They get more wear in that first column because it’s the one we use most in elections,” Winchester says. “Because of that,
we began not even to use that first column in municipal elections. We’ve never seen a pattern like this with so many not punching
in the first row but punching in all the other rows. It’s just very weird to think that people came to the polls and didn’t
vote for president.”

Winchester had initially been supportive of LePore, defending her on the butterfly ballot, thinking it was a mistake, but
an honest mistake. But then LePore began to make decisions that Winchester thought were wrong, ones she saw as favoring the
Bush campaign. LePore must have known that if the canvassing board asked for the opinion from the secretary of state, it would
be binding, Winchester thought. And it was obvious that Harris was going to say no. LePore let the voters down by doing that.

Then, after the recount began, Winchester thought that LePore and Burton had been too hard-line against counting dimples.
The 1990 standard had been adopted before it was clear that there were problems with some of the equipment, Winchester thought.

Of course, Winchester knows LePore quite well, having groomed her for her present job, and she remembers the one criticism
she had about LePore: “She needs to delegate some responsibility, so that she will not be overburdened,” Winchester once wrote
on LePore’s annual job performance review. And here it was, just two days before the deadline, and LePore was
still
not delegating. She would do periodic audits of the ballots on her own, instead of letting someone else compile the stats.
And every time she did this, the canvassing board would have to take a break.

Then there are Winchester’s other main criticisms of her former protégé: she really isn’t all that organized, and she tends
to panic. Winchester remembers the written instructions she’d once put together for how to conduct a manual recount in an
expeditious and efficient manner—which is not, Winchester thinks, the way LePore’s done it. The undervotes and overvotes are
supposed to be separated from the rest of the ballots immediately. You’re not supposed to have a situation where anybody could
object to everything, which the Republicans immediately saw as a way to wreak havoc on the process.

All of these things are helping to hand the election to George Bush, Winchester, a Democrat, thinks. Having made a mess of
the butterfly ballot, it seemed to Winchester that LePore should have bent over backward to be fair to those voters who got
screwed by counting everything.

After all, Winchester has family members who were confused by the butterfly ballot. Her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, an
honors student, who cast her first presidential vote. And her daughter-in-law, an attorney.

“LePore never apologized to them,” Winchester will later say. “When I think of all the elderly Jewish voters so thrilled to
vote for a Jewish candidate on a national ticket, voters who seemed genuinely anguished to have learned that they may have
inadvertently voted for Buchanan. She has shown callous indifference to voters. Sure, she seems nice when you talk to her,
but I don’t think it’s nice to treat people like that. These people are suffering just as much as Theresa is.”

In the coming days, after the canvassing board refuses to allow a more lenient standard, Winchester will unleash her wrath
upon LePore in a series of local interviews with the media. And LePore will sit there, inside
the OEC, amazed and confused and stunned by the fact that her mentor has turned against her with such anger.