Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Three (cont.)
The Gore campaign called upon Warren Christopher, former U.S. secretary of state and a prominent lawyer, to head its legal team. The Bush campaign summoned longtime Bush family adviser James A. Baker III, who also had done a turn as secretary of state in the administration of Bush’s father. Each side enlisted cadres of young attorneys and political advisers.
The Bush team, writes Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer and author of Too Close To Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, was “an armada of legal firepower.” Joining Baker were former Solicitor General Ted Olson and Washington rainmakers Ben Ginsberg and George Terwilliger. Powerhouse Washington law firms were at the Republicans’ disposal. Attorneys from Greenberg Traurig, Florida’s second-largest firm, also signed on.
By Friday, the mandatory “machine recount” had cut Bush’s lead to 327 votes. A day earlier, the Gore campaign had requested hand recounts of votes in four heavily Democratic counties where voting irregularities had been reported — Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia. The Bush camp argued that such a “selective” recount would violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, because it would elevate the votes of some counties over others. The Republicans filed suit in federal court to block it. Harris, the Florida secretary of state, announced she would enforce a November 14 deadline for receiving all state election results except overseas absentee ballots. Palm Beach County suspended counting and Miami Dade officials, concerned that they would be unable to meet the deadline, decided to count just 1 percent of the votes in certain precincts.
For the next two weeks, both sides slugged it out in various courts and election offices, trying to come up with a final tally before the Electoral College was set to meet to certify the next president on December 18. The manual recount proceeded in fits and starts. Ultimately, on December 12, the Supreme Court rejected further manual recounts, agreeing with the argument put forth by the Republicans that it violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee. Observers noted that the five most conservative justices outvoted the four more liberal members.
At 9 p.m. on December 13, in a nationally televised address, Gore conceded. By the time it was all over, the Bush campaign had poured $13.8 million into the recount fight, about four times what the Gore campaign spent.
Most of the millions went to lawyers and their staff, but not all. Some went to a group of young GOP congressional staffers who hastily headed to Florida to serve as foot soldiers. They were part of a group of as many as 750 Republican activists from around the country who arrived to oppose the recount. As the process wore on, they occasionally had to improvise.
Then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was George W. Bush’s campaign co-chairOn November 22, four days before the deadline the Florida Supreme Court had set for certifying the vote counts, election officials gathered on the 18th floor of the Miami-Dade government building to resume the hand count. A total of 10,750 ballots awaited, and the outcome could cement George Bush’s slim lead in the state — or give the lead to Al Gore. The clock was ticking.
A large crowd of spectators gathered outside the glass-walled conference room, and as the day wore on, the mood grew increasingly tense. When the officials decided to relocate to a smaller office one floor up, the crowd set up such a ruckus that the canvassers abruptly halted the vote count. It was a major blow to the Gore campaign.
Although the crowd was initially described as locals, “There were no guayaberas. This crowd looked tweedy,” one observer told Salon.com. Within days, they had been identified as Republican operatives and their protest was dubbed the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” Among the leaders were aides to Republican Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. (Four years later, The Washington Post’s Al Kamen and others provided a handy guide to the protesters, titled, “Where are they now?” One was serving as White House political director; another became deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and several had joined powerful Washington lobbying groups. Another year later, one of the group replaced Karl Rove as Bush’s policy director.)
Gore’s campaign avoided high-profile shenanigans, for the most part. The GOP complained loudly enough about the recount itself and Gore’s legal tactics. The state Supreme Court, originally charged with the post-election decision-making, was composed entirely of Democratic-appointed justices, and, according to Republican operatives, the local election boards making key decisions were Democratic puppets. One Gore legal tactic, an attempt to throw out overseas absentee ballots without proper postage — largely military votes — drew accusations of “unpatriotic” behavior. Eventually, Democrats conceded and requested that all ballots be counted in conjunction with what they called their “inclusion” not “exclusion” approach to the recount.
Was the 2000 presidential election stolen? Depends on who is speaking.
Even after eight major news organizations paid the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center to conduct a study of every rejected ballot in Florida’s 67 counties, the vote tally remained unclear. The study included both “undervotes” — ballots that recorded no votes for president — and “overvotes” — ballots that recorded votes for more than one presidential candidate. Gore’s legal team never asked for a recount of overvotes, but the study found that a state-wide recount that included those ballots would have handed the election to Gore; thousands of voters had marked off more than one name on the ballot, but circled Gore’s name, or wrote it out by hand, indicating their preference with signs a machine could not interpret. The real recount, however, the one stopped by the Supreme Court, did not include overvotes and, according to the study, would have delivered the election to Bush.
“Elections are messy businesses involving a lot of people and a lot of activities,” said Barry Richard, a leading Florida lawyer for Bush, in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. “If the courts threw out every election because of an error or because somebody did something that was inappropriate or fraudulent in some area, it would be very difficult to ever have closure on an election. You have to overcome a higher bar than simply showing that somebody did something. You have to show that there is a reasonable chance it’s affected the election.”
Lawyer-author Jeffrey Toobin concludes his book with his own assessment: “If the simple preference of the voters behind the curtains was the rule — as it is supposed to be in a democracy — then Gore probably won the state by several thousand votes.” Journalist Andrew Gumbel says the Republicans “did not steal the election so much as grab hold of it while they had the chance and refuse to let go.” He believes Gore actually won. So does Cornell University government professor Walter R. Mebane, who wrote: “The story of Florida in 2000 is mostly not one of fraud, but rather one of defective election administration.”
Read the series:
Part One: A difficult problem to quantify
Part Two: “Swilling the Planters with Bumbo”
Part Three: The strange story of Florida’s 2000 election
Part Four: A second messy election: Ohio 2004
Part Five: What impedes election reform efforts
Listen to or download the podcast
Sarah Laskow contributed reporting to this story.
Susan Q. Stranahan is a freelance journalist. For 28 years, she was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered environment, business, and the courts. Her stories were a major component of The Inquirer’s coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting. Stranahan is the author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Fortune, Mother Jones, and Time. She lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania.
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