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Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Three

The strange story of Florida's 2000 election

By all outward appearances, Manuel Yip of Miami was a dedicated public citizen, unfailingly casting his ballot. Yip voted in local elections in 1994 and again in the general election. A year later, he dutifully voted in a referendum to relocate Parrot Jungle, a Miami tourist attraction starring Dutchess, the bicycle-riding cockatoo. In November 1997, he voted in the city’s mayoral election.

Trouble is, Yip died in 1993. Yip’s from-beyond-the-grave votes came courtesy of Alberto Russi, a Miami “ballot broker” who supported former Republican Mayor Xavier Suarez in his bid to resume office and signed Yip’s name to absentee ballots. And, apparently, plenty of other people’s names, too. When police arrested the 92-year-old Russi in November 1997, they found a veritable get-out-the-vote machine in his Little Havana home: more than 100 absentee ballots intended for the upcoming mayoral election, 21 voter registration cards, and 50 blank voter registration applications. He pleaded no contest to four counts of voter fraud and, because of his age, was sentenced only to two years of probation. Out of 44,000 votes cast in Miami’s hotly contested mayoral contest, 5,000 were absentee ballots.

In March 1998, after a two-week trial, a Florida judge found “a pattern of fraudulent, intentional, and criminal conduct,” and a week later an appeals court voided all the absentee ballots, reversing the results of the election. In response, the Florida Legislature passed an election-reform package. And that, in turn, helped create the tangle that was to become the state’s bizarre 2000 election, whose final count has never been definitively established, but nonetheless led to an unprecedented 5-4 Supreme Court decision that definitively made George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States.

As Election Day 2008 looms on the horizon, people are still debating whether the Florida election was stolen. In the 36 days between the day the voters voted and the day the Supreme Court voted, the Republican and Democratic parties ran up legal bills that totaled in the millions and added a new set of meanings to the term “buying of the president.” The nation saw how crude voting machinery can be and learned about “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” produced by punch-card machines. Accusations flew, demonstrators brought a ballot recount to a halt, and people’s faith in the integrity of our elections was shaken. It was shaken again in the 2004 election, this time in Ohio, and it’s still shaking today.

Among other things, the Florida election reforms required the state’s Division of Elections to purge its voter files of dead persons, duplicate registrants, persons declared mentally incompetent, and convicted felons whose civil rights had not been restored. The work was to be done by an outside contractor. Database Technologies Inc. of Boca Raton (now part of ChoicePoint Inc.) was hired for $4 million.

The company produced a list of more than 42,000 “probable” and “possible” felons. But it soon was discovered that the so-called purge lists also contained the names of innocent people, including some judges, who happened to share names with actual felons, and people whose names were used as aliases by felons. Revised lists issued in June 2000 no longer named 8,000 people who had committed misdemeanors — in Texas — but most of the other inaccuracies remained.

Officials at Database Technologies warned the state from the outset that the lists were flawed. It was left to county election supervisors to implement the purges; 20 counties ignored the lists altogether. “There were names on the list that I knew were not felons,” the Union County elections supervisor told The Palm Beach Post. “One was a youth director in our church.” Ultimately less than half of the voters on the list were actually barred from voting.

Republicans controlled top state offices and the purge effort was regarded by some as a GOP effort to hold down the African-American vote, which was expected not only to be heavily Democratic, but also higher than usual in 2000. Governor Jeb Bush — the GOP presidential candidate’s brother — had eliminated affirmative action in state contracts and university admissions, angering many in the minority community. (In the 2000 election, 9 out of 10 Florida blacks voted Democrat, according to exit polls.)

Although blacks made up 13 percent of Florida’s population, they accounted for more than 40 percent of the names on the purge lists. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission would later determine that “almost one out of every seven people on this list were there in error and risked being disenfranchised.” And that, the commission added, had “a disproportionate impact on African-Americans.”

The faulty purge lists were just one sign of an election process in disarray. Just how seriously flawed it was would soon become evident to the world. The public face of the wheels-flying-off electoral system in Florida was Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a former state senator from a wealthy and politically powerful family. When she wasn’t running the state’s elections, she served as co-chair of George Bush’s election campaign in the Sunshine State. Harris paid little attention to the daily operations of the elections division, and her staff was unseasoned. “It was like asking someone to play in the Super Bowl when they had never played football before,” a county elections supervisor later complained to a Washington Post reporter.

Florida’s 67 counties used four different voting systems, including 1960s-era punch-card machines. On Election Day, local election officials often were left to their own devices when problems arose. One of the most familiar sounds at polling places was a busy signal at county election headquarters.

Election Day 2000 was about to become Election Month and then some. The standoff began when the campaigns of Bush and Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, realized at about midnight that Florida’s 25 electoral votes would give either Bush or Gore the 270 needed to become president.

NBC projected Gore as the winner in Florida at 7:49:40 p.m. Eastern Time. CBS followed 31 seconds later, and ABC joined in at 7:52 p.m. But the networks had a change of heart as the evening wore on and pulled back their declarations. At 2:16 the next morning, Fox News declared Bush the winner in Florida; within four minutes the other networks followed suit. “George Bush, governor of Texas, will become the 43rd president of the United States. At 18 minutes past 2 o’clock Eastern Time, CNN declares that George Walker Bush has won Florida’s 25 electoral votes,” announced CNN anchor Bernard Shaw.  Gore, who had telephoned Bush to offer his congratulations, called back an hour later to say “never mind.” By 4:15 a.m., the networks again had pulled back their projections, but Bush continued to hold a narrow lead in Florida.

The Democrats pinned their hopes on a recount. Under Florida law, a mandatory recount is required if the margin is less than a half-percent. With nearly 6 million votes cast, a recount would have been launched if 30,000 votes separated the two candidates. At dawn November 8, Bush held a 1,784-vote lead. It was time to summon the lawyers.

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.

On 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.”