Amid the contentious Florida vote recounts that will decide the presidency, Vice President Al Gore strode confidently out of the White House a few days ago and told reporters that “there’s something special about our process that depends totally on the American people having a chance to express their will without any intervening interference.”
Cut to a dingy, overheated, other-side-of-the-tracks warehouse in the shadow of downtown Ft. Lauderdale. While Gore was extolling the virtues of non-interference, his lawyers were interfering in a most deliberate way, looking over the shoulders of vote counters, arguing about the validity of ballot cards, making tense calls on cell phones to other lawyers in Tallahassee and Washington.
The Republicans did the same. A team of GOP lawyers from Washington marched into the warehouse in Broward County, commandeered a dark back room from which to monitor events and made their own terse cellular dispatches to minders in Tallahassee, Washington and Austin, Texas.
The scene in the warehouse has been replicated a dozen times over in recent days along South Florida’s coast, and in Tallahassee, the epicenter of the political and legal brawl over the U.S. presidency.
Since the Nov. 7 election, and complaints about a confusing ballot form in Palm Beach County, throngs of lawyers from Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin and Nashville, as well as local Florida lawyers, have descended on Florida elections offices.
“It’s amazing that it is working so well,” said Ben Kuehne, one of the lead Gore lawyers. “We have had a lot of lawyers just calling to offer their services.”
The lawyers are no doubt working hard, but Florida’s voters and county officials say the blue suits are just gumming up the works, and, in the process, taking over the state’s election process from the people Floridians have hired and elected to make it run.
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Just ask Andre Fladell. He was the first Palm Beach County resident to file a lawsuit over what he says was the county’s confusing presidential ballot, the issue that started the tortured battle over Florida’s votes in the first place.
“My suit is a local issue, a small local issue,” said Fladell, a shorts- and sandals-wearing chiropractor and political gadfly who goes to the beach each day at 10 a.m., no matter what.
“It’s the right to vote, the responsibility of government to either help or hinder. But these people are so busy running up numbers and fixing the numbers and acting like everyone who didn’t vote right is ignorant or stupid. They just all need to go home.”
The first word of voter problems in Florida came in the late-morning hours of Nov. 7, Election Day. People in Palm Beach County didn’t understand their ballots and might have voted for the wrong person. In particular, many Gore supporters might have voted for Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan.
As the vote tallying stretched into the morning of Nov. 8, word came to Florida Democratic Party officials that a team of three lawyers had been dispatched from Gore headquarters in Nashville. They were led by Ron Klain, a Washingtonian and Gore’s former chief of staff.
Once the team arrived, the lawyers looked at the complaints of people like Fladell and decided to have nothing to do with them.
“Pretty quickly we dismissed the idea of challenging the whole confusing ballot issue in Palm Beach County,” said Bob Poe, the Florida Democratic Party chairman who took part in the discussions. “They looked at the case law and saw that it probably wasn’t going to work as a challenge in court.”
In fact, Poe said, the national party lawyers have warned local Democrats to stay away from the more than a dozen lawsuits filed by Palm Beach County voters.
Instead, the legal team decided to challenge the machine voting process in Palm Beach and in two other South Florida counties, Broward and Miami-Dade, though there had been no reports of significant voter irregularities there. In essence, they used confusion over ballots in Palm Beach County as a springboard to raise questions about vote counts in other counties.
Their strategy was simple: Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward Counties were Gore strongholds, and all three had a good chunk of “undercount” votes–ballots on which voters had not registered votes for a candidate in every race. Together, the three counties represented more than 28,000 undercount ballots.
Each of the three counties also uses punch-out ballot cards, in which voters use a metal stylus to puncture a perforated square next to their candidate’s name. The Gore lawyers suspected that many of the undercounted ballot cards held votes for their candidate, votes that the machine might not have read because the punch mark wasn’t pushed all the way through. All three counties have large populations of senior citizens who might not be so dexterous when punching the ballot, they figured.
Under state law, the slender, 1,700-vote statewide edge George W. Bush held over Gore after the election mandated a machine recount of all 67 Florida counties. The Gore team, using another clause of the election law, cited the possibility of the machines not counting partially punched ballot cards as reason enough to conduct a sample hand count of 1 percent of the vote in each of the South Florida counties.
The Gore recount strategy was put in motion on Thursday, Nov. 9, two days after the election. In Palm Beach, state party chairman Poe filed a request for a manual recount of votes. Gore campaign lawyers drafted the document, Poe said.
In Broward County, Democratic Party Chairman Mitch Ceasar filed a similar request.
The party chairman in Miami-Dade, Joe Geller, did the same, noting in his letter, “The risk of some votes not being counted, especially in such a close race, creates an unacceptable situation in a democracy.”
The recount request law allows the parties filing the complaints to pick the precincts that make up that 1 percent. Geller’s letter even states that he would be the one picking the precincts. But in each case, lawyers working for the national campaign, not the local county party, arrived to select the precincts that would be hand counted, according to party officials.
“I don’t know who really picked the precincts,” Ceasar said. “I wasn’t really involved in that. I only filed the complaint.”
The Gore campaign’s ultimate goal was to win countywide recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, where they stood the best chance of picking up the most votes. Sample recounts in other counties were not requested, though Duval County, which Bush won, had the highest percentage of ballot cards tossed out because of voter mistakes.
Kuehne, one of Gore’s Florida lawyers, said that the party’s choice of recount counties was not weighted by candidate.
“It wasn’t cherry-picking,” Kuehne said. “You show this to anyone and say `What do you think about the 2000 election vote counting and all of these undercounted votes?’ and they would find it a problem. These were the places with the highest undercounts.”
As the request for recounts were made, a slew of lawyers from both parties were arriving in Tallahassee and South Florida to engage in the coming legal skirmishes. Two former secretaries of state, Warren Christopher and James Baker III, set up office in the Florida capital as the legal surrogates for Gore and Bush, respectively. Christopher, William Daley, Gore’s campaign chairman, and Miami lawyer Kendall Coffey appeared together before reporters to criticize the voting irregularities and suggest that legal steps were under way.
By election week’s end, Klain was assembling an ad hoc Florida law firm. The partners in this new firm, he said, came from “all over,” including Nashville, Washington and Boston.
Also with Klain in Tallahassee is Michael J. Whouley, Gore’s chief strategist at the Democratic National Committee.
Bush’s team appears to be using fewer legal resources. Bush has generally remained secluded at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, 100 miles from the state capital, Austin. Like Gore’s effort, Bush’s campaign headquarters has been transformed into recount central. His top aides remain at work there, but the brunt of Bush’s legal effort rests with Baker in Tallahassee.
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Baker is essentially running a legal defense of the vote count as it stands, with GOP lawyers rushing to stop outbreaks of recounts. Unlike the Democrats, the GOP also seems to have dispatched fewer out-of-state litigators, instead enlisting local GOP lawyers to work the local elections offices, county canvassing boards and courts.
When a key courtroom hearing was held in West Palm Beach on Tuesday over whether the county could go ahead with a manual recount of all 461,988 votes cast in the general election, Barry Richard–the Bush team’s equivalent of Ron Klain–argued the motion on the telephone from Tallahassee.
In Broward County, Bush campaign lawyers have popped in and out of proceedings, but many of the decisions and arguments have been made by Ed Pozzuoli, the Broward County Republican chairman who is also a lawyer, and state Sen. Jim Scott.