Down & Dirty (86 page)

With everything on hold, in Austin and Washington, D.C., it seems like the time to let the alpha males out, to show that they’re
still around, to convey whatever messages they feel are in their self-interest. For Lieberman and Cheney, that message is
that there is support for their causes on Capitol Hill. For Bush, that message is one of peace and understanding and a display
of sympathy of questionable sincerity, if excellent execution, for Al Gore. For Gore, that message is desperation.

“Good morning,” Bush says.“Had a good briefing this morning. I appreciate the administration’s willingness to send a member
of the intelligence community over to give me a security briefing.” Does he think Gore should concede? “Well, that’s a decision
the vice president has to make,” Bush says. “It’s a difficult decision, of course. And I can understand what he may be going
through. It’s been a very interesting period of time for both of us. It’s been one month from today that the people actually
showed up and started to vote, and here we stand—and here I stand, still, you know, without a clear verdict.”

Standing with House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, and Oklahoma representative J. C. Watts, Cheney has a different take
on that. “Obviously,” he says, “I think those two court decisions”—Sauls and SCOTUS—“were affirmations of the fact that, with
respect to the vote in Florida, the votes have been counted and recounted and now certified. And Governor
Bush and I feel that it validated the decisions that had been made previously, and indicate, once again, that we did prevail
in the election in Florida.” There’s an election possibly being stolen—by one side or the other or possibly both—and this
is a rare chance to put a major player on the spot. But again the press doesn’t bother. Instead, Cheney’s asked whether he
pronounces his name CHAY-nee or CHEE-nee.“It really doesn’t matter,” he says.

A few yards away is Lieberman. “Dick Gephardt made a point the other day that I think is so important to keep coming back
to,” he says, “that next year, someone—some university or a group of students—will under a Freedom of Information action in
Florida go in and gather these ballots and count them. And it will not be good for our country, it will not be good for whoever
is president then, if the result of that count would justify the seating in office of someone other than the one who was there.”

At NavObs, Gore comes out to the reporters. “I don’t really have an opening statement,” he says. “If you want to ask any questions,
feel free.”

Gore’s asked how efforts to toss the 25,000 absentee ballots in Seminole and Martin County jibe with his call to “count every
vote.”

Gore immediately starts babbling untruths about the cases. He says that in Seminole “there were more than enough votes to
make the difference that were apparently thrown into—” He catches himself. “The
applications
for ballots were thrown into the trash can by the supervisor of elections there, apparently. Even though they were missing
the same number that the Republican Party workers were allowed to come in and fix the other applications with.”

He backs off a bit. “So I don’t want to speculate on what remedy might be—I’m not a party to that case or the Martin County
case”—But he can’t help himself. “More than enough votes were potentially taken away from Democrats, because they were not
given the same access that Republicans were,” he says.“Remember, according to what’s come out in that case—”

He catches himself. “Again, I’m not a party to it, but I’ve read about it,” he says.

“Apparently the Democratic Party chair was denied the opportunity to even look at the list of applications,” Gore says. “Whereas
the Republican Party workers were allowed to roam around unsupervised, inside the office and bring their computers in, and
fix all of the valid applications for one side, even as the Democrats were denied an opportunity to come in, denied a chance
to even look at the applications, and those applications were thrown out. Now, that doesn’t seem fair to me.”

No, it doesn’t seem fair. Of course, it also doesn’t seem
true.

An e-mail is soon sent within the DNC.

Subject: gore clean up

We need to get his seminole remarks, and the “democratic ballot applications that lacked the id number were thrown in the
trash,” stuff checked and put in to talking points for everyone.

He made a little news and we need to document what he said and get it out to everyone……

asap—i have four reporters really pushing me on this.

For all the various untruths, pufferies, evasions, exaggerations, and downright lies that Gore has said in his life—and been
slammed repeatedly for, sometimes fairly, sometimes not so, during this election—his crazy riff on Seminole seems to go generally
uncriticized in the media. It may be that reporters are busy, it may be that no one’s really sure of what the facts are in
the Seminole case. And it may be pity.

In fact, a lot of reporters are imbued with odd feelings about Gore these days. Especially since Gore—who during his campaign
once went sixty-two days without holding a press conference—is now reaching out to so many of them. He regularly phones up
network TV anchors and producers, explaining where he’s coming from, pitching them stories. At one point he strikes at least
one of these network superstars as having gone a bit off the deep end.

One piece Gore pitches comes from an obscure news story written in 1989 about the Mack-MacKay Senate race, which has a speculative
X-Files-
esque conspiracy riff on the idea that Votomatic software could be programmed to not count, say, every tenth vote. There was
and is no evidence to this theory, other than the fact that
it could have happened!
And in the face of the Gore legal team’s argument that there are design flaws inherent in punch-card ballots, it doesn’t
even make much sense. But Gore becomes fascinated—some might say unhealthily so—by the story, which one of his old journalist
buddies has found and brought to his attention. Gore calls a buddy at ABC, becomes convinced that
20/20
is going to investigate the matter. Some of his advisers suggest that such a story is just not going to happen so late in
the game, but Gore is convinced that something’s there and that ABC will investigate.

On Web site Voter.com, legendary Watergate newsman Carl Bernstein gets 1988 Florida senate candidate Buddy MacKay to riff,
Parallax View
–
like, as to what might happen if some bad guy had the source codes. “What could have happened in 1988,” MacKay tells Bernstein,
“and we couldn’t get to it at the time, was that the machines could have been programmed so that in my big precincts, every
tenth vote got counted wrong.”

But outside of Bernstein’s highly theoretical story, media investigations into the rather suspect charges don’t go very far.
ABC News’s Cokie Roberts calls ABC News Florida legal consultant Steve Uhlfelder—who was one of MacKay’s co-counsels in that
1988 race—to see if there’s any truth to the matter. Uhlfelder tells her that it’s crazy talk; no one ever talked about a
conspiratorial nefarious computer programmer back then. Punch-card ballot machines are anachronistic junk, that’s all. The
primary reason for the vast number of undervotes was that the Mack-MacKay race was at the bottom of the first page of many
counties’ ballots, under the presidential contest, so people didn’t notice it. They had suspected that the software might
not be working right, but testing the software reassured them that it was functioning properly, at least in the counties where
they tested it. But it was never about a purposefully inserted computer glitch, this “software discrimination” thing. Uhlfelder’s
surprised that MacKay’s saying otherwise.

Some reporters who hear about this conspiracy theory begin to wonder about Gore. Is he completely losing it?

Martin and Lewis commence at 7
A.M.
Wednesday. Ninety minutes later they break, and the Bush lawyers run down a flight to make the same arguments before Judge
Clark. Half an hour after Clark finishes up, Lewis will resume and preside all through the night, until the Martin County
case is done. Two hard facts collide in both these cases: one, clearly both Goard and Robbins were extending preferential
treatment to the GOP, and engaging in some shady dealings as it pertained to Florida law, specifically the 1998 absentee-ballot
application statute. The second: there’s nothing really to be done about it since no one is alleging that anyone other than
actual voters cast their ballots.

Clark gets to this right off the bat. There are two issues, she says. “The first is whether the addition… or completion of
voter registration ID numbers is sufficient to invalidate the absentee ballots. And then the second issue I see is whether
or not the Democratic Party and Republican Party were treated differently… to the extent that the validity or integrity of
the election process was compromised.”

Richman says that the first question is rooted in the matter of Goard’s “intentional wrongdoing.” Goard, he points out, “testified
under oath that
she did not know the name of the Republican operative, when the testimony will clearly show that she did.” To the Democratic
team, that’s sure evidence she was trying to cover something up.

But in his opening argument, Bristow points out that state Democratic chair, Bob Poe, knew what Leach was doing while it was
going on,
before
Election Day.“He knew that he could go into that office, and he did not. He knew that if there was any kind of violation
of law, he could have gone ahead, and he could have filed suit, and he could have done something about it beforehand.”

Helping Bristow as an intervening attorney representing absentee voters in both the Seminole and Martin County cases is—despite
his rather soft, inclusive rhetoric in this case—one of the more active members of Florida’s Christian Right. Matthew Staver,
president and general counsel of the Christian activist Liberty Counsel, hosts a conservative radio talk show and represents
all sorts of conservative causes in courts, defending prayer in Duval County public schools, filing a brief against gay and
lesbian civil unions in Vermont, and representing the Rev. Ed Martin, an anti–abortion rights protester accused of harassing
women entering the Ocala Women’s Center. But Staver is careful not to mention any of this now, and not a single member of
the media realizes who he really is.

Staver says that many of his clients voted absentee “because they are disabled…. We should not let this hypertechnicality
disenfranchise these voters.” Staver trots out Helga Powell, born in Nuremberg and raised as a member of the Hitler Youth.
The Bush-backing former Nazi doesn’t want to be disenfranchised, knowing “firsthand the price that citizens of a country pay
when they have no right to vote for representatives and have no voice in the governance of their country.” When it was the
concentration camp survivors in Palm Beach who were confused, the Republicans sure didn’t seem as sympathetic as they do now
toward this poor alumna of the Hitler youth.

The fun starts when the Democrats and Republicans start stealing one another’s rhetoric from the Sauls case. Seminole County’s
attorney, Terry Young, cribs from Gore when he says that a ballot “is not just a piece of paper. It is a voice. It’s a right
to be heard, it’s a right to participate. And a voice at all costs should not be silenced.” The Democrats, conversely, are
suddenly strict adherents to the letter of the law. Richman calls Steven Hall to the stand. Hall, a painter and construction
worker who served as the campaign manager for a Democratic candidate for state representative, met with Goard on August 18,
and in a “tense” and unwelcoming meeting,
Goard told him that if absentee-ballot request forms didn’t have all the necessary information, “they would be discarded.”
Richman reads the deposition of a Republican voter and Korean War veteran, Ronald Livingston, who in September 1998 wanted
an absentee ballot and was given no help by Goard, no help at all. He was told he’d need to put his request in writing, with
his voter ID number, but Goard’s office wouldn’t tell him what his number was. Two years later, when Livingston found out
that she had bent over backward to help the state GOP, he called her to complain.“Hey, if you don’t like it, file a protest,”
she replied. Richman establishes fairly conclusively that Goard’s story kept changing—first she said Leach had been in her
office for one or two days, then ten or eleven, then Leach said it was closer to fifteen, and one of Goard’s subordinates
said it might have been three full weeks. Richman also hammers home the question of whether or not Goard was open about knowing
Leach, or either of the field operatives who assisted him, or the GOP official who first arranged their little expedition.
Even Leach says in his deposition that “clearly” she knew them.

Richman even establishes some sound arguments pertaining to the law. As in the Carollo-Suarez mayor’s race, absentee ballots
are in Florida case law considered a privilege, not a right, and they have been tossed before. And clearly the elections office
was compromised in some way; these offices are not meant to be temporary work spaces for partisan operatives. Did Leach tamper
with any other absentee ballots? There’s no proof that he did. But he sure could have, and in that, the process was arguably
sullied.