Down & Dirty (66 page)

In Tallahassee, meanwhile, Democratic lawyers are preparing to contest the election, which is still scheduled to be certified
Sunday at 5
P.M
. They plan on challenging the results from four counties, suing their canvassing boards for four different reasons. Two of
the counties are no surprise: Miami-Dade, where the canvassing board never finished its hand recount; and Palm Beach, where
Gore attorneys still think the canvassing board has been too stringent on its chad requirements.

But there are two others that they’re thinking of including, kind of out of nowhere.

At first blush, when junior Gore attorney Jeremy Bash tells me about Nassau County, it sounds pretty promising. Nassau County,
which is largely Republican, has decided to report its original election returns—rather than its recount tally—to the secretary
of state Sunday, thus stripping Gore of 51 votes. The law says you have to take the recount number, Bash says, case closed.

But after I phone up one of the canvassing board members, it’s clear to me that it’s not that simple. Nassau County commissioner
Marianne Marshall tells me that just before 9
A.M
. on Friday, November 24, she—as a temporary member of the canvassing board—was one in a 3 to 0 vote to use the original Election
Day numbers. The vote came upon the recommendation of Supervisor of Elections Shirley King, a Democrat, who “felt that they
[the original Election Night numbers] were more accurate” than the mandated recount numbers, according to Marshall. For whatever
reason, during the Nassau recount, 218 votes weren’t pulled out of the box they were in. Forgetting to count them added a
net gain of 51 votes to Gore’s total. But upon review, King realized what had happened and decided that those 218 voters shouldn’t
be disenfranchised.

“If she said that that’s the way she wanted to go, then I support it,” Marshall says. “Shirley King has been the supervisor
of elections for Nassau County for twenty-eight years. She has always been very honest and served with integrity, and I respect
her immensely,” Marshall said. Joining King and Marshall in the vote was Judge Bob Williams, also a Democrat.

This one is clearly going nowhere.

The other county the Dems are thinking of including in their contest? None other than Seminole County.

A
ndrew Jackson was the first American president propelled to power by a victory in the Seminole War; Bush needs to be the second.

Back then, of course, it was a defeat of the Seminole Indians, slaughtered by ol’ Hickory and his troops in 1817. Jackson
became a national hero, first governor of Florida, and President of the United States, elected in 1828.

This Seminole County case is similar only in its guerilla tactics. And it all revolves around a guerilla GOP warrior by the
name of Michael Leach.

Leach is from Pensacola and is military through and through. His grandfather was on the U.S.S.
Independence
during World War II; his dad was in the navy during Vietnam; Leach went right into the air force after graduating high school
in 1989. After his discharge, he served as a part-time deputy sheriff in Jefferson County while serving in the air force reserves.

In 1996, Leach enrolled at FSU, where, ironically, he majored in criminology with a minor in political science. When he graduated
in April, he got a job with the state Republican Party as one of the eleven regional directors for the Bush-Cheney campaign,
serving eight northern counties. His office in the Bush Building is resplendent with Nixon memorabilia.

In October, state political director Todd Schnick came to Leach with a problem. The absentee-ballot applications that the
state GOP sent out lacked a space for voters to include their voter ID numbers; apparently the vendor who printed them up
just messed up. Most counties were accepting them anyway, filling in the numbers themselves. But Sandra Goard, the
elections supervisor in Seminole County, has told Schnick that she has a pile of 2,200 or so of these applications in her
office that she doesn’t have the time or the inclination to correct. Schnick was welcome to send someone to do the job, but
the applications couldn’t be removed from her office.

It was tedious work. Fifteen days, fourteen to fifteen hours a day. A couple other regional directors helped out a bit, but
generally it was just Leach sitting there in Goard’s office, using his laptop and VictorySuite computer program, which had
the name and information of every registered voter.

Goard wasn’t always this accommodating. Not to a Democrat, at any rate.

In March, Dean Ray, forty, who operates his own kitchen appliances sales-and-service shop in Sanford, Florida, submitted 831
signatures to Goard as part of the 1,862 he needed to secure his name on the ballot to run for county commissioner. Goard
accepted 644 of them—while rejecting almost 200 of them for technicalities. Ray requested that she return to him the rejected
ones so he could fix them; Goard refused. “They were turned into the office, and at that point they became public record,”
Goard explains to me.

Goard either became nicer between March and October or she has different levels of accommodation within her psyche depending
on party affiliation. Leach camped out in her office for fifteen days. He made the fixes, putting the appropriate voter ID
number on each absentee-ballot application—even if VictorySuite listed the voter as a Democrat, which happened in maybe fifty
or sixty instances.

On November 17, Leach was checking things out in Orange County, just south of Seminole, when he got a call on his cell phone.
He had been named in the lawsuit seeking to throw out all 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County, because, the suit alleged,
the absentee-ballot applications had been improperly tampered with. By Leach.

On Saturday, November 25, while the Gore legal team considers disenfranchising 15,000 Seminole County voters—not one of whom
is alleged to have done anything wrong—their political arm is holding a town meeting at the Palm Beach Airport Hilton for
“disenfranchised” Palm Beach voters.

After Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic delegate from Washington, D.C., compares the disenfranchisement of Palm Beachers
to that of Washingtonians who pay taxes but have no representation in the House and Senate, one after another Palm Beach voter
grabs the mike to tell her a tale of woe.

Democratic operatives acknowledge that there’s no hope for a revote (though Berger still wants to include the butterfly ballot
case in the contest trial), but they want to “put a human face” on what happened in Palm Beach County, they tell me. Only
a couple of TV cameras come by, though, so how many people see—much less care about—this human face remains up for debate.

A mile or so west on Southern Boulevard, at the Emergency Operations Center, LePore and her chums on the Palm Beach canvassing
board—Burton and Roberts—are tearing through the 8,000 or so disputed ballots they have left to rule on.

The county’s director of public affairs, Denise Cote, walks a few reporters through the task at hand. There were anywhere
from 14,000 to 15,000 disputed ballots. Over the course of the original recount, somewhere around 4,000 of these were counted.
The board got through 2,000 on Friday.

Boy, that Thanksgiving break they took doesn’t seem so smart right now. How on earth will they be able to get through 8,000
more by Sunday at 4:59
P.M
.? I ask.

“They’re committed to finishing the process,” Cote says. “They’re going to quicken the pace. They indicated to me that they
would work through the night if need be.” Anyway, she points out “it’s not going to be over” on Sunday, since
SCOTUS
will hear arguments over a Bush petition on Friday, there will be an appeal to the ruling against a revote in Palm Beach
County, “and a potpourri of lawsuits going on here.”

I ask how LePore’s, Roberts’s, and Burton’s moods are, slammed as they’ve been by the Republicans for even conducting the
count, and by the Democrats for being too discriminating in their chad-love.

“They seem to be quite jovial,” Cote says. “They work well together.”

Burton rolls up a piece of trash and throws it at the trash can, hoops-style. He misses.

“You almost hit it!” Roberts says.

What of the Republicans who are quoting LePore’s chad ruling from 1990, when she was deputy elections supervisor and only
accepted chad that had broken off from the ballot on at least two corners?

“The policy is more extensive than that,” Cote says. Rather, she says, it’s up to the discretion of the canvassing board.

“Undervote,” Burton says. Roberts squints and holds the ballot up to the light, then places it down on the table.

“Undervote,” he says again.

A couple different times, Burton becomes amused at the ballots themselves. He holds one up for the cameras: “It’s punched
out, and it says ‘This one,’” he says. At another point, on another ballot, the holes are unusually large. “This is somebody
who wanted their vote to count. It looks like they used a shotgun,” Burton says. “I mean, talk about removing a chad.”

Shortly before 10
P.M
. on Saturday night, there’s a dispute between Burton and the GOP observers over a Gore ballot. When absentee ballots are
covered with anything—lipstick, say, or maybe ketchup—they are often unable to be processed through the tabulation machine.
So election workers will take a pink ballot—its “mate”—and punch the corresponding holes in it, running it through the machine
and attaching it to the original ballot. But at some point a ballot and its mate have been separated, and now there’s a problem.
Members of the canvassing board want to count a pink Gore “mate” as a vote, expecting to find its original ballot in one of
the 186 precincts they have left to go through. Wallace and John Bolton object and want the board to track down the original
ballot before counting the mate as a vote.

While Burton and the Republican have at it, Roberts excuses herself and walks over to a few reporters. “We’ll finish by five,”
she insists. “Because we understand that’s how long Katherine Harris is keeping her office open.”

She shouts to the table that she wants to get back to counting.

Boston Boy Newman, meanwhile, is pleasantly surprised. Hauling Burton’s ass before LaBarga and presenting Friday’s panel of
experts seem to have had an effect on the standard he’s applying. Before the panel’s presentation on Friday morning, by Newman’s
calculations Gore was down about 10 votes, with 40 percent of the undervotes counted. But now they’re picking up some. It’s
still not the right standard, he thinks, but it’s better.

“Five,” LePore says, meaning a Gore vote.

“Five,” says Burton.

“Five,” says LePore.

“Five,” says Burton. They’re tearing through the ballots now, a GOP observer sitting between the two of them watching every
ballot.

“Five,” LePore says.

“Over, five and six,” Burton says, meaning a vote for both Gore and Buchanan, which won’t count.