October 23, 2024 • 55 mins
What happened in Palm Beach County when a bitterly-contested national election came to town–and who paid the price?
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode,
I want to let you know that you can binge
the entire season of Fiasco Bush v. Gore right now,
add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast show page,
(00:36):
or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode.
Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
The closest election in a generation, I.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Called it at seven fifty two pm. It was all
downhill after that moment.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Florida comes out of the Gore column.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Florida goes Bush, the presidency is Bush. That would be
something if the network's managed to blow it twice in
one night.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
In some ways, you can win or lose an election
based on what the TVs say.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Well, someone find out for me whether it's a a
tread of state as a Democrat or a Republican.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
Who would ever thought you'd be on a plane heading
to Florida to start a recount that could determine who
the president is.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
The two thousand election wasn't really Jackie Winchester's problem four
years earlier. It would have been back then she was
the Supervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Florida, a
job that put her in charge of making sure that
election day always ran as smoothly as possible.
Speaker 7 (01:37):
You have only one day to make it right, and
you're dependent on thousands of volunteers who have maybe three
days of training every few years, and you cannot control
what's going on out there and the precincts, and things
can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
After holding the post for twenty three years, Winchester had
retired in nineteen ninety six. In two thousand, she was
a volunteer with the Gore campaign, so she wasn't entirely
on the sidelines, but it was not her burden to bear.
When her daughter in law called an election day to
inform her that something had gone awry with the ballots
in Palm Beach, it.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
Was in all the radios, all that cha. They were
talking about it.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Here's how the presidential candidates are listed on Palm Beach
County's punch card ballot. Voters we talked to feel the
ballot's layout is confusing, and.
Speaker 7 (02:22):
She said, you know, I'm not sure I've voted correctly.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
After hearing that word spread across Palm Beach that if
you weren't paying close attention, it was easy to punch
through the wrong hole and vote for a candidate you
didn't mean to vote for.
Speaker 8 (02:34):
Here's the problem. In Palm Beach County, they use what's
called a punch hole ballot. To vote for the first name,
George Bush, a voter would punch the first hole. Al
Gore's name was listed right under Bush's, but voting for
Gore required punching the third hole down, not the second.
Speaker 9 (02:52):
Gore is the second person down.
Speaker 10 (02:54):
This is the second hole down. I made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
What made the crisis in Palm Beach so gut wrenching
was that lots of people seemed to have all made
the same mistake. These were people who had wanted to
vote for Al Gore, and instead they voted for the
right wing third party candidate, Pat Buchanan.
Speaker 11 (03:12):
I almost drove off the road when I heard that
I voted for Pat Buchanan.
Speaker 12 (03:16):
I am not the only one that was confused, and
many people probably voted for Buchanan meaning to vote for Gore,
and that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Pat Buchanan first rose to national prominence as a speechwriter
and senior adviser to Richard Nixon. He'd run for president
under the banner of the Reform Party, and his prospects
in Palm Beach County had not been great, in part
because there were a lot of Jewish people who lived
in Palm Beach, and Buchanan had a history of making
comments that were perceived as antisemitic. Most recently, Buchanan had
(03:45):
reinforced that perception by arguing in a book that Adolph
Hitler had never represented a real threat to American interests.
Speaker 8 (03:52):
Palm Beach County is heavily democratic, with large blocks of
black and Jewish voters, not exactly Pat Buchanan country, Yet
he polled three times as many votes here as any
other county in the state.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Buchanan got more than three thousand votes in Palm Beach County,
six times as many as he got in Miami Dade,
which was twice as big. Some voters had punched holes
for both Gore and Buchanan, meaning their ballots had been
automatically invalidated. Common sense suggested that most of these people
had voted for Buchanan unintentionally, then caught their mistake and
tried to correct it. Even Buchanan acknowledged that some of
(04:26):
his votes in Palm Beach had probably been meant for
the ticket that included Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate
for vice president nominated by a major party.
Speaker 13 (04:34):
If the two candidates they pushed were Buchanan and Gore,
almost certainly those are al Gore's votes and not mine.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
The ballot in Palm Beach quickly became known in the
media as the butterfly ballot because the candidate's names appeared
on two opposing pages like wings, and there was a
row of punch holes running down the middle. Most of
the voters who had issues with the butterfly ballot were elderly,
and there were a lot of elderly voters in Palm
Beach County. Here's Jackie Winchester.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Again, and most of the retirement communities, the big condos
that tend to vote early in the morning, and it
was in those. He thinks that all of these people
were saying that they were afraid they had voted for Buchanan,
and of course they did.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Actually, Winchester was eighty nine years old and living in
a retirement community herself. When I spoke to her on
election Day two thousand. She arrived at the Gore campaign's
Palm Beach office at around ten in the morning and
started taking calls from distressed voters.
Speaker 7 (05:32):
It was just really very sad because these are people
who had been voting all their allows. Voting was very
important to them, and they felt that they had lost
their vote and they wanted to know what they could
do about it, or said there wasn't anything they could
do about it.
Speaker 8 (05:48):
It could have happened anywhere.
Speaker 14 (05:49):
A rocket scientist could have happened.
Speaker 8 (05:51):
Meet Jim Pesh. Yes, he designs rockets.
Speaker 7 (05:55):
Let me get this straight.
Speaker 8 (05:56):
You're a rocket scientist, literally, and you had problems.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
As the gravity of the butterfly ballot debacle set in,
Winchester started to worry about the woman who had replaced
her as election supervisor in Palm Beach. Her name was
Teresa Lapour. She had started working at the election's office
as Winchester's assistant when she was still a teenager, and
she had been climbing her way up the ladder ever since.
As election supervisor, Lapour had commissioned the butterfly ballot design
(06:25):
and she had signed off on it. Others had seen
it too, both the Democrats and the Republicans in Florida
had approved the ballot design in advance, but when the
ballot became a national news story, it was Lapour who
was held responsible for it.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
The Supervisor of Elections, Teresa Lapour says, voters are across
the county have expressed their concerns about the presidential ballot.
Speaker 15 (06:45):
If voters need to remember that, they should punch the
whole next to the ear next to the number next
to the name of the candidate they want to vote for.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Lapour didn't conceive of the butterfly ballot thoughtlessly. It was
an attempt to solve a very specific problem. In nineteen
ninety eight, Florida had passed a law making it easier
for third party candidates to qualify for inclusion on the ballot.
In two thousand, election supervisors across the state had to
make for ten presidential candidates. They all dealt with it
in their own way, which underscorees how strangely decentralized a
(07:16):
national election really is. Every county in Florida had jurisdiction
over their own ballots. Teresa Lapour decided that ten candidates
was too many to fit on one page because the
type would be too small, so she spread them out
over to She.
Speaker 7 (07:31):
Had said that she did it that way because she
felt that she could make the print larger, that there
are a lot of older people in Palm Beach County
with vision problems, and that she rather than do it
the way the other coundies who are doing it where
the print would have been smaller, that she could make
the print larger this way.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
Lapour remained silent.
Speaker 16 (07:52):
In response to the anger, She says through her attorney,
she designed the ballot with the elderly folks in mind,
with the hopes they could see it better.
Speaker 17 (07:59):
And that's a heavy burden on the shoulders of Teresa Lapour.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The day after the election, Jackie Winchester visited her oldfe
in downtown Palm Beach to see how Lapoor was holding up.
It was a sympathy call from one season supervisor of
Elections to another.
Speaker 7 (08:18):
She was really being i would say, being dumped on,
and she was crying. She was very upset, and I've
told her you know that I was sorry she was
having to go through all that and she didn't mean
to cause any problems.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Did she have any advice for her?
Speaker 7 (08:37):
No?
Speaker 11 (08:37):
Why not?
Speaker 7 (08:39):
At that point there was nothing that could be done.
The election was over.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
In fact, Teresa Lapour had a whole lot of elections
still ahead of her. Lapour, who did not respond to
my interview requests, described the experience in the two thousand
and four documentary. I kind of likened the whole thing
to my perfect storm.
Speaker 18 (09:00):
All the planets were lined upright, and everything just kind
of collided over Palm Beach County.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
As lawyers for the two campaigns descended on Palm Beach
to litigate the butterfly ballot, Lapour would find her working
eighteen hour days, facing down protesters outside her office and
receiving so many death threats that she needed a security
detail to accompany her home at night. Later, Lapoor would
teller reporter for the Saint Petersburg Times, you want my blood,
here take it. I'm Leon Nafock from Prologue Projects and
(09:33):
Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bush v. Gore. Tonight the
debate over when a vote is a vote? Nineteen thousand
Americans were disenfranchised.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
I wanted to cook the books until they could figure
out how to win an election. They had lost it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Results in this one county could tell the tale episode
three ballot with butterfly wings. How the recount battle in
Florida started, and how both Republicans and Democrats became convinced
that the White House was being stolen by the other side.
Catherine Harris probably the closest thing to a household name
(10:12):
to emerge from the two thousand recount. As Florida's Secretary
of State, Harris was the ultimate authority over the state's
election results on election day, her office was responsible for
collecting vote totals from all sixty seven counties in Florida,
then declaring a winner as part of a formal certification process.
Speaker 6 (10:29):
It was kind of a ministerial job. You add up
sixty seven counties and you say who won the election.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
That's Harris. She was elected Florida Secretary of State in
nineteen ninety eight, so, unlike Jackie Winchester, the two thousand
election was very much her problem. If her job had
ever been ministerial, that flew out the window very quickly
on November eighth. Throughout the recount period, Harris was part referee,
part timekeeper, someone who advised county election officials on vote
(10:57):
counting procedure and enforced statewide deadlines set forth in Florida
election law. Harris's point of view on the butterfly ballot
issue was that it was kind of overblown.
Speaker 6 (11:07):
As see you where they were confused. I don't think
I would have made that mistake. It was not that
hard to vote for Gore. That was actually kind of simple.
But if somebody wanted to be confused, or I mean
not wanted to be confused, but they're getting nervous in
their voting, than perhaps they were.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
The two thousand election thrust Harris into an awkward role.
On paper, she was supposed to be a political and independent,
but she was also an elected official, and like the
vast majority of elected officials, she had a part as
an affiliation. Harris was a Republican. It wasn't a secret
she had run for Secretary of State as a Republican
and she had been aligned with the Republican Party since
(11:46):
the start of her political career. During the two thousand campaign,
Harris served as one of George W. Bush's co chairs
in Florida. She also stumped for Bush as part of
the Freezon for a Reason bus tour when she gave
out Florida oranges to Bush supporters in New Hampshire. Again,
there was nothing inherently sinister about this, but when Harris
started making one decision after another that seemed to benefit Bush,
(12:08):
Democrats had a hard time seeing her as a genuinely
neutral arbiter.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
The Gore campaign press secretary has called the Secretary of
State in Florida.
Speaker 15 (12:17):
A hack Gore advisor, accusing Florida's Republican secretary of State
and just try to ensure a Bush victory.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Harris adamantly rejects the suggestion that she was trying to
help Bush win, even though she obviously did want him
to win she campaigned for him. She maintains that a
Secretary of State, she made unbiased decisions without any particular
outcome in mind.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
In fact, the law was my only safe harbor. People
still come up to me and say thank you a weekly.
I'm in airports every week, so I'm surprised by that,
but I've never accepted that compliment. I just say, hey,
I didn't do anything special. I just followed our laws
and they were sufficient.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
One of the first laws Catherine Harris had to enforce
after election day was one you might remember from our
previous episode. It was the law acquiring a statewide machine
recount whenever the margin between two candidates was less than
half of one percent. Bush's lead before the machine recount
was one seven hundred and eighty four votes out of
almost six million cast, so three one hundredths of one
(13:18):
percent of the overall vote total.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
We did a machine recount within seventy two hours for
the entire state. It was remarkable. That was not an
easy task, but we did that in seventy two hours,
and at that time, and for the equipment that we had,
computerization to get it done in seventy two hours?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Or was the remarkable feat? After the break the results
of the machine recount, the new numbers came in on
the Friday morning after the election.
Speaker 18 (13:50):
An unofficial Tallly of all Florida counties gives George W.
Bush a minuscule three hundred and twenty seven vote lead
over Al Gore out of six million votes cast.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
The margin between Bush and Gore shrank to just three
hundred and twenty seven votes, so five to one thousandths
of one percent. Under normal circumstances, a fluctuation of fourteen
hundred votes in a state wide race wouldn't sound like much,
but Bush's lead had been cut by significantly more votes
than the new margin separating him from Gore. It suggested
(14:23):
that a third recount could produce a totally different result
and maybe even put Gore ahead. The magnitude of the
change in the vote total called into question the very
idea that an objectively accurate vote count was possible.
Speaker 12 (14:35):
Many in this nation are getting anxious what many called
the beginning of potentially a constitutional crisis in this nation.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Neither campaign had time for such philosophical angst. From the
moment they arrived in Florida. Bush's people were fighting to
protect their lead.
Speaker 13 (14:51):
They want a quick, almost mechanical recount. How George W.
Bush certified on the road to inauguration.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
While Gore's were trying to find enough votes to overcome it.
Speaker 13 (14:59):
The Gore campaign is trying to lengthen out the timeline,
gather the facts for any irregularities in the Florida ballot,
and then moved to a challenge.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
But what exactly was being challenged? What were the two
campaigns fighting over. The guy brought in to answer these
questions for the Gore campaign was Jack Young, a lawyer
specializing in recount law. On the morning of November eighth,
Young briefed Gore's top advisors in Nashville. Then he got
on the recount one plane to Florida.
Speaker 19 (15:27):
The question that was asked of May was, how does
a recount work? What do you need to do if
we are to go through a recount in Florida.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Young knew what he was talking about. He was the
co author of a short book called The Recount Primer.
Speaker 19 (15:44):
The Recount Primer who was, in essence, a printed set
of instructions as to how to deal with a recount,
starting with election night and then going through the process.
It's probably thirty pages at best.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
As Young explained to the Gore team, the big prize
on the table between their guy and the other guy
was a mountain of ballots cast across Florida that had
either come up as invalid or didn't record any vote
for president. These ballots could be divided into two categories,
undervotes and overvotes. You can think of undervotes as the
result of not voting enough, and overvotes as the result
(16:21):
of voting too much.
Speaker 19 (16:23):
An undervote is an instance where the machine didn't pick
up a vote, and overvotes what you're looking at is
people having voted for two candidates when the selection is
for only one.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
There were all kinds of reasons a machine might mistakenly
classify a valid ballot as an undervote or an overvote.
With punch card machines like the kind used in Palm Beach,
people didn't always punch through the hole all the way.
Sometimes voters just didn't follow instructions. Instead of punching through
the hole, they'd circle their candidate's name or put a
check mark next to it, or they'd write it out
by hand in a random spot on the ballot. In
(17:00):
a lot of these cases, a human being could look
at the ballot and discern what the voter had intended,
something a machine couldn't do. That was why, according to
Jack Young and the Recount Primer, the Gore campaign's first
step was to demand a hand recount in as many
counties as they could. The more under votes and over
votes were counted by hand, the more chances Gore had
(17:21):
to eat away at the three hundred and twenty seven
vote margins separating him from Bush.
Speaker 19 (17:25):
If you're behind, you want to expand the recount as
much as you can. Now there's no guarantee, obviously with
punch cards that it's going to come out your way,
but it's going to be different, and if you're behind,
different is good.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Young urged the top lieutenants on the Gore legal team
to ask for hand recounts in all sixty seven Florida counties.
This would have been consistent with the Gore team's main
talking point from the days after the election that all
they wanted was to get every vote counted.
Speaker 19 (17:59):
We have consistently maintained that every volte must.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Count, but Young was ultimately overruled. Instead, the Gore team
decided to make a much narrower, more modest request, zero
in on just four counties.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
Today, the appropriate Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a
hand count of ballots in Palm Beach County, as well
as three other counties.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Miami Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The request was
actually less modest than it sounds. Miami Dade, Broward, Palm Beach,
and Volusia were four of the biggest counties in Florida. Together,
they represented thirty four percent of Florida's population, and between
them they had received approximately one point nine million ballots. Still,
(18:41):
why didn't Gore just request a hand recount across the
entire state? Like Jack Young was imploring him to do.
The practical answer is that at this stage in the process,
there was no mechanism in Florida law allowing a candidate
to ask for a statewide recount, and one fell swoop.
If Gore wanted hand recounts in all sixty seven counties,
his lawyers would have to make the case in each
(19:01):
county individually, and that would be a logistical nightmare. Some
of Gore's advisors also thought it would be risky. Even
if Gore could somehow get all all sixty seven recompetitions filed,
the Bush lawyers could just selectively fight the ones most
likely to favor Democrats while letting the ones in Republican
counties go forward. At a press conference, the head of
Gore's recount team, Warren Christopher, explained that Miami Dade, Broward, Felucia,
(19:25):
and Palm Beach had been selected because each one experienced
some weirdness on election day.
Speaker 15 (19:30):
The only four counties in which and counts were requested
were counties where there was real anomalies that showed up
real irregularities.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Basically, it was a grab bag. Palm Beach was in
there because of the butterfly ballot Belusia was in there
because there had been glitches in their vote count on
election night. As for Miami Dade and Broward, those two
got thrown in because it looked like there was a
disproportionate number of under votes there. But irregularities were not
the only thing these four counties had in common, as
Republicans and the media quickly pointed out, they were also
(20:01):
full of Democratic voters.
Speaker 8 (20:03):
Certainly, all of this.
Speaker 20 (20:04):
Is them asking for things and then crossing their fingers
that they're going to get the votes there. They don't
have any hard evidence count of.
Speaker 9 (20:10):
These cherry picked counties that are designed to help Al Gore.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Gore's decision to only ask for recounts in four Democratic
counties was a pr disaster. It also alienated the Florida
Secretary of State's office, where the perception among staff was
that the Democrats were trying to pull ahead in the
vote count in a fundamentally unfair way.
Speaker 21 (20:26):
It was unsettling to me that a candidate would cherry
pick four counties out of sixty seven to recount.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Kerry Carpenter. She was a lawyer and Secretary
of State Catherine Harris's office.
Speaker 21 (20:39):
I believe all of us on our side were of
the mindset that it didn't seem right to all the
other counties. Everybody's vote has to have equal weight.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
The Secretary of State's office did not have the power
to turn down Gore's recount requests. That authority rested with
election officials at the county level, who were organized into
three person panels called canvassing boards. Each county had its
own canvassing board, and each one was made up of
the local election supervisor, a local judge, and a local
county commissioner. In typical election years, the boards played a quiet,
(21:11):
largely administrative role. At the end of every election, it
was their job to count up the ballots from every
voting precinct in the county and transmit the total to
the Secretary of State's office. Technically, it was the canvassing
boards in Palm Beach, Broward, Velusia, and Miami Dade that
Gore's team had to convince that manual recounts were necessary.
But as Gore's lawyers agitated for the recounts to start
(21:33):
in the days after the election, it was the Secretary
of State's office that emerged as the single biggest obstacle
in their way.
Speaker 12 (21:46):
We're standing by in Tallahassee, Florida for a news conference
by the Secretary of State of the State of Florida.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
On November ninth, Catherine Harris announced that a press conference
in Tallahassee that in accordance with Florida law, all counties
had to have their final vote hollies into her office
by November fourteenth, seven days after election day Florida.
Speaker 22 (22:07):
We are still awaiting the results from the super elections
in fourteenth Florida counties, which by law have until Tuesday,
November fourteenth, to submit those returns to the office of
the Secretary of State.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
The official position of the Secretary of State's office was
that the November fourteenth deadline was non negotiable. Harris would
not be able to accept any late vote tallies, even
if some counties decided to conduct manual recounts and weren't
done with them when the deadline came. That was the law,
and there was nothing Harris could do about it.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
I had no idea to whose benefit it would accrue.
I just know I had had to follow the law.
There would be those who would disagree, and they're entitled
to their opinion. But I don't know what I could
have done differently in terms of following the law.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Harris became a media sensation in the weeks after the election,
and after giving one particularly stilted press conference, she also
became a targeted ridicule from seeing.
Speaker 19 (23:02):
Her, it's clear why Republicans are not normally caught up
in the sex scan.
Speaker 11 (23:05):
Is there?
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I think that's when you're drunk. Sure, But then in
the Washington Post, fashion critic Robin Given described Harris's lips
as overdrawn with berry red lipstick. Her skin is plastered
and powdered to the texture of pre war walls, and
her eyes is rimmed and liner and frosted with blue shadow.
Speaker 15 (23:22):
I had race down there in Florida is tighter than
Catherine Harris's face.
Speaker 8 (23:26):
The ladies been on.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Elsewhere. She was depicted as a ditz who had been
born into a rich family and was in way over
her head. Here's on a gaest tire impersonating Harris on
Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 23 (23:38):
I am a public servant. I serve the people of
Florida and will abide by their directives. Bush one, and
when he's president, he's going to make me an ambassador
and not ambassador to some sad country where everyone's poor
and sick all the time.
Speaker 6 (23:56):
It didn't matter appearance intellect, never mind that I did
my master's at Harvard and they were acting like I
was some dilettante. They said, she's the Brahmin of the
highest order. She's just saying that I was so wealthy
to be discredited.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
But at the end of the day, the negative media
coverage could not take away Harris's power as Secretary of State,
and that meant she was going to collect vote tallies
on November fourteenth, just like the law said she had to.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
You know, none of those things are pleasant, but I
was elected as Warren oath and I was going to
do it.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
As the deadline approached, all eyes turned to the canvassing
boards and the four counties where Gore had requested manual recounts,
and none of them got more attention than Palm Beach.
The canvassing board in Palm Beach County was made up
of Election Supervisor Teresa Lapour, County Commissioner Carol Roberts, and
(24:51):
Circuit Judge Charles Burton.
Speaker 17 (24:52):
They are the members of the Palm Beach County Election
Canvassing Board. The three of the potential the shape who
becomes the next president of the United States.
Speaker 20 (25:01):
So here we go into ground zero of the Florida recount.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
This is journalist Jake Tapper. He covered the Palm Beach
recount for Salon dot com and wrote book about the
two thousand election called Down and Dirty.
Speaker 20 (25:12):
And there are three individuals there who are in charge
of everything, and nobody outside of Palm Beach, or even
most people in Palm Beach probably has ever heard of
any of them.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
According to Florida law, the way for the canvassing board
to decide whether or not to order a county wide
manual recount was to take a sample of the overall
vote at least one percent in Palm Beach. That translated
to about forty six hundred ballots. The idea was to
see how much the margin between the two candidates changed
once those ballots were recounted by hand. If the difference
(25:47):
was big enough, the canvassing Board would undertake the laborious
work of counting all four hundred and sixty two thousand
votes in the county.
Speaker 11 (25:54):
All right, good morning everyone, We could have quiet in here.
We can get through this meeting as quickly as possible.
And get through the matter at hand.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
The one percent test played out in public view at
the Palm Beach County Government Center, and thanks to Florida's
expansive transparency laws, the entire proceeding was captured on video
for posterity. Volunteers from both political parties were dispatched to
serve as partisan observers. Their job was to watch the
votes get counted and register formal objections when they disagreed
with the canvassing Board's judgment that most of the ballots
(26:27):
being recounted were no brainers. They'd been cast by voters
who had successfully punched a clean whole next to their
preferred candidate's name. These ballots did not call out for interpretation.
And then there were the under votes. These turned out
to be devilishly tricky for the canvassing Board to evaluate.
Speaker 20 (26:44):
These three people, Carol Roberts, Teresa Lapoor and Judge Charles
Burton now have to go through four thousand or so
ballots and assess for the ones in which it was
not clear whether or not the person voted for Bush
or Gore, whether that person meant to vote for Bush
(27:04):
or Gore, but because it was a punch card, it
didn't necessarily register. And this is where Chad comes into
the scene.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Remember earlier when I said Catherine Harris was the closest
thing to a household name to come out of the
Florida recount, I take that back. Chad definitely takes the cake.
Speaker 19 (27:23):
Chad's the munchkin of the electoral donut, as it were.
Speaker 16 (27:27):
There's been a lot of discussion about the hanging chad
and the dimple chad.
Speaker 11 (27:31):
Right now, the name.
Speaker 15 (27:32):
Of the next president hangs on those tiny chads and
the people trying to the vine.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Chad refers to the tiny pieces of paper they get
poked out of a ballot when a voter uses a
punch card machine successfully. When a voter uses a punch
card machine unsuccessfully, either because they didn't press hard enough
through the ballot with their stylus or because the machine malfunctioned,
the chad can stay attached to the ballot, resulting in
an undervote. And yes, as Jake Tapper notes in his book,
(27:59):
the plural of chad is chad.
Speaker 20 (28:01):
And then there are different kinds of chad. There is
a hanging chad that's attached to the ballot, hanging on
just by one corner there's a swinging door chad that's
hanging on by two of the corners. There's a pregnant chad,
there's a bulge, and there's a dimpled chadge where there's
like a little poke.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
The question facing the Canvassing Board in Palm Beach County
came down to this, did a chad need to be
partially detached to a ballot order to count as a vote,
or was it enough for it to be indented, dimpled, or,
in the unofficial parlance, pregnant. The Palm Beach County Canvassing
Board started out by applying a relatively strict standard, one
based on a precedent set in nineteen ninety, back when
(28:44):
Jackie Winchester was the Supervisor of Elections. According to that
nineteen ninety standard, a mere indentation was not evidence of
voter intent, so a ballot with a dimpled or pregnant
chad could not be considered a valid vote.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
The first being of the nineteen ninety standard I tend
to agree with.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Because it is.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
A few hours into the count Judge Burton noticed that
without really meaning to, the Canvassing Board had gradually adopted
a more lenient standard than the one that's started with.
The thinking seemed to be that a chad doesn't just
dimple itself. If it showed visible signs of struggle, it
probably meant someone had tried to vote. The application of
this forgiving and according to the Republicans highly subjective standard
(29:25):
was advantageous to Al Gore.
Speaker 20 (29:27):
As they're doing this one percent hand recount using this
very generous standard, more and more Gore votes are being found,
and the news in Goreland is good.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Before long, Gore had picked up fifty new votes. It
seemed possible that at this rate he could make up
the margin separating him from Bush by the time Lapour, Roberts,
and Burton were done with the one percent test, never
mind the rest of the county. But then something happened.
At around five pm, Judge Burton returned from a cigarette
break and interrupted the count. It's hard to hear him
(30:06):
on this recording, but essentially he wanted to start the
one percent over this time, sticking to the nineteen ninety standard.
Speaker 11 (30:13):
Conservius, have you voted on this?
Speaker 24 (30:16):
I want to do?
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Was over objections from Gore's lawyers. Teresa Lapour and Carol
Roberts both agreed with Burton. And so the count began again.
I guess my bothers what prompted Judge Burton to stop
the one percent test and restarted under a stricter standard.
As it turned out, he had received some persuasive advice
(30:37):
from the Secretary of State's office.
Speaker 21 (30:43):
I wasn't aware at the time that there were all
these eyes on me. I later learned afterward that people
were very suspicious about the fact that I had gone
into a conference room with Judge Burton. But I was
just simply following him into this room because he had
asked me to.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
That's Kerry Carpenter. She's the lawyer from Catherin Harris's office
we heard from earlier, the one who said it didn't
seem right that Gore had only requested recounts and Democratic strongholds.
When it was announced that Palm Beach would be conducting
a one percent test, Carpenter was sent down to monitor
the situation and offer explanations of Florida election law to
the canvassing board members. That Carpenter says is exactly what
(31:19):
Judge Burton was after when he asked her to step
into that conference room.
Speaker 21 (31:22):
His concern was that they had started out using the
nineteen ninety standards to do the sample recount, and over
time the standard was evolving into a different standard that
he believed was counting votes as votes that he didn't
think were really votes. And he wanted my advice on this.
What should he do? Basically he didn't know.
Speaker 14 (31:45):
He didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Carpenter advised Burton to go back to the stricter nineteen
ninety standard.
Speaker 21 (31:51):
And I said, when this ends, and most likely we'll
be contested, will probably be a hearing in Tallahassee, and
you're likely to be a witness, and I don't think
you want to have to testify in front of the
entire nation that you counted things as votes that weren't
really votes. And he agreed with that not be good
for him.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
When the count got going again, it became clear that
many of the votes that had gone to Gore under
the looser standard were now going to be thrown out
under the new standard. The number of gore votes was
still going up, but by much less.
Speaker 21 (32:26):
It was enough that had they not gone back and
redid that pile using the nineteen ninety standards, there would
have been enough gore votes to have certified the election
for Gore and then Bush would have been challenging the election.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
How do you feel about that?
Speaker 21 (32:46):
I think we did the right thing regardless of the result.
My job was to focus on doing the right thing,
and I believed it then and I believe it today
that we did the right thing.
Speaker 11 (33:00):
By good evening, everyone, I should say good morning.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Lapoor, Roberts, and Burton finished the one percent count just
before two am. They had discovered thirty three Gore votes
and fourteen Bush votes, for a net gain of nineteen
in Gore's favor. Now, the question was whether that was
enough to justify a county wide recount carry. Carpenter's position
was no. She told the canvassing board that according to
(33:24):
Florida law, the only circumstance in which a manual recount
is justified is if there's been a malfunction with the
vote counting machines.
Speaker 25 (33:30):
When a manual recount where the entire county is done,
it is because the manual recount of the one percent
demonstrated some type of error in the equipment and the
machines that were used.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Carpenter said that since the one percent test hadn't revealed
any problems with the machines, there was no reason to
have a full recount.
Speaker 25 (33:50):
Well, that would not be a vote tabulation error that
would affect the outcount. It would be a voter error
that may affect the outpower.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Judge Burton, who declined to be interviewed for this podcast,
moved to put off any decision about the county wide
recount until the Secretary of State's office could issue a
formal advisory opinion on what the canvassing Board should do.
Speaker 11 (34:11):
Said, I would like to be more fully informed before
this board makes such a serious decision that can affect
this entire.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Concrete It's worth mentioning for the record that all three
members of the Palm Beach Canvassing Board were Democrats, though
Judge Burton had been appointed by Jeb Bush. Between the
three of them, Carol Roberts was considered to be the
most sympathetic toward Gore, and no one was surprised when
she came out strongly in favor of a manual recount.
Speaker 10 (34:37):
And I decided that with nineteen vote out of one
percent and maybe there'd be nineteen hundred votes, was a
full recount.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Teresa Lapour sided with Carol Roberts. That made it two
against one. The recount in Palm Beach County was on.
Speaker 10 (34:56):
Prime move. That this board conductor manual recount of all
the ballots for the presidential elections.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
For the year two county, Palm Beach County, center of
the political universe.
Speaker 15 (35:08):
Fifty teams working seven our shifts will start to handcount.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
More than four hundred and sixty thousand ballots.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Who wins The White House could hang literally on what's
called a chat.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
All that planning was still ahead. The vote to proceed
with the manual recount had happened in the middle of
the night, so for the moment, the members of the
Palm Beach County Canvassing Board headed out to get some sleep.
Carol Roberts drove home that night by.
Speaker 10 (35:33):
Yourself, And when I got home, like one thirty or two,
my answering machine was lit up all over the place.
So I decided to see what kind of messages I got,
and I was horrified with all of the death threats.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Roberts's name and face had been on the news all day.
The country was transfixed by what was going on in
Palm Beach, and tensions were running high.
Speaker 10 (35:57):
And there were messages that said you better watch out
how you cross the street. You might not make it across.
You better watch your back. I have a gun. Things
like that. And they came from all over the United States.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
What were they I mean, what were they mad at
you about?
Speaker 10 (36:12):
I'm not sure what they were mad at me about.
I just know that there were an awful lot of
people all of the United States that seemed to be
very displeased that we were going to recount.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
We'll be right back that weekend. As Teresa Lapour, Carol Roberts,
and Charles Burton braced themselves for the start of the
full recount, Katherine Harris and her team looked to November fourteenth,
the deadline that Harris had set for the canvassing boards
to submit their final vote totals.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
The overall idea that fundamental framework, strategic framework was to
hold the line on the dates and slow walk the county.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
This is Max Dapanovitch. He's a Republican lobbyist who was
recruited by a Bush campaign official to advise Catherine Harris
during the recount.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
I was very partisan and known for it. There was
no doubt about who I was, how I felt, or
why I was summoned as Mary Madaline once said, I
am a bush Leech at bush Lett l I E g. E.
Bush Leech got a vassal.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Stepanovitch's role in the Secretary of State's Office during the
recount is a matter of some dispute. He says he
was there to work behind the scenes and make sure
that Katherin Harris brought the election in for a landing.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
I told her at the time, you know, a lot
of people run for public office and they believe that
when that moment comes, when that you know, John Kennedy
profile encourage moment arise, that they will rise to the occasion.
Speaker 11 (37:49):
I told her.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
That this is that moment. If you're going to do something,
do it today.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
But Harris plays down Stapanovitch's contributions.
Speaker 6 (38:01):
I don't want to discredit Mac, but that's he wants
to insert himself as important, and I understand, and I
value his I valued his friendship.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Whatever level of influence Tapanovitch had, it does sound like
he provided a kind of moral clarity to what the
Secretary of State's office was doing. As he saw it,
the Gore people were trying to cheat their way into
the White House, and they were doing it by dragging
things out until the vote came out in their favor.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
I think their perspective was what this entire exercise was
about was divining in some fashion the will of the
electorate and taking as much time as it was necessary
to do so. We thought maybe a good idea, just
(38:47):
to comply.
Speaker 7 (38:47):
With the law.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
The thing is, election law in Florida was not totally clear. Yes,
there was a statute on the books that said the
Secretary of State's office shall ignore any vote totals that
come in more than seven days after the election. But
there was another statute, a more recent one, that seemed
to conflict with the first one. This law said that
the Secretary of State may ignore laid vote totals, but
(39:10):
that she didn't have to.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
The Republicans who are trying to stop the recount cite
one statute. The Democrats relied on the very next statute,
shall or may, little words that could make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Like so many disputes that flared up during the two
thousand recount, this one was decided in a court room.
After hearing arguments from both sides, a circuit court judge
ruled that may trumped shall, meaning Catherine Harris could reject
laid vote totals that she wasn't required to by law.
The judge also ruled that Harris could not refuse to
(39:42):
grant extensions arbitrarily, she had to have real reasons for
doing so. After conferring with her staff and Max Dpanovich,
Harris addressed the ruling by asking the county canvassing boards
to explain why they couldn't make the November fourteenth deadline.
The next day, the secretary of State's office received memos
from Palm Beach, Miami Dade, and Broward in which they
(40:04):
cited legal confusion and logistical issues as reasons for needing
more time. After reviewing memos, Harris swiftly concluded that extensions
were not warranted. She would be sticking to her original position.
Speaker 16 (40:16):
Florida's Secretary of State, Catherine Harris has announced that she
is rejecting any further efforts to recount ballots from the
election by hand.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
The Secretary of State said that she will not consider
any extension of the votes the vote she has now influenced.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
In a press conference, Harris announced that she would be
certifying the election on the following Saturday, November eighteenth, Once
all overseas absentee ballots have been received.
Speaker 9 (40:40):
The reasons given in their requests are insufficient to warrant
waiver of the unambiguous filing deadline imposed by the Florida Legislature.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
The Gore team characterizing the Secretary's approach as kaf guys.
Speaker 19 (40:56):
We are very sorry that the Secretary of State has
taken such a rash and a precipitous action.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
By this point, only Belusia County had finished their manual recount.
The other counties were taking longer, and now it's like
their efforts were going to come to nothing. But the
Palm Beach Canvassing Board was not convinced that Harris's word
was final, so they filed an emergency petition with the
Florida Supreme Court asking whether they could still proceed with
their manual recount.
Speaker 26 (41:23):
They are still hoping that the State Supreme Court will
give them guidance about this particular county's recount. That is
why there is a sense of some limbo here in
Palm Beach County.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
All of this puts the focus on the Florida State
Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
The Florida Supreme Court issued a response the next day,
though the seven justices weren't prepared to say whether Harris
had to accept late counts. It was their position that
in the interim palm Beach was allowed to keep counting.
With that, the Florida Supreme Court opened a new chapter
in the recount saga. Once again, an ostensibly apolitical Florida
(41:59):
institution was faced with an impossible mission to remain nonpartisan
while making decisions that had unavoidably political ramifications. Before we continue,
I want to acknowledge that it's been quite a while
since we heard anything about the butterfly ballot. You might
be wondering did we just forget about that storyline or
(42:19):
what That would be a fair question, except it wasn't
really our decision to drop the butterfly ballot. It was
the Gore campaigns. Because for all the attention the butterfly
ballot got in the days after the election, it turned
out not to be a viable issue for Gore. It
was just a mistake that no one could plausibly fix.
Speaker 24 (42:39):
We determined that the butterfly ballot was a very difficult
issue because the remedy is hard to figure.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
That's Benedict Cuney. He's a Florida lawyer who worked for
Gore during the recount and led the team in Palm Beach.
Cuney told me that even though the butterfly ballot didn't
end up being a winning legal issue for Gore, it
was incredibly important as a galvanizing symbol.
Speaker 24 (43:01):
The butterfly ballot was one way of signifying that something
had gone horribly wrong with this election, and I think
that did Bowy people. It didn't have the same kind
of legal vitality that evaluating under votes or over votes,
but nonetheless it had a lot of oomph and pizazz.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
In addition to being visual and concrete, the butterfly ballot
made the Democrats feel like their fight was justified. It
was the flip side of the Bush team's belief that
Gore was trying to cheat to win. Here again is
Max Tapanovitch, the Republican lobbyist who advised Catherine Harris during
the recount.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
You know, the whole hanging chad thing, the determination of intent.
The longer that torture went on, the more likely it
was that they would manufacture votes. And the more pressure built,
either whether it was the media or whether it was
in the courts or otherwise, the more likely that the
dam would give way, and you would say, well, they're
(44:01):
registered in a heavy Democrat precinct, Well just assume their
Democrats and would have voted for out Gore. Let's count
that one for him. So you know, frequently people who
won't to give me a hard time, we'll talk about
us having stolen the election. And it is my belief
and I believe it sincerely, that we prevented the election
from being stolen.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Stepanovitch, by the way, agrees that most of the Buchanan
votes in Palm Beach were supposed to go to Gore.
He just doesn't think it matters.
Speaker 24 (44:30):
I believe.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That on that day, Election Day two thousand, that a
majority of the people who went to the polls and
intended to vote intended to vote for Al Gore. But
we can't know that because they failed to vote properly.
Speaker 16 (44:56):
We're now going to take you to Palm Beach, Florida.
In Palm Beach tonight, the voter recount is just beginning,
and we just thought we would listen in as they
begin their process.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Canvassing board in Palm Beach started it's manual recount on Thursday,
November sixteenth. It was going to be a much larger
undertaking than the one percent test. To accommodate the extra
volunteers and partisan observers that were needed to staff the effort,
the recount was housed in the Emergency Operations Center in
West Palm Beach, a cavernous space typically used as a
command center for government operations during hurricanes. Outside the Emergency
(45:32):
Operations Center, about four hundred Republican protesters gathered to voice
their opposition to the recount. They held signs shouting out
Katherine Harris, go cat go, and Harris we trust. Inside,
volunteers and county employees took their seats and got ready
to count. Over the course of the day, they would
(45:53):
be joined by a team of lawyers representing Gore and Bush,
a group that included John Bolton, the future National security
advisor to Donald Trump. Among the local volunteers who showed
up to help count ballots was John Winchester, the son
of former election supervisor Jackie Winchester.
Speaker 14 (46:10):
It was a crazy time. We had to get in
line early in the morning, and there were all these
protesters out there. A lot of people in the election's
office were just kind of, you know, we're nervous about it.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
John Winchester was no stranger to election administration. In addition
to hanging around the election's office when his mom ran
the show there, he also created the software that Palm
Beach County used to register voters. Just like with the
one percent count, most of the ballots that were being
recounted were no brainers. You could tell right away who
they were four. But not long after the counting started,
(46:43):
Winchester noticed that the Republican observers standing over his shoulder
were doing something strange.
Speaker 14 (46:48):
They were objecting to every ballot, Every ballot that wasn't
punched out for Bush they were objecting to. I remember
sitting at the table looking at a ballot, going, really, really,
what are you objecting to? This ballot is clearly a
vote for one candidate. There's one hole the next clear
But I object they would so they were totally They
(47:08):
were objecting without reason.
Speaker 7 (47:10):
These aren't pound and hanging and swinging on all pronounce
but there we.
Speaker 10 (47:15):
Don't have time to argue.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
According to recount procedure, every ballot that got objected to
was passed up to the three members of the canvassing board,
who would look over it together and decide whether it
bore any clear sign of voter intent. The problem was
that the board was getting so many ballots passed up
to them they couldn't get through them all.
Speaker 11 (47:34):
All right, your objections loaded, I say that, just it's
markedly different than the other ones.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Whatever. When Jackie Winchester's son told her what was happening
at the emergency center, she could barely contain her anger.
Speaker 7 (47:47):
The Republican observers very quickly figured out that if they
objected to ballots, even though there was obviously no reason
to object, that they could slow down the whole thing.
And it were certainly worked because the canvassing Board was
getting all of these ballots if they had to look
at when there was really no reason for them to
(48:08):
look at them.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Jackie Winchester felt that Teresa Lapour had made a big
mistake in having every single ballot counted individually. What Lapour
should have done, Winchester thought, was separate out the ballots
with undervotes, and how the canvassing board prioritize those. The
no brainers, meanwhile, could be assessed in bulk, thereby minimizing
the opportunity for partisan observers to slow down the process.
(48:31):
That was how Winchester had done recounts in the past
when she was election supervisor, and it had made for
a much more efficient process.
Speaker 7 (48:39):
I was very upset because I felt that she was
messing up the recount. I knew that she was aware
of the instructions for the way we normally did it,
and that the way she was ignoring that was just chaos.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
So I felt that it was wrong. Winchester tried to
get word to the canvassing board and to La Poor
in particular, but she couldn't get through. In her frustration,
Winchester later decided to go public with her complaints, telling
reporters that her long serving Ormer assistant had failed her constituents.
Winchester even attacked Lapour for the butterfly ballot, which she
(49:16):
had previously regarded as an innocent lapse in judgment.
Speaker 7 (49:19):
Had we not had the butterfly ballot, had people not
voted for your count and instead of Gore, I think
there probably would not even have been a recount in
Palm Beach County. The election probably would have been over
an election night. It is amazing if the consequences of
what seems at first like a fairly small mistake, did.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
You ever talk to Teresa about that? No, did you
ever talk to again after all this?
Speaker 12 (49:46):
No?
Speaker 11 (49:47):
I did not.
Speaker 7 (49:48):
I was pretty disgusted, I have to say.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
On the second day of the Palm Beach recount, Friday,
November seventeenth, there was an unexpected development out of Callahassee.
Speaker 17 (50:00):
Another day of hairpin turns in the court.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Like a political Lazarus, Al Gore came back from the
brink today the Supreme Court of Florida, breathing new life
into his crusade to count every vote.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
The Florida Supreme Court had handed down an injunction forbidding
Catherine Harris from certifying the election results until the Court
could review the case.
Speaker 15 (50:18):
The Court on its own motion and joins the respondent
Secretary of State from certifying the results of the November seventh,
two thousand presidential election until further order of this Court.
Speaker 17 (50:29):
Well the full range of emotions in the Bush campaign,
putting any plans for celebration on hold.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
The injunction was a major victory for Team Gore. Finally,
the shot clock had been halted, and the possibility that
Gore could still make up enough votes before the election
results were certified was once again alive.
Speaker 12 (50:44):
Today's court decisions have given Gore the most precious commodity
he could hope for time.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
Oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court were scheduled for Monday,
November twentieth, But first, the State of Florida had to
deal with something more important, an annual ritual that briefly
put the recount out of everyone's minds.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
This contest is not for politicians.
Speaker 17 (51:05):
Lawyers are hanging chads. Welcome to Florida versus Florida State.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
That Saturday, tens of thousands of people from around the
state descended on Tallahassee to watch the Florida State Seminoles
play football against the Florida Gators. Even as the recount
saga crept towards its third week, politicians and local businessmen
crowded into luxury boxes to rub elbows with their fellow
power brokers.
Speaker 17 (51:27):
Not a chilling northern of Florida.
Speaker 19 (51:30):
Evening the Florida State Seminoles post their rivals from.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Days A number of key participants in the recount watched
the game from a private box belonging to the President
of FSU. Guests included two justices from the Florida Supreme Court.
The Bush team's top lawyer, Ben Ginsburg, Florida Governor Jeb Bush,
and Secretary of State Catherine Harris. If things had gone
according to plan, Harris would have been allowed to certify
the election for Bush earlier that day. Instead, she had
(51:57):
to wait for the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in.
I would have assumed this was a stressful weekend for Harris,
but when I asked her about it, she said, the
Florida Supreme Court ruling just felt like another step in
the legal process.
Speaker 6 (52:10):
You know, that's what they ruled. They're entitled to that,
so we just follow the next step that the law required.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
I should mention Harris gave me kind of a hard
time for the name of this podcast.
Speaker 6 (52:21):
It wasn't a fiasco, it wasn't a constitutional crisis. It
was a close election, and what was fiasco esque was
the way the media handled it.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
But other than that, she sounded surprisingly sanguine.
Speaker 6 (52:36):
Because I don't have one single solitary regret.
Speaker 24 (52:39):
I could do it over.
Speaker 6 (52:41):
Many people say, boy, if you could wave a wand
and it never had to happen to you, would you
do it. But I'm so grateful that I had a
chance to be honorable in my actions, and so if
someone could wave a match you wand take.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
It away, I wouldn't let them. Why are you grateful
for it?
Speaker 6 (53:00):
I'm just grateful that I was, you know, in a
spiritual sense, because I'm Christian. You know that maybe in
all the earth thought I got chosen to handle that.
I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I feel like I was
found worthy.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
At the football game, Harris spoke to a group of
boosters and a couple of reporters. You know what I
dreamed of today, she told them. I dreamed that I
would ride into this stadium on a horse, carrying the
FSU flag in one hand and the certification in the other,
while everyone around me cheered. As it happened. The game
could not have played out more perfectly for the occasion.
(53:35):
While the clock ran down, the two teams were separated
by a single point and a potential game winning field goal,
and the final play of regulation time had to be
reviewed by the refs, and the.
Speaker 12 (53:45):
Two officials talked to each other. Crowd's going crazy.
Speaker 4 (53:50):
I mean the balls on the other side of walking.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
I'm just kidding. Florida State actually won that game easily,
thirty to seven.
Speaker 17 (53:59):
That is Florida's worst loss.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
It was a landslide, it.
Speaker 11 (54:03):
Was a round, and let's go quickly out of jack a.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Roof outside the stadium. The game was only just approaching halftime,
and though it wasn't exactly a tie, it really didn't
feel like anyone was winning. On the next episode of Fiasco,
how the confrontation in Florida went from a tangle of
courtroom proceedings to an extra legal street fight.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Why don't we do what democrats do?
Speaker 4 (54:31):
I said, Let's do some civil disobedience.
Speaker 3 (54:34):
Let's have a sit in, Let's create a ruckus.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
madelin kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Nafock. Our script
editor was Daniel Riley. Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer,
and we received additional editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our
(55:02):
music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode,
with additional music from Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips and y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special
Thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and
(55:25):
documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the
link in the show notes. Thanks to c SPAN, NBC
News Archive, CNN, and Channel twenty in Palm Beach for
the archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks for listening.
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode,
I want to let you know that you can binge
the entire season of Fiasco Bush v. Gore right now,
add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast show page,
(00:36):
or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode.
Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
The closest election in a generation, I.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Called it at seven fifty two pm. It was all
downhill after that moment.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Florida comes out of the Gore column.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Florida goes Bush, the presidency is Bush. That would be
something if the network's managed to blow it twice in
one night.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
In some ways, you can win or lose an election
based on what the TVs say.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Well, someone find out for me whether it's a a
tread of state as a Democrat or a Republican.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
Who would ever thought you'd be on a plane heading
to Florida to start a recount that could determine who
the president is.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
The two thousand election wasn't really Jackie Winchester's problem four
years earlier. It would have been back then she was
the Supervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Florida, a
job that put her in charge of making sure that
election day always ran as smoothly as possible.
Speaker 7 (01:37):
You have only one day to make it right, and
you're dependent on thousands of volunteers who have maybe three
days of training every few years, and you cannot control
what's going on out there and the precincts, and things
can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
After holding the post for twenty three years, Winchester had
retired in nineteen ninety six. In two thousand, she was
a volunteer with the Gore campaign, so she wasn't entirely
on the sidelines, but it was not her burden to bear.
When her daughter in law called an election day to
inform her that something had gone awry with the ballots
in Palm Beach, it.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
Was in all the radios, all that cha. They were
talking about it.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Here's how the presidential candidates are listed on Palm Beach
County's punch card ballot. Voters we talked to feel the
ballot's layout is confusing, and.
Speaker 7 (02:22):
She said, you know, I'm not sure I've voted correctly.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
After hearing that word spread across Palm Beach that if
you weren't paying close attention, it was easy to punch
through the wrong hole and vote for a candidate you
didn't mean to vote for.
Speaker 8 (02:34):
Here's the problem. In Palm Beach County, they use what's
called a punch hole ballot. To vote for the first name,
George Bush, a voter would punch the first hole. Al
Gore's name was listed right under Bush's, but voting for
Gore required punching the third hole down, not the second.
Speaker 9 (02:52):
Gore is the second person down.
Speaker 10 (02:54):
This is the second hole down. I made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
What made the crisis in Palm Beach so gut wrenching
was that lots of people seemed to have all made
the same mistake. These were people who had wanted to
vote for Al Gore, and instead they voted for the
right wing third party candidate, Pat Buchanan.
Speaker 11 (03:12):
I almost drove off the road when I heard that
I voted for Pat Buchanan.
Speaker 12 (03:16):
I am not the only one that was confused, and
many people probably voted for Buchanan meaning to vote for Gore,
and that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Pat Buchanan first rose to national prominence as a speechwriter
and senior adviser to Richard Nixon. He'd run for president
under the banner of the Reform Party, and his prospects
in Palm Beach County had not been great, in part
because there were a lot of Jewish people who lived
in Palm Beach, and Buchanan had a history of making
comments that were perceived as antisemitic. Most recently, Buchanan had
(03:45):
reinforced that perception by arguing in a book that Adolph
Hitler had never represented a real threat to American interests.
Speaker 8 (03:52):
Palm Beach County is heavily democratic, with large blocks of
black and Jewish voters, not exactly Pat Buchanan country, Yet
he polled three times as many votes here as any
other county in the state.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Buchanan got more than three thousand votes in Palm Beach County,
six times as many as he got in Miami Dade,
which was twice as big. Some voters had punched holes
for both Gore and Buchanan, meaning their ballots had been
automatically invalidated. Common sense suggested that most of these people
had voted for Buchanan unintentionally, then caught their mistake and
tried to correct it. Even Buchanan acknowledged that some of
(04:26):
his votes in Palm Beach had probably been meant for
the ticket that included Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate
for vice president nominated by a major party.
Speaker 13 (04:34):
If the two candidates they pushed were Buchanan and Gore,
almost certainly those are al Gore's votes and not mine.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
The ballot in Palm Beach quickly became known in the
media as the butterfly ballot because the candidate's names appeared
on two opposing pages like wings, and there was a
row of punch holes running down the middle. Most of
the voters who had issues with the butterfly ballot were elderly,
and there were a lot of elderly voters in Palm
Beach County. Here's Jackie Winchester.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Again, and most of the retirement communities, the big condos
that tend to vote early in the morning, and it
was in those. He thinks that all of these people
were saying that they were afraid they had voted for Buchanan,
and of course they did.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Actually, Winchester was eighty nine years old and living in
a retirement community herself. When I spoke to her on
election Day two thousand. She arrived at the Gore campaign's
Palm Beach office at around ten in the morning and
started taking calls from distressed voters.
Speaker 7 (05:32):
It was just really very sad because these are people
who had been voting all their allows. Voting was very
important to them, and they felt that they had lost
their vote and they wanted to know what they could
do about it, or said there wasn't anything they could
do about it.
Speaker 8 (05:48):
It could have happened anywhere.
Speaker 14 (05:49):
A rocket scientist could have happened.
Speaker 8 (05:51):
Meet Jim Pesh. Yes, he designs rockets.
Speaker 7 (05:55):
Let me get this straight.
Speaker 8 (05:56):
You're a rocket scientist, literally, and you had problems.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
As the gravity of the butterfly ballot debacle set in,
Winchester started to worry about the woman who had replaced
her as election supervisor in Palm Beach. Her name was
Teresa Lapour. She had started working at the election's office
as Winchester's assistant when she was still a teenager, and
she had been climbing her way up the ladder ever since.
As election supervisor, Lapour had commissioned the butterfly ballot design
(06:25):
and she had signed off on it. Others had seen
it too, both the Democrats and the Republicans in Florida
had approved the ballot design in advance, but when the
ballot became a national news story, it was Lapour who
was held responsible for it.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
The Supervisor of Elections, Teresa Lapour says, voters are across
the county have expressed their concerns about the presidential ballot.
Speaker 15 (06:45):
If voters need to remember that, they should punch the
whole next to the ear next to the number next
to the name of the candidate they want to vote for.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Lapour didn't conceive of the butterfly ballot thoughtlessly. It was
an attempt to solve a very specific problem. In nineteen
ninety eight, Florida had passed a law making it easier
for third party candidates to qualify for inclusion on the ballot.
In two thousand, election supervisors across the state had to
make for ten presidential candidates. They all dealt with it
in their own way, which underscorees how strangely decentralized a
(07:16):
national election really is. Every county in Florida had jurisdiction
over their own ballots. Teresa Lapour decided that ten candidates
was too many to fit on one page because the
type would be too small, so she spread them out
over to She.
Speaker 7 (07:31):
Had said that she did it that way because she
felt that she could make the print larger, that there
are a lot of older people in Palm Beach County
with vision problems, and that she rather than do it
the way the other coundies who are doing it where
the print would have been smaller, that she could make
the print larger this way.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
Lapour remained silent.
Speaker 16 (07:52):
In response to the anger, She says through her attorney,
she designed the ballot with the elderly folks in mind,
with the hopes they could see it better.
Speaker 17 (07:59):
And that's a heavy burden on the shoulders of Teresa Lapour.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The day after the election, Jackie Winchester visited her oldfe
in downtown Palm Beach to see how Lapoor was holding up.
It was a sympathy call from one season supervisor of
Elections to another.
Speaker 7 (08:18):
She was really being i would say, being dumped on,
and she was crying. She was very upset, and I've
told her you know that I was sorry she was
having to go through all that and she didn't mean
to cause any problems.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Did she have any advice for her?
Speaker 7 (08:37):
No?
Speaker 11 (08:37):
Why not?
Speaker 7 (08:39):
At that point there was nothing that could be done.
The election was over.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
In fact, Teresa Lapour had a whole lot of elections
still ahead of her. Lapour, who did not respond to
my interview requests, described the experience in the two thousand
and four documentary. I kind of likened the whole thing
to my perfect storm.
Speaker 18 (09:00):
All the planets were lined upright, and everything just kind
of collided over Palm Beach County.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
As lawyers for the two campaigns descended on Palm Beach
to litigate the butterfly ballot, Lapour would find her working
eighteen hour days, facing down protesters outside her office and
receiving so many death threats that she needed a security
detail to accompany her home at night. Later, Lapoor would
teller reporter for the Saint Petersburg Times, you want my blood,
here take it. I'm Leon Nafock from Prologue Projects and
(09:33):
Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bush v. Gore. Tonight the
debate over when a vote is a vote? Nineteen thousand
Americans were disenfranchised.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
I wanted to cook the books until they could figure
out how to win an election. They had lost it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Results in this one county could tell the tale episode
three ballot with butterfly wings. How the recount battle in
Florida started, and how both Republicans and Democrats became convinced
that the White House was being stolen by the other side.
Catherine Harris probably the closest thing to a household name
(10:12):
to emerge from the two thousand recount. As Florida's Secretary
of State, Harris was the ultimate authority over the state's
election results on election day, her office was responsible for
collecting vote totals from all sixty seven counties in Florida,
then declaring a winner as part of a formal certification process.
Speaker 6 (10:29):
It was kind of a ministerial job. You add up
sixty seven counties and you say who won the election.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
That's Harris. She was elected Florida Secretary of State in
nineteen ninety eight, so, unlike Jackie Winchester, the two thousand
election was very much her problem. If her job had
ever been ministerial, that flew out the window very quickly
on November eighth. Throughout the recount period, Harris was part referee,
part timekeeper, someone who advised county election officials on vote
(10:57):
counting procedure and enforced statewide deadlines set forth in Florida
election law. Harris's point of view on the butterfly ballot
issue was that it was kind of overblown.
Speaker 6 (11:07):
As see you where they were confused. I don't think
I would have made that mistake. It was not that
hard to vote for Gore. That was actually kind of simple.
But if somebody wanted to be confused, or I mean
not wanted to be confused, but they're getting nervous in
their voting, than perhaps they were.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
The two thousand election thrust Harris into an awkward role.
On paper, she was supposed to be a political and independent,
but she was also an elected official, and like the
vast majority of elected officials, she had a part as
an affiliation. Harris was a Republican. It wasn't a secret
she had run for Secretary of State as a Republican
and she had been aligned with the Republican Party since
(11:46):
the start of her political career. During the two thousand campaign,
Harris served as one of George W. Bush's co chairs
in Florida. She also stumped for Bush as part of
the Freezon for a Reason bus tour when she gave
out Florida oranges to Bush supporters in New Hampshire. Again,
there was nothing inherently sinister about this, but when Harris
started making one decision after another that seemed to benefit Bush,
(12:08):
Democrats had a hard time seeing her as a genuinely
neutral arbiter.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
The Gore campaign press secretary has called the Secretary of
State in Florida.
Speaker 15 (12:17):
A hack Gore advisor, accusing Florida's Republican secretary of State
and just try to ensure a Bush victory.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Harris adamantly rejects the suggestion that she was trying to
help Bush win, even though she obviously did want him
to win she campaigned for him. She maintains that a
Secretary of State, she made unbiased decisions without any particular
outcome in mind.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
In fact, the law was my only safe harbor. People
still come up to me and say thank you a weekly.
I'm in airports every week, so I'm surprised by that,
but I've never accepted that compliment. I just say, hey,
I didn't do anything special. I just followed our laws
and they were sufficient.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
One of the first laws Catherine Harris had to enforce
after election day was one you might remember from our
previous episode. It was the law acquiring a statewide machine
recount whenever the margin between two candidates was less than
half of one percent. Bush's lead before the machine recount
was one seven hundred and eighty four votes out of
almost six million cast, so three one hundredths of one
(13:18):
percent of the overall vote total.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
We did a machine recount within seventy two hours for
the entire state. It was remarkable. That was not an
easy task, but we did that in seventy two hours,
and at that time, and for the equipment that we had,
computerization to get it done in seventy two hours?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Or was the remarkable feat? After the break the results
of the machine recount, the new numbers came in on
the Friday morning after the election.
Speaker 18 (13:50):
An unofficial Tallly of all Florida counties gives George W.
Bush a minuscule three hundred and twenty seven vote lead
over Al Gore out of six million votes cast.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
The margin between Bush and Gore shrank to just three
hundred and twenty seven votes, so five to one thousandths
of one percent. Under normal circumstances, a fluctuation of fourteen
hundred votes in a state wide race wouldn't sound like much,
but Bush's lead had been cut by significantly more votes
than the new margin separating him from Gore. It suggested
(14:23):
that a third recount could produce a totally different result
and maybe even put Gore ahead. The magnitude of the
change in the vote total called into question the very
idea that an objectively accurate vote count was possible.
Speaker 12 (14:35):
Many in this nation are getting anxious what many called
the beginning of potentially a constitutional crisis in this nation.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Neither campaign had time for such philosophical angst. From the
moment they arrived in Florida. Bush's people were fighting to
protect their lead.
Speaker 13 (14:51):
They want a quick, almost mechanical recount. How George W.
Bush certified on the road to inauguration.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
While Gore's were trying to find enough votes to overcome it.
Speaker 13 (14:59):
The Gore campaign is trying to lengthen out the timeline,
gather the facts for any irregularities in the Florida ballot,
and then moved to a challenge.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
But what exactly was being challenged? What were the two
campaigns fighting over. The guy brought in to answer these
questions for the Gore campaign was Jack Young, a lawyer
specializing in recount law. On the morning of November eighth,
Young briefed Gore's top advisors in Nashville. Then he got
on the recount one plane to Florida.
Speaker 19 (15:27):
The question that was asked of May was, how does
a recount work? What do you need to do if
we are to go through a recount in Florida.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Young knew what he was talking about. He was the
co author of a short book called The Recount Primer.
Speaker 19 (15:44):
The Recount Primer who was, in essence, a printed set
of instructions as to how to deal with a recount,
starting with election night and then going through the process.
It's probably thirty pages at best.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
As Young explained to the Gore team, the big prize
on the table between their guy and the other guy
was a mountain of ballots cast across Florida that had
either come up as invalid or didn't record any vote
for president. These ballots could be divided into two categories,
undervotes and overvotes. You can think of undervotes as the
result of not voting enough, and overvotes as the result
(16:21):
of voting too much.
Speaker 19 (16:23):
An undervote is an instance where the machine didn't pick
up a vote, and overvotes what you're looking at is
people having voted for two candidates when the selection is
for only one.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
There were all kinds of reasons a machine might mistakenly
classify a valid ballot as an undervote or an overvote.
With punch card machines like the kind used in Palm Beach,
people didn't always punch through the hole all the way.
Sometimes voters just didn't follow instructions. Instead of punching through
the hole, they'd circle their candidate's name or put a
check mark next to it, or they'd write it out
by hand in a random spot on the ballot. In
(17:00):
a lot of these cases, a human being could look
at the ballot and discern what the voter had intended,
something a machine couldn't do. That was why, according to
Jack Young and the Recount Primer, the Gore campaign's first
step was to demand a hand recount in as many
counties as they could. The more under votes and over
votes were counted by hand, the more chances Gore had
(17:21):
to eat away at the three hundred and twenty seven
vote margins separating him from Bush.
Speaker 19 (17:25):
If you're behind, you want to expand the recount as
much as you can. Now there's no guarantee, obviously with
punch cards that it's going to come out your way,
but it's going to be different, and if you're behind,
different is good.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Young urged the top lieutenants on the Gore legal team
to ask for hand recounts in all sixty seven Florida counties.
This would have been consistent with the Gore team's main
talking point from the days after the election that all
they wanted was to get every vote counted.
Speaker 19 (17:59):
We have consistently maintained that every volte must.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Count, but Young was ultimately overruled. Instead, the Gore team
decided to make a much narrower, more modest request, zero
in on just four counties.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
Today, the appropriate Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a
hand count of ballots in Palm Beach County, as well
as three other counties.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Miami Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The request was
actually less modest than it sounds. Miami Dade, Broward, Palm Beach,
and Volusia were four of the biggest counties in Florida. Together,
they represented thirty four percent of Florida's population, and between
them they had received approximately one point nine million ballots. Still,
(18:41):
why didn't Gore just request a hand recount across the
entire state? Like Jack Young was imploring him to do.
The practical answer is that at this stage in the process,
there was no mechanism in Florida law allowing a candidate
to ask for a statewide recount, and one fell swoop.
If Gore wanted hand recounts in all sixty seven counties,
his lawyers would have to make the case in each
(19:01):
county individually, and that would be a logistical nightmare. Some
of Gore's advisors also thought it would be risky. Even
if Gore could somehow get all all sixty seven recompetitions filed,
the Bush lawyers could just selectively fight the ones most
likely to favor Democrats while letting the ones in Republican
counties go forward. At a press conference, the head of
Gore's recount team, Warren Christopher, explained that Miami Dade, Broward, Felucia,
(19:25):
and Palm Beach had been selected because each one experienced
some weirdness on election day.
Speaker 15 (19:30):
The only four counties in which and counts were requested
were counties where there was real anomalies that showed up
real irregularities.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Basically, it was a grab bag. Palm Beach was in
there because of the butterfly ballot Belusia was in there
because there had been glitches in their vote count on
election night. As for Miami Dade and Broward, those two
got thrown in because it looked like there was a
disproportionate number of under votes there. But irregularities were not
the only thing these four counties had in common, as
Republicans and the media quickly pointed out, they were also
(20:01):
full of Democratic voters.
Speaker 8 (20:03):
Certainly, all of this.
Speaker 20 (20:04):
Is them asking for things and then crossing their fingers
that they're going to get the votes there. They don't
have any hard evidence count of.
Speaker 9 (20:10):
These cherry picked counties that are designed to help Al Gore.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Gore's decision to only ask for recounts in four Democratic
counties was a pr disaster. It also alienated the Florida
Secretary of State's office, where the perception among staff was
that the Democrats were trying to pull ahead in the
vote count in a fundamentally unfair way.
Speaker 21 (20:26):
It was unsettling to me that a candidate would cherry
pick four counties out of sixty seven to recount.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Kerry Carpenter. She was a lawyer and Secretary
of State Catherine Harris's office.
Speaker 21 (20:39):
I believe all of us on our side were of
the mindset that it didn't seem right to all the
other counties. Everybody's vote has to have equal weight.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
The Secretary of State's office did not have the power
to turn down Gore's recount requests. That authority rested with
election officials at the county level, who were organized into
three person panels called canvassing boards. Each county had its
own canvassing board, and each one was made up of
the local election supervisor, a local judge, and a local
county commissioner. In typical election years, the boards played a quiet,
(21:11):
largely administrative role. At the end of every election, it
was their job to count up the ballots from every
voting precinct in the county and transmit the total to
the Secretary of State's office. Technically, it was the canvassing
boards in Palm Beach, Broward, Velusia, and Miami Dade that
Gore's team had to convince that manual recounts were necessary.
But as Gore's lawyers agitated for the recounts to start
(21:33):
in the days after the election, it was the Secretary
of State's office that emerged as the single biggest obstacle
in their way.
Speaker 12 (21:46):
We're standing by in Tallahassee, Florida for a news conference
by the Secretary of State of the State of Florida.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
On November ninth, Catherine Harris announced that a press conference
in Tallahassee that in accordance with Florida law, all counties
had to have their final vote hollies into her office
by November fourteenth, seven days after election day Florida.
Speaker 22 (22:07):
We are still awaiting the results from the super elections
in fourteenth Florida counties, which by law have until Tuesday,
November fourteenth, to submit those returns to the office of
the Secretary of State.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
The official position of the Secretary of State's office was
that the November fourteenth deadline was non negotiable. Harris would
not be able to accept any late vote tallies, even
if some counties decided to conduct manual recounts and weren't
done with them when the deadline came. That was the law,
and there was nothing Harris could do about it.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
I had no idea to whose benefit it would accrue.
I just know I had had to follow the law.
There would be those who would disagree, and they're entitled
to their opinion. But I don't know what I could
have done differently in terms of following the law.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Harris became a media sensation in the weeks after the election,
and after giving one particularly stilted press conference, she also
became a targeted ridicule from seeing.
Speaker 19 (23:02):
Her, it's clear why Republicans are not normally caught up
in the sex scan.
Speaker 11 (23:05):
Is there?
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I think that's when you're drunk. Sure, But then in
the Washington Post, fashion critic Robin Given described Harris's lips
as overdrawn with berry red lipstick. Her skin is plastered
and powdered to the texture of pre war walls, and
her eyes is rimmed and liner and frosted with blue shadow.
Speaker 15 (23:22):
I had race down there in Florida is tighter than
Catherine Harris's face.
Speaker 8 (23:26):
The ladies been on.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Elsewhere. She was depicted as a ditz who had been
born into a rich family and was in way over
her head. Here's on a gaest tire impersonating Harris on
Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 23 (23:38):
I am a public servant. I serve the people of
Florida and will abide by their directives. Bush one, and
when he's president, he's going to make me an ambassador
and not ambassador to some sad country where everyone's poor
and sick all the time.
Speaker 6 (23:56):
It didn't matter appearance intellect, never mind that I did
my master's at Harvard and they were acting like I
was some dilettante. They said, she's the Brahmin of the
highest order. She's just saying that I was so wealthy
to be discredited.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
But at the end of the day, the negative media
coverage could not take away Harris's power as Secretary of State,
and that meant she was going to collect vote tallies
on November fourteenth, just like the law said she had to.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
You know, none of those things are pleasant, but I
was elected as Warren oath and I was going to
do it.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
As the deadline approached, all eyes turned to the canvassing
boards and the four counties where Gore had requested manual recounts,
and none of them got more attention than Palm Beach.
The canvassing board in Palm Beach County was made up
of Election Supervisor Teresa Lapour, County Commissioner Carol Roberts, and
(24:51):
Circuit Judge Charles Burton.
Speaker 17 (24:52):
They are the members of the Palm Beach County Election
Canvassing Board. The three of the potential the shape who
becomes the next president of the United States.
Speaker 20 (25:01):
So here we go into ground zero of the Florida recount.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
This is journalist Jake Tapper. He covered the Palm Beach
recount for Salon dot com and wrote book about the
two thousand election called Down and Dirty.
Speaker 20 (25:12):
And there are three individuals there who are in charge
of everything, and nobody outside of Palm Beach, or even
most people in Palm Beach probably has ever heard of
any of them.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
According to Florida law, the way for the canvassing board
to decide whether or not to order a county wide
manual recount was to take a sample of the overall
vote at least one percent in Palm Beach. That translated
to about forty six hundred ballots. The idea was to
see how much the margin between the two candidates changed
once those ballots were recounted by hand. If the difference
(25:47):
was big enough, the canvassing Board would undertake the laborious
work of counting all four hundred and sixty two thousand
votes in the county.
Speaker 11 (25:54):
All right, good morning everyone, We could have quiet in here.
We can get through this meeting as quickly as possible.
And get through the matter at hand.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
The one percent test played out in public view at
the Palm Beach County Government Center, and thanks to Florida's
expansive transparency laws, the entire proceeding was captured on video
for posterity. Volunteers from both political parties were dispatched to
serve as partisan observers. Their job was to watch the
votes get counted and register formal objections when they disagreed
with the canvassing Board's judgment that most of the ballots
(26:27):
being recounted were no brainers. They'd been cast by voters
who had successfully punched a clean whole next to their
preferred candidate's name. These ballots did not call out for interpretation.
And then there were the under votes. These turned out
to be devilishly tricky for the canvassing Board to evaluate.
Speaker 20 (26:44):
These three people, Carol Roberts, Teresa Lapoor and Judge Charles
Burton now have to go through four thousand or so
ballots and assess for the ones in which it was
not clear whether or not the person voted for Bush
or Gore, whether that person meant to vote for Bush
(27:04):
or Gore, but because it was a punch card, it
didn't necessarily register. And this is where Chad comes into
the scene.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Remember earlier when I said Catherine Harris was the closest
thing to a household name to come out of the
Florida recount, I take that back. Chad definitely takes the cake.
Speaker 19 (27:23):
Chad's the munchkin of the electoral donut, as it were.
Speaker 16 (27:27):
There's been a lot of discussion about the hanging chad
and the dimple chad.
Speaker 11 (27:31):
Right now, the name.
Speaker 15 (27:32):
Of the next president hangs on those tiny chads and
the people trying to the vine.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Chad refers to the tiny pieces of paper they get
poked out of a ballot when a voter uses a
punch card machine successfully. When a voter uses a punch
card machine unsuccessfully, either because they didn't press hard enough
through the ballot with their stylus or because the machine malfunctioned,
the chad can stay attached to the ballot, resulting in
an undervote. And yes, as Jake Tapper notes in his book,
(27:59):
the plural of chad is chad.
Speaker 20 (28:01):
And then there are different kinds of chad. There is
a hanging chad that's attached to the ballot, hanging on
just by one corner there's a swinging door chad that's
hanging on by two of the corners. There's a pregnant chad,
there's a bulge, and there's a dimpled chadge where there's
like a little poke.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
The question facing the Canvassing Board in Palm Beach County
came down to this, did a chad need to be
partially detached to a ballot order to count as a vote,
or was it enough for it to be indented, dimpled, or,
in the unofficial parlance, pregnant. The Palm Beach County Canvassing
Board started out by applying a relatively strict standard, one
based on a precedent set in nineteen ninety, back when
(28:44):
Jackie Winchester was the Supervisor of Elections. According to that
nineteen ninety standard, a mere indentation was not evidence of
voter intent, so a ballot with a dimpled or pregnant
chad could not be considered a valid vote.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
The first being of the nineteen ninety standard I tend
to agree with.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Because it is.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
A few hours into the count Judge Burton noticed that
without really meaning to, the Canvassing Board had gradually adopted
a more lenient standard than the one that's started with.
The thinking seemed to be that a chad doesn't just
dimple itself. If it showed visible signs of struggle, it
probably meant someone had tried to vote. The application of
this forgiving and according to the Republicans highly subjective standard
(29:25):
was advantageous to Al Gore.
Speaker 20 (29:27):
As they're doing this one percent hand recount using this
very generous standard, more and more Gore votes are being found,
and the news in Goreland is good.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Before long, Gore had picked up fifty new votes. It
seemed possible that at this rate he could make up
the margin separating him from Bush by the time Lapour, Roberts,
and Burton were done with the one percent test, never
mind the rest of the county. But then something happened.
At around five pm, Judge Burton returned from a cigarette
break and interrupted the count. It's hard to hear him
(30:06):
on this recording, but essentially he wanted to start the
one percent over this time, sticking to the nineteen ninety standard.
Speaker 11 (30:13):
Conservius, have you voted on this?
Speaker 24 (30:16):
I want to do?
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Was over objections from Gore's lawyers. Teresa Lapour and Carol
Roberts both agreed with Burton. And so the count began again.
I guess my bothers what prompted Judge Burton to stop
the one percent test and restarted under a stricter standard.
As it turned out, he had received some persuasive advice
(30:37):
from the Secretary of State's office.
Speaker 21 (30:43):
I wasn't aware at the time that there were all
these eyes on me. I later learned afterward that people
were very suspicious about the fact that I had gone
into a conference room with Judge Burton. But I was
just simply following him into this room because he had
asked me to.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
That's Kerry Carpenter. She's the lawyer from Catherin Harris's office
we heard from earlier, the one who said it didn't
seem right that Gore had only requested recounts and Democratic strongholds.
When it was announced that Palm Beach would be conducting
a one percent test, Carpenter was sent down to monitor
the situation and offer explanations of Florida election law to
the canvassing board members. That Carpenter says is exactly what
(31:19):
Judge Burton was after when he asked her to step
into that conference room.
Speaker 21 (31:22):
His concern was that they had started out using the
nineteen ninety standards to do the sample recount, and over
time the standard was evolving into a different standard that
he believed was counting votes as votes that he didn't
think were really votes. And he wanted my advice on this.
What should he do? Basically he didn't know.
Speaker 14 (31:45):
He didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Carpenter advised Burton to go back to the stricter nineteen
ninety standard.
Speaker 21 (31:51):
And I said, when this ends, and most likely we'll
be contested, will probably be a hearing in Tallahassee, and
you're likely to be a witness, and I don't think
you want to have to testify in front of the
entire nation that you counted things as votes that weren't
really votes. And he agreed with that not be good
for him.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
When the count got going again, it became clear that
many of the votes that had gone to Gore under
the looser standard were now going to be thrown out
under the new standard. The number of gore votes was
still going up, but by much less.
Speaker 21 (32:26):
It was enough that had they not gone back and
redid that pile using the nineteen ninety standards, there would
have been enough gore votes to have certified the election
for Gore and then Bush would have been challenging the election.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
How do you feel about that?
Speaker 21 (32:46):
I think we did the right thing regardless of the result.
My job was to focus on doing the right thing,
and I believed it then and I believe it today
that we did the right thing.
Speaker 11 (33:00):
By good evening, everyone, I should say good morning.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Lapoor, Roberts, and Burton finished the one percent count just
before two am. They had discovered thirty three Gore votes
and fourteen Bush votes, for a net gain of nineteen
in Gore's favor. Now, the question was whether that was
enough to justify a county wide recount carry. Carpenter's position
was no. She told the canvassing board that according to
(33:24):
Florida law, the only circumstance in which a manual recount
is justified is if there's been a malfunction with the
vote counting machines.
Speaker 25 (33:30):
When a manual recount where the entire county is done,
it is because the manual recount of the one percent
demonstrated some type of error in the equipment and the
machines that were used.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Carpenter said that since the one percent test hadn't revealed
any problems with the machines, there was no reason to
have a full recount.
Speaker 25 (33:50):
Well, that would not be a vote tabulation error that
would affect the outcount. It would be a voter error
that may affect the outpower.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Judge Burton, who declined to be interviewed for this podcast,
moved to put off any decision about the county wide
recount until the Secretary of State's office could issue a
formal advisory opinion on what the canvassing Board should do.
Speaker 11 (34:11):
Said, I would like to be more fully informed before
this board makes such a serious decision that can affect
this entire.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Concrete It's worth mentioning for the record that all three
members of the Palm Beach Canvassing Board were Democrats, though
Judge Burton had been appointed by Jeb Bush. Between the
three of them, Carol Roberts was considered to be the
most sympathetic toward Gore, and no one was surprised when
she came out strongly in favor of a manual recount.
Speaker 10 (34:37):
And I decided that with nineteen vote out of one
percent and maybe there'd be nineteen hundred votes, was a
full recount.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Teresa Lapour sided with Carol Roberts. That made it two
against one. The recount in Palm Beach County was on.
Speaker 10 (34:56):
Prime move. That this board conductor manual recount of all
the ballots for the presidential elections.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
For the year two county, Palm Beach County, center of
the political universe.
Speaker 15 (35:08):
Fifty teams working seven our shifts will start to handcount.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
More than four hundred and sixty thousand ballots.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Who wins The White House could hang literally on what's
called a chat.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
All that planning was still ahead. The vote to proceed
with the manual recount had happened in the middle of
the night, so for the moment, the members of the
Palm Beach County Canvassing Board headed out to get some sleep.
Carol Roberts drove home that night by.
Speaker 10 (35:33):
Yourself, And when I got home, like one thirty or two,
my answering machine was lit up all over the place.
So I decided to see what kind of messages I got,
and I was horrified with all of the death threats.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Roberts's name and face had been on the news all day.
The country was transfixed by what was going on in
Palm Beach, and tensions were running high.
Speaker 10 (35:57):
And there were messages that said you better watch out
how you cross the street. You might not make it across.
You better watch your back. I have a gun. Things
like that. And they came from all over the United States.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
What were they I mean, what were they mad at
you about?
Speaker 10 (36:12):
I'm not sure what they were mad at me about.
I just know that there were an awful lot of
people all of the United States that seemed to be
very displeased that we were going to recount.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
We'll be right back that weekend. As Teresa Lapour, Carol Roberts,
and Charles Burton braced themselves for the start of the
full recount, Katherine Harris and her team looked to November fourteenth,
the deadline that Harris had set for the canvassing boards
to submit their final vote totals.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
The overall idea that fundamental framework, strategic framework was to
hold the line on the dates and slow walk the county.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
This is Max Dapanovitch. He's a Republican lobbyist who was
recruited by a Bush campaign official to advise Catherine Harris
during the recount.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
I was very partisan and known for it. There was
no doubt about who I was, how I felt, or
why I was summoned as Mary Madaline once said, I
am a bush Leech at bush Lett l I E g. E.
Bush Leech got a vassal.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Stepanovitch's role in the Secretary of State's Office during the
recount is a matter of some dispute. He says he
was there to work behind the scenes and make sure
that Katherin Harris brought the election in for a landing.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
I told her at the time, you know, a lot
of people run for public office and they believe that
when that moment comes, when that you know, John Kennedy
profile encourage moment arise, that they will rise to the occasion.
Speaker 11 (37:49):
I told her.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
That this is that moment. If you're going to do something,
do it today.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
But Harris plays down Stapanovitch's contributions.
Speaker 6 (38:01):
I don't want to discredit Mac, but that's he wants
to insert himself as important, and I understand, and I
value his I valued his friendship.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Whatever level of influence Tapanovitch had, it does sound like
he provided a kind of moral clarity to what the
Secretary of State's office was doing. As he saw it,
the Gore people were trying to cheat their way into
the White House, and they were doing it by dragging
things out until the vote came out in their favor.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
I think their perspective was what this entire exercise was
about was divining in some fashion the will of the
electorate and taking as much time as it was necessary
to do so. We thought maybe a good idea, just
(38:47):
to comply.
Speaker 7 (38:47):
With the law.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
The thing is, election law in Florida was not totally clear. Yes,
there was a statute on the books that said the
Secretary of State's office shall ignore any vote totals that
come in more than seven days after the election. But
there was another statute, a more recent one, that seemed
to conflict with the first one. This law said that
the Secretary of State may ignore laid vote totals, but
(39:10):
that she didn't have to.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
The Republicans who are trying to stop the recount cite
one statute. The Democrats relied on the very next statute,
shall or may, little words that could make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Like so many disputes that flared up during the two
thousand recount, this one was decided in a court room.
After hearing arguments from both sides, a circuit court judge
ruled that may trumped shall, meaning Catherine Harris could reject
laid vote totals that she wasn't required to by law.
The judge also ruled that Harris could not refuse to
(39:42):
grant extensions arbitrarily, she had to have real reasons for
doing so. After conferring with her staff and Max Dpanovich,
Harris addressed the ruling by asking the county canvassing boards
to explain why they couldn't make the November fourteenth deadline.
The next day, the secretary of State's office received memos
from Palm Beach, Miami Dade, and Broward in which they
(40:04):
cited legal confusion and logistical issues as reasons for needing
more time. After reviewing memos, Harris swiftly concluded that extensions
were not warranted. She would be sticking to her original position.
Speaker 16 (40:16):
Florida's Secretary of State, Catherine Harris has announced that she
is rejecting any further efforts to recount ballots from the
election by hand.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
The Secretary of State said that she will not consider
any extension of the votes the vote she has now influenced.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
In a press conference, Harris announced that she would be
certifying the election on the following Saturday, November eighteenth, Once
all overseas absentee ballots have been received.
Speaker 9 (40:40):
The reasons given in their requests are insufficient to warrant
waiver of the unambiguous filing deadline imposed by the Florida Legislature.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
The Gore team characterizing the Secretary's approach as kaf guys.
Speaker 19 (40:56):
We are very sorry that the Secretary of State has
taken such a rash and a precipitous action.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
By this point, only Belusia County had finished their manual recount.
The other counties were taking longer, and now it's like
their efforts were going to come to nothing. But the
Palm Beach Canvassing Board was not convinced that Harris's word
was final, so they filed an emergency petition with the
Florida Supreme Court asking whether they could still proceed with
their manual recount.
Speaker 26 (41:23):
They are still hoping that the State Supreme Court will
give them guidance about this particular county's recount. That is
why there is a sense of some limbo here in
Palm Beach County.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
All of this puts the focus on the Florida State
Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
The Florida Supreme Court issued a response the next day,
though the seven justices weren't prepared to say whether Harris
had to accept late counts. It was their position that
in the interim palm Beach was allowed to keep counting.
With that, the Florida Supreme Court opened a new chapter
in the recount saga. Once again, an ostensibly apolitical Florida
(41:59):
institution was faced with an impossible mission to remain nonpartisan
while making decisions that had unavoidably political ramifications. Before we continue,
I want to acknowledge that it's been quite a while
since we heard anything about the butterfly ballot. You might
be wondering did we just forget about that storyline or
(42:19):
what That would be a fair question, except it wasn't
really our decision to drop the butterfly ballot. It was
the Gore campaigns. Because for all the attention the butterfly
ballot got in the days after the election, it turned
out not to be a viable issue for Gore. It
was just a mistake that no one could plausibly fix.
Speaker 24 (42:39):
We determined that the butterfly ballot was a very difficult
issue because the remedy is hard to figure.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
That's Benedict Cuney. He's a Florida lawyer who worked for
Gore during the recount and led the team in Palm Beach.
Cuney told me that even though the butterfly ballot didn't
end up being a winning legal issue for Gore, it
was incredibly important as a galvanizing symbol.
Speaker 24 (43:01):
The butterfly ballot was one way of signifying that something
had gone horribly wrong with this election, and I think
that did Bowy people. It didn't have the same kind
of legal vitality that evaluating under votes or over votes,
but nonetheless it had a lot of oomph and pizazz.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
In addition to being visual and concrete, the butterfly ballot
made the Democrats feel like their fight was justified. It
was the flip side of the Bush team's belief that
Gore was trying to cheat to win. Here again is
Max Tapanovitch, the Republican lobbyist who advised Catherine Harris during
the recount.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
You know, the whole hanging chad thing, the determination of intent.
The longer that torture went on, the more likely it
was that they would manufacture votes. And the more pressure built,
either whether it was the media or whether it was
in the courts or otherwise, the more likely that the
dam would give way, and you would say, well, they're
(44:01):
registered in a heavy Democrat precinct, Well just assume their
Democrats and would have voted for out Gore. Let's count
that one for him. So you know, frequently people who
won't to give me a hard time, we'll talk about
us having stolen the election. And it is my belief
and I believe it sincerely, that we prevented the election
from being stolen.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Stepanovitch, by the way, agrees that most of the Buchanan
votes in Palm Beach were supposed to go to Gore.
He just doesn't think it matters.
Speaker 24 (44:30):
I believe.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That on that day, Election Day two thousand, that a
majority of the people who went to the polls and
intended to vote intended to vote for Al Gore. But
we can't know that because they failed to vote properly.
Speaker 16 (44:56):
We're now going to take you to Palm Beach, Florida.
In Palm Beach tonight, the voter recount is just beginning,
and we just thought we would listen in as they
begin their process.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Canvassing board in Palm Beach started it's manual recount on Thursday,
November sixteenth. It was going to be a much larger
undertaking than the one percent test. To accommodate the extra
volunteers and partisan observers that were needed to staff the effort,
the recount was housed in the Emergency Operations Center in
West Palm Beach, a cavernous space typically used as a
command center for government operations during hurricanes. Outside the Emergency
(45:32):
Operations Center, about four hundred Republican protesters gathered to voice
their opposition to the recount. They held signs shouting out
Katherine Harris, go cat go, and Harris we trust. Inside,
volunteers and county employees took their seats and got ready
to count. Over the course of the day, they would
(45:53):
be joined by a team of lawyers representing Gore and Bush,
a group that included John Bolton, the future National security
advisor to Donald Trump. Among the local volunteers who showed
up to help count ballots was John Winchester, the son
of former election supervisor Jackie Winchester.
Speaker 14 (46:10):
It was a crazy time. We had to get in
line early in the morning, and there were all these
protesters out there. A lot of people in the election's
office were just kind of, you know, we're nervous about it.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
John Winchester was no stranger to election administration. In addition
to hanging around the election's office when his mom ran
the show there, he also created the software that Palm
Beach County used to register voters. Just like with the
one percent count, most of the ballots that were being
recounted were no brainers. You could tell right away who
they were four. But not long after the counting started,
(46:43):
Winchester noticed that the Republican observers standing over his shoulder
were doing something strange.
Speaker 14 (46:48):
They were objecting to every ballot, Every ballot that wasn't
punched out for Bush they were objecting to. I remember
sitting at the table looking at a ballot, going, really, really,
what are you objecting to? This ballot is clearly a
vote for one candidate. There's one hole the next clear
But I object they would so they were totally They
(47:08):
were objecting without reason.
Speaker 7 (47:10):
These aren't pound and hanging and swinging on all pronounce
but there we.
Speaker 10 (47:15):
Don't have time to argue.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
According to recount procedure, every ballot that got objected to
was passed up to the three members of the canvassing board,
who would look over it together and decide whether it
bore any clear sign of voter intent. The problem was
that the board was getting so many ballots passed up
to them they couldn't get through them all.
Speaker 11 (47:34):
All right, your objections loaded, I say that, just it's
markedly different than the other ones.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Whatever. When Jackie Winchester's son told her what was happening
at the emergency center, she could barely contain her anger.
Speaker 7 (47:47):
The Republican observers very quickly figured out that if they
objected to ballots, even though there was obviously no reason
to object, that they could slow down the whole thing.
And it were certainly worked because the canvassing Board was
getting all of these ballots if they had to look
at when there was really no reason for them to
(48:08):
look at them.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Jackie Winchester felt that Teresa Lapour had made a big
mistake in having every single ballot counted individually. What Lapour
should have done, Winchester thought, was separate out the ballots
with undervotes, and how the canvassing board prioritize those. The
no brainers, meanwhile, could be assessed in bulk, thereby minimizing
the opportunity for partisan observers to slow down the process.
(48:31):
That was how Winchester had done recounts in the past
when she was election supervisor, and it had made for
a much more efficient process.
Speaker 7 (48:39):
I was very upset because I felt that she was
messing up the recount. I knew that she was aware
of the instructions for the way we normally did it,
and that the way she was ignoring that was just chaos.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
So I felt that it was wrong. Winchester tried to
get word to the canvassing board and to La Poor
in particular, but she couldn't get through. In her frustration,
Winchester later decided to go public with her complaints, telling
reporters that her long serving Ormer assistant had failed her constituents.
Winchester even attacked Lapour for the butterfly ballot, which she
(49:16):
had previously regarded as an innocent lapse in judgment.
Speaker 7 (49:19):
Had we not had the butterfly ballot, had people not
voted for your count and instead of Gore, I think
there probably would not even have been a recount in
Palm Beach County. The election probably would have been over
an election night. It is amazing if the consequences of
what seems at first like a fairly small mistake, did.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
You ever talk to Teresa about that? No, did you
ever talk to again after all this?
Speaker 12 (49:46):
No?
Speaker 11 (49:47):
I did not.
Speaker 7 (49:48):
I was pretty disgusted, I have to say.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
On the second day of the Palm Beach recount, Friday,
November seventeenth, there was an unexpected development out of Callahassee.
Speaker 17 (50:00):
Another day of hairpin turns in the court.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Like a political Lazarus, Al Gore came back from the
brink today the Supreme Court of Florida, breathing new life
into his crusade to count every vote.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
The Florida Supreme Court had handed down an injunction forbidding
Catherine Harris from certifying the election results until the Court
could review the case.
Speaker 15 (50:18):
The Court on its own motion and joins the respondent
Secretary of State from certifying the results of the November seventh,
two thousand presidential election until further order of this Court.
Speaker 17 (50:29):
Well the full range of emotions in the Bush campaign,
putting any plans for celebration on hold.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
The injunction was a major victory for Team Gore. Finally,
the shot clock had been halted, and the possibility that
Gore could still make up enough votes before the election
results were certified was once again alive.
Speaker 12 (50:44):
Today's court decisions have given Gore the most precious commodity
he could hope for time.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
Oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court were scheduled for Monday,
November twentieth, But first, the State of Florida had to
deal with something more important, an annual ritual that briefly
put the recount out of everyone's minds.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
This contest is not for politicians.
Speaker 17 (51:05):
Lawyers are hanging chads. Welcome to Florida versus Florida State.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
That Saturday, tens of thousands of people from around the
state descended on Tallahassee to watch the Florida State Seminoles
play football against the Florida Gators. Even as the recount
saga crept towards its third week, politicians and local businessmen
crowded into luxury boxes to rub elbows with their fellow
power brokers.
Speaker 17 (51:27):
Not a chilling northern of Florida.
Speaker 19 (51:30):
Evening the Florida State Seminoles post their rivals from.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Days A number of key participants in the recount watched
the game from a private box belonging to the President
of FSU. Guests included two justices from the Florida Supreme Court.
The Bush team's top lawyer, Ben Ginsburg, Florida Governor Jeb Bush,
and Secretary of State Catherine Harris. If things had gone
according to plan, Harris would have been allowed to certify
the election for Bush earlier that day. Instead, she had
(51:57):
to wait for the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in.
I would have assumed this was a stressful weekend for Harris,
but when I asked her about it, she said, the
Florida Supreme Court ruling just felt like another step in
the legal process.
Speaker 6 (52:10):
You know, that's what they ruled. They're entitled to that,
so we just follow the next step that the law required.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
I should mention Harris gave me kind of a hard
time for the name of this podcast.
Speaker 6 (52:21):
It wasn't a fiasco, it wasn't a constitutional crisis. It
was a close election, and what was fiasco esque was
the way the media handled it.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
But other than that, she sounded surprisingly sanguine.
Speaker 6 (52:36):
Because I don't have one single solitary regret.
Speaker 24 (52:39):
I could do it over.
Speaker 6 (52:41):
Many people say, boy, if you could wave a wand
and it never had to happen to you, would you
do it. But I'm so grateful that I had a
chance to be honorable in my actions, and so if
someone could wave a match you wand take.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
It away, I wouldn't let them. Why are you grateful
for it?
Speaker 6 (53:00):
I'm just grateful that I was, you know, in a
spiritual sense, because I'm Christian. You know that maybe in
all the earth thought I got chosen to handle that.
I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I feel like I was
found worthy.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
At the football game, Harris spoke to a group of
boosters and a couple of reporters. You know what I
dreamed of today, she told them. I dreamed that I
would ride into this stadium on a horse, carrying the
FSU flag in one hand and the certification in the other,
while everyone around me cheered. As it happened. The game
could not have played out more perfectly for the occasion.
(53:35):
While the clock ran down, the two teams were separated
by a single point and a potential game winning field goal,
and the final play of regulation time had to be
reviewed by the refs, and the.
Speaker 12 (53:45):
Two officials talked to each other. Crowd's going crazy.
Speaker 4 (53:50):
I mean the balls on the other side of walking.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
I'm just kidding. Florida State actually won that game easily,
thirty to seven.
Speaker 17 (53:59):
That is Florida's worst loss.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
It was a landslide, it.
Speaker 11 (54:03):
Was a round, and let's go quickly out of jack a.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Roof outside the stadium. The game was only just approaching halftime,
and though it wasn't exactly a tie, it really didn't
feel like anyone was winning. On the next episode of Fiasco,
how the confrontation in Florida went from a tangle of
courtroom proceedings to an extra legal street fight.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Why don't we do what democrats do?
Speaker 4 (54:31):
I said, Let's do some civil disobedience.
Speaker 3 (54:34):
Let's have a sit in, Let's create a ruckus.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
madelin kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Nafock. Our script
editor was Daniel Riley. Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer,
and we received additional editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our
(55:02):
music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode,
with additional music from Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips and y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special
Thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and
(55:25):
documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the
link in the show notes. Thanks to c SPAN, NBC
News Archive, CNN, and Channel twenty in Palm Beach for
the archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks for listening.
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