(2 of 2)
After 2 a.m. the returns from two heavily Democratic areas, Miami's Dade County and Broward, where Fort Lauderdale is located, had cut Bush's lead for a while to as few as 200 votes. That was when Florida Democratic leaders started working their phones furiously, calling state attorney general Bob Butterworth, Gore's Florida campaign chairman. Butterworth himself was on the phone with senior Gore advisers in Nashville, telling them that the vice president should not concede. "You couldn't help feeling that something was being stolen from us," says a state Democratic chief.
At 4 a.m., right after Gore phoned Bush to retract his concession, Volusia County judge Michael McDermott ordered the building that houses the election supervisors, as well as the Dumpsters outside, sealed. At one point during election night, hundreds of votes for Gore had disappeared from the computer count, though they reappeared later. There is a history of election disputes in Volusia, among them the 1996 reelection of sheriff Bob Vogel, when a controversial count of absentee ballots put Vogel ahead of an opponent he had trailed on election night. That led two years later to a Florida Supreme Court decision that said elections in that state could be invalidated merely for reasons of Election Day error, even in the absence of outright fraud, so long as there was doubt that the outcome reflected "the will of the voters." But it did not specify when the remedy should involve ordering a new election, something Democrats have talked about for Palm Beach. And Florida courts have almost never gone to that length.
As the closeness of the vote became apparent, Democratic officials were also concerned about the absentee vote, which they knew could be decisive in an election as close as this one, but which had also been at issue in some famously disputed Florida elections of recent years. In the Miami Beach mayoral race three years ago, incumbent Joe Carollo, a Republican, won 51 percent of the votes cast at polling places. His challenger, ex-mayor Xavier Suarez, who ran as an independent, won 61 percent of the absentees, forcing the contest into a runoff that Suarez won with a large number of absentee ballots. Carollo filed suit, claiming that Suarez forged signatures on absentee ballots. In March 1998, Judge Thomas S. Wilson Jr. found massive fraud and ordered a new election. When Carollo appealed, arguing he should simply be declared the winner without a new election, the higher court agreed.
On Wednesday morning resentment over the Palm Beach screwup was high. The state Democratic party set up a toll-free number to allow people to call in reports of voting irregularities. If the election was turning into a mystery, then all of Florida would be vacuumed for clues. Questions mounted: When poll workers turned away people with the explanation that there were not enough ballots, when they illegally asked seniors for a Social Security number, was it an innocent mistake or deliberate obstruction? Meanwhile, a statewide recount of the Florida vote was already assured, triggered by a law that requires one for any election in which the winning margin is under one-half of 1 percent of the vote.
It was also on Wednesday that Jesse Jackson flew to Miami from Gore's campaign headquarters in Nashville, Tenn. Jackson was quick to insist that the issue was "not about black and white, it's about wrong and right," but his presence helped point up another angle to the Democratic challenge: complaints of what some black voters believed were subtle forms of racial intimidation, such as the police roadblock that was set up on voting day about a mile from a minority-neighborhood polling place in rural Wakulla County.
On Thursday more than 300 African-American students from nearby Florida A&M University came to the capitol in Tallahassee and staged a sit-in, demanding to see Jeb Bush and state attorney general Butterworth. But by this time frustrated Republicans were getting snippy too. That afternoon scores of counter-protesters arrived at the same site wearing Bush-Cheney T-shirts, shouting down pro-Gore demonstrators on the capitol plaza and waving signs that read "My grandmother can vote correctly... why can't yours?"
If she couldn't, it might have been because of the cardboard ballots used in the disputed counties. The machines that tabulate the punch cards often invalidate ballots in which voters have not cleanly broken through the perforated hole. A bit of cardboard chaff clinging to the puncture, officially known as a "hanging chad," is enough to confuse the counting machine, which helps explain how thousands of ballots can register a vote for some offices but not others. Of the more than 600,000 votes cast in Broward County, the machines found no vote for president on 6,686 ballots in a place that gave Gore 68 percent of the vote. In counties in which ballots were scanned by other means, the percentage was typically a fraction of 1 percent. In Pinellas County, when election officials removed the chaff from ballots before they were submitted for recount by the machines, Gore picked up an additional 417 votes.
When Bill Daley, the Gore campaign chairman, went before the cameras on Thursday to emphasize that the Gore campaign was ready to challenge the Florida outcome, lawsuits challenging the ballot were sprouting all around Palm Beach County. Many were spearheaded by citizens with Democratic party connections, though none of them yet had the official involvement of the state or national party. Jim Green, an ACLU lawyer in Palm Beach, was collecting statements from anyone who called his office. "All five lines here were lit up nonstop," he says. With union activists rounding up Florida notaries to take affidavits from the callers, Green figured that he would have 250 plaintiffs for the ballot-challenge suit he planned to file this week.
On Thursday night, Palm Beach County circuit-court judge Kathleen Kroll issued an injunction that barred the county from certifying the recount results until a hearing on Nov. 14. In this initial phase, Florida law gives lower-court judges considerable power to decide if a vote is valid and, if not, to rule on remedies. The initial thing to determine is whether the confusing Palm Beach ballot was illegal in the first place. Democrats contend that it violates a provision of state election law that requires each candidate's name to appear to the left of the corresponding punch hole. Republicans say the Democrats are reading the wrong section of Florida law. Though the Palm Beach ballots are cardboard, the cards are read by machines, and the law, they say, allows the names of candidates on "mechanical" ballots to be placed on either side of the hole.
Republicans also complained that samples of the ballot, which had been used before in Palm Beach without incident, had been published in the local paper and mailed to voters before the election. But Lillian Gaines, 67, a retired schoolteacher in West Palm Beach who is a plaintiff in one of the ballot lawsuits, says the sample did not show that the punch holes would not be aligned with the names. "This is what made it so confusing for people when they finally went into the booth," says her attorney, Harold Weiss.
The judges can also choose from any number of methods to determine whether the votes affected were sufficient to change the statewide outcome, since the central issue is which candidate will be awarded Florida's electoral votes. One of those methods is a statistical analysis of the kind that has shown that Buchanan's total of 3,407 votes in heavily Democratic Palm Beach was far higher than his tally elsewhere in the state. If a court decides that the election is invalid, it would still be necessary to rule on whether a new vote is the only remedy. Florida courts, like courts in most other states, have been reluctant to order new elections even in cases of outright fraud. But in a circumstance as novel and highly charged as this one, the past may not be any guide.
No guide at all. Jesse Jackson says the conclusion to this year's campaign is like a football game tied in the fourth quarter. "Overtime ain't agony," he said. "If you go to sudden death, that's wow-wee! That's shakalakalaka." By the end of this week, the Florida votes may all be counted and recounted, but the court rulings may still be pending, and the election of the president may still depend on how the dust settles in the Sunshine State. Shakalakalaka would be the word for it.
- Reported by Tim Padgett and Kathie Klarreich/Palm Beach, Cathy Booth Thomas and Timothy Roche/Tallahassee, Brad Liston/Volusia, Jeanne Dequine and Mary Sutter/Miami and Viveca Novak/Washington