October 30, 2024 • 53 mins
How public relations battles yielded big legal wins for the Bush team.
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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 goor right now
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage, or
(00:37):
visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode
previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
The Gore campaign is trying to lengthen out the timeline.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a handcount of ballots
of Palm Beach County as well as three other counties.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
It was unsettling to me that a candidate would cherry
pick four counties out of sixty seven to recount fifty teams.
Speaker 5 (01:08):
We'll start to handcount more than four hundred and sixty
thousand ballots.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
There's been a lot of discussion about the Hanging Chad
and the dimple chat.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
The fundamental framework was to slow walk the count.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Gore advisor accusing Florida's Republican Secretary of State just trying
to ensure.
Speaker 7 (01:25):
A Bush victory.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
I had no idea to who benefit it would accrue.
I just know I had had to follow the law.
Speaker 8 (01:30):
Florida's highest state court has blocked the Secretary of State.
Speaker 9 (01:34):
Voice wins one round, Gore wins the next. It is
a legal slug fest that won't end soon.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
In the weeks after election day, an overwhelming majority of
Americans between seventy seven and eighty seven percent, said they
were closely following the Florida recount. But the Florida recount
was not easy to follow. Staying up on the latest
developments could feel a cramming for an exam the procedural
debates between the two parties and intricacies of Florida law
could be a bit much.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The judge says, the five o'clock deadline stands. But it's
not that simple, because the judge also says.
Speaker 10 (02:10):
Balance, Natalie, All of what John Zurella just explained was complicated,
but it did seem to be a little bit consistent.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
But there was more, and it was murkier. There were
just so many names and subplots to keep track of.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
There are so many claims and counter claims, so many
numbers flying through the air.
Speaker 11 (02:27):
We hope you all have your scorecards out, because this
one's getting more complicated.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
All the time, and no one knew how long it
was going to take to resolve.
Speaker 12 (02:33):
Everybody is starting to lose patience with this election.
Speaker 13 (02:36):
The process seems doomed to work its slow and painful
way through a series of court rooms.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
No matter what happens, it certainly leaves Florida in a
sort of legal state of limbo.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The worst part might have been how impossible it was
to talk about the recount without using all these horrible
bureaucratic phrases like certification deadline and canvassing board and advisory opinion.
This deadening jargon was not just a problem for journalists
trying to make the recount story exciting or at least legible.
It was also a problem for the two campaigns. Both
(03:09):
of them needed to frame the churn of the recount
on their terms, and to do so in ways that
had at least some emotional residence. Democrats found that emotional
residence early with the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach. It
was easy to comprehend how terrible it might feel to
know that you wasted your vote in such a close race.
But about ten days after the election, the Republicans found
(03:30):
an emotional rallying point of their own, and they found
it in something exquisitely boring sounding called overseas absentee ballots.
Speaker 8 (03:38):
The postmarks come from all over the world, votes usually overlooked.
Speaker 14 (03:43):
This year, they could determine the election.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
More than six million Americans live overseas, which is.
Speaker 15 (03:48):
Roughly the size of the population of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Just how many of those absentee ballots are author are
still to be.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Counted, and who will get how many of them? Overseas
absentee ballots were used by American citizens living abroad in
recent presidential elections. The state of Florida had received between
fifteen hundred and three thousand of them in a normal election.
That was not a lot of votes. But in two thousand,
when it became clear that overseas absentee ballots could determine
(04:15):
the outcome of the race, they were thrust into the
center of a bitter confrontation between the two campaigns.
Speaker 16 (04:20):
There are battles going on in county offices all over
the state. We've heard reports of county officials screaming at
each other as Democrats and Republicans go to the map
for every overseas absentee vote.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
The process for tabulating overseas absentee ballots in Florida followed
its own special timeline, one that was intended to compensate
for the fact that mail coming in from far away
takes a long time to get where it's going. Here's
Mark Herron, a lawyer who became an expert on overseas
absentee ballots while working with the Gore recount team.
Speaker 8 (04:50):
In Florida. You could continue to receive and count overseas
absentee ballots until ten days after the election if they
had been postmarked prior to the close of election day.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
The voters who used overseas absentee ballots tended to belong
to one of several distinct groups American diplomats working at
four or embassies, American Jews living in Israel, expats in general,
and US military personnel stationed abroad. The Gore team expected
many of the overseas ballots to come from this last group,
and that they would overwhelmingly favor Bush.
Speaker 8 (05:24):
The military people were generally more conservative in terms of
their viewpoints on the world than Democrats, and I guess
the thinking would be that the military folks would vote
for Bush. As opposed to Gore.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
As overseas absentee ballots poured into Florida's sixty seven county
canvassing boards, the Gore team worried that their opponents would
try to take advantage of the system.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
There were reports and rumors that planes military planes were
flying into Panama City stuffed would oversee ballots that had
not been postmarked prior to election day.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
No evidence of such organized ballots stuffing ever emerged, but
at the time anything seemed possible, so higher ups on
the Gore recount team asked Heron to do some research
and write up a detailed memo under what circumstances would
it be appropriate, according to Florida law, to challenge the
validity of an overseas absentee ballot. The intended audience for
Heron's memo was the network of Democratic lawyers helping the
(06:22):
Gore campaign around the state. When Florida's sixty seven counties
started going through their overseas absentee ballots, these lawyers would
be responsible for challenging incomplete or legal ones.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
They could use it when they appeared before the canvassing
boards and say, hey, this one here can't be counted
because it isn't signed. This one here can't be counted
because there's no postmark on it. There's no postmark that
indicates that it was mailed or transmitted prior to the
close of election day, or it has a postmark that's
after election day, and therefore it can't be accepted.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
In its first paragraph, Heron's memo specifically mentioned members of
the Armed forces, along with other citizens of the United
States who are temporarily residing outside the country. The memo
went out to a group of Democratic Party lawyers on
November fifteenth, with the expectation that it would stay among friends,
but less than forty eight hours later, a copy made
its way to Bush headquarters in Tallahassee. The Republicans instantly
(07:21):
recognized it as a major opportunity. Here was a Gore
lawyer providing instructions on how to disqualify votes sent in
by American soldiers. The indignant TV appearances practically booked themselves.
Speaker 12 (07:33):
The Vice President's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment,
against the men and women who serve in our armed forces.
Speaker 14 (07:39):
I'm tired of hearing Democrats saying, including out Gore account
every vote, and yet they're all over the state of Florida,
challenging thousands of our military votes.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
The Bush team pushed the story to every news out
what they could, and organized press conferences to publicize the issue.
Speaker 17 (07:54):
We are concerned that a targeted effort by the Democratic
Party sought to throw out as many as a third
of the overseas absentee ballots received since election day, many
of them the votes of the men and women of
our United States Armed Forces who are serving the cause
of freedom throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
The Heron memo, as it came to be known, instantly
broke through the static of recount coverage. And if you're
wondering how the Bush communications team turned to phrase as
cumbersome as oversees absentee ballots into a hot issue, the
answer is they didn't have to because they could call
them military ballots instead.
Speaker 12 (08:31):
The Democrats have launched a statewide effort throughout as many
military ballots as they can.
Speaker 16 (08:37):
Democratic lawyers had been given guidelines on how to challenge
military ballots, and the wife of one sailor spoke out.
Speaker 18 (08:43):
It was the first that he had heard that his
ballot was one of the votes that did not count.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I don't think it's too cynical or unfair to wonder
how the Gore team didn't see this coming. But Heron
really thought that all he was doing was summarizing this
corner of Florida election law so that Gore's lawyers in
the ground would know what they were dealing with. Now
the campaign was being accused of trying to disenfranchise men
and women in uniform.
Speaker 8 (09:10):
The military is a somewhat sacred thing, and these folks
are giving up their lives, their family life, you know,
to defend the country. And then to say that, hey,
these Democrats are trying to take away their vote. It
kind of all fits into the narrative of what democrats
are all about, and it was very, very powerful. They
do a great job with spin even when the reality
(09:31):
is completely to the contrary, and this was one of
those examples.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
You may recall that in our previous episode you heard
a lot of people say repeatedly that all they did
during the recount was follow the law. But as Mark
Heron learned the hard way, the recount was about much
more than the law. It was also about politics as
a means of influencing how the law gets applied. By
using the Heron memo as the basis for a pr
onslaught against Gore. The Bush team wasn't just trying to
(09:57):
score points on cable news or win hearts and minds.
They were generating pressure that would make the law work
to their advantage. I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and
Pushkin Industries. This is Fiasco Bush v.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Gore.
Speaker 19 (10:13):
Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in
the courts, but not on the streets.
Speaker 11 (10:18):
Republican demonstrators stormed the hallway.
Speaker 17 (10:21):
It sounds like you're in the middle of a prison riot.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Episode four spinoff How the Bush campaign achieved crucial legal
victories by burying Al Gore in the court of public opinion,
Believe it or not. One of Al Gore's most effective
(10:47):
advocates in two thousand was his running mate Joe Lieberman.
During the recount, while Gore strategized with his lawyers behind
the scenes, Lieberman appeared on TV as something between an
attack dog and a cheerleader. Day after day he defended
the Democratic line and calmly predicted that when all the
votes were counted, he and Gore would be victorious.
Speaker 20 (11:06):
We think we want if we think if all the
votes in Florida. Aret it not only will we have
won the popular vote in America, Al Gore and I
would have won the election. Maybe our opponents think that too,
and that's why they don't want those votes to be counted.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
With Gore facing intense criticism over Mark Heron's memo, the
campaign looked to Liberman to come in and play the enforcer.
On Saturday, November eighteenth, Lieberman was briefed on the Haroan
memo over the phone, and the next morning he appeared
on Meet the Press with Tim Russard.
Speaker 20 (11:35):
Senator Joseph Lieberman is with us, welcome back, warning Tim
still a senator, not Vice president.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Russert brought up the Heron memo almost immediately.
Speaker 11 (11:43):
And people are very, very concerned.
Speaker 20 (11:45):
They point to a memo written by.
Speaker 9 (11:47):
Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists the Gore campaign, telling
Democratic lawyers, this is how you knock out balance from
military people overseas.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
They don't have a postmark to the Gore operatives in Tallahassee.
Watching Lieberman's appearance on TV, it was obvious how he
should have responded.
Speaker 21 (12:06):
He was getting pounded, and the answers should have been
we're for counting all votes that were cast on before
election day.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
This is Nick Baldick, one of Gore's top lieutenants in Florida.
Speaker 21 (12:16):
You know there are proceedures to make sure that illegal
votes don't come in after and those should be upheld.
That would have been roughly the response I would have given.
It was not the response he gave.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Instead, Lieberman took a trip to Waffle City. He didn't
even try to defend the campaign or make the argument
for enforcing election law in the way Heron's memo had suggested.
Speaker 20 (12:36):
Again, Al Gore and I don't want to. I don't
want to ever be part of anything that would put
an extra burden on the military personnel abroad.
Speaker 22 (12:43):
If Joe Lieberman said this morning, count those.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Baldick watched in disbelief as Lieberman threw Mark Herron and
the Gore campaign as a whole under the bus.
Speaker 20 (12:51):
My own point of view, if I was there, I
would give the benefit of the doubt to Bellot's coming
in from a military personnel generally, but particularly in light
of the letter and the kind of statements we've heard
about it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
But the here's Baldick again.
Speaker 21 (13:06):
I mean, I remember screaming at the television, being very
angry when lots of people working with me, young people volunteers,
had been across sixty seven counties trying to uphold the
law and make sure the ballots from Maryland and ones
that were sent obviously after election day were not counted illegally,
(13:28):
and they were screamed at and called unpatriotic and had
batteries thrown at them, and Senator Lieberman sold all those
people out by just caving on that morning.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Heron, who was also watching the interview from gore headquarters,
did not take it well.
Speaker 8 (13:43):
It was like I'd been kicked in the stomach. I
was quite sick, so to speak, and at that point
in time I had to leave the building and walk
around Tallahassee for a while. I just couldn't believe what
he had done.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Lieberman told me in an interview that he still remembers
meeting with Gore after his TV appearance.
Speaker 23 (14:03):
And it was actually, as I recall, the only time
during the whole campaign when now seemed to be disappoint
pointed in something I'd done.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
But Lieberman maintains he did the right thing, the patriotic thing,
the morally defensible thing by distancing the campaign from the
Haroan memo.
Speaker 23 (14:19):
We Democrats believe in the franchise, and in fact that
other parts of Florida were fighting because we were alleging
that the Republican officials prevented some people from voting.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Setting aside the legal merits of the Haroan memo, Lieberman
says that he was concerned about how the campaign would
look if he stood by it. What if Democrats ended
up winning the White House and American soldiers believed that
their own commander in chief had tried to disenfranchise them.
Speaker 23 (14:47):
And I must say the other thing that swung into
action as Tim Ruster to meet to Posess with this
question was wait a second, I don't want al Gaar
and me to be seen as people who are gonna
do anything to stop We want so much to win
that we're going to block the vote of a soldier
who's overseas serving us because he made some technical mistake.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Lieberman wanted the campaign to commit to its count every
vote mantra, even if he saw Republicans making contradictory arguments
of their.
Speaker 23 (15:19):
Own, because both sides were being inconsistent. The Republicans were
calling for technical adherence to the law in some parts
of the state about cutting ballots, but they were saying, oh,
you got to go a little easy on these soldiers.
We were saying, in some parts of the state, you
got to be a little easy on these voters, particularly
(15:40):
minority voters, and not exclude them from voting. But in
this case, we were saying, this is the letter of
the law, so that these absmptee ballots can't be count it.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
After Liberman's appearance on Meet the Press, other Democrats joined
him in calling for lenient standard on military ballots.
Speaker 24 (15:58):
That's the order from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Among them was Bob Butterworth, the Democratic Attorney General of Florida.
Speaker 14 (16:05):
Saying no man or woman in military service to this
nation should have his or vote rejected solely due to
the absence of a post bar.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
It was not exactly a legal victory for Republicans, since
neither Lieberman nor Butterworth had authority over any aspect of
the recount, but symbolically it was devastating.
Speaker 14 (16:23):
The public relations fight over rejected overseas absentee ballots.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
On NBC's Meet.
Speaker 25 (16:29):
The Press, Joe Lieberman supports giving them quote the benefit
of the doubt.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
More after the break. While the Gore campaign tried to
play defense on overseas absentee ballots, the hand recount of
regular old domestic ballots was continuing in fits and starts.
The four counties where Gore had requested recounts were all
at different stages of the process. Palm Beach and Broward
(17:00):
had been added for several days, Volusia was already done.
In Miami Dade, they hadn't even started yet. Now this
feels like a good moment to confess some thing, which
is that here at Fiasco, our journalistic bias towards the
dramatic and dysfunctional means that Volusia and Broward, where the
hand recounts went relatively smoothly, are getting short tripped on
(17:20):
this podcast. It's not exactly fair, but shout out to
them for doing such a good job counting votes. That
hearing about it is not all that interesting. In Miami Dada,
on the other hand, things were about to get turbulent.
To be fair, the task before the Miami Dade canvassing
board was enormous. It was the biggest county in Florida
(17:41):
by a huge margin, and they had about six hundred
and fifty thousand votes. To get through a recount would
require a lot of manpower and a lot of time,
and because of how many votes were at stake, both
the Bush campaign and the Gore campaign were watching the
process like hawks and fighting over it.
Speaker 5 (17:58):
Also like hawks, Republicans in Miami tried one last time
this morning to prevent a handcount in Florida's most populist county.
The effort failed, opening the door to a recount that
could add hundreds, maybe thous of new votes to the
state's total.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
The logistics of the recount in Miami Dade were pretty
much the same as in Palm Beach. After going through
a one percent sample of the overall vote, approximately six
thousand ballots, the Canvassing board debated whether or not to
conduct a full manual recount. After some hesitation, they decided
to proceed.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Miami Dade County, under pressure from the Gore campaign, decided
that it too, will recount ballots by hand, meaning that
heavily democratic Florida counties will be recounting more than one
point seven million ballots.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
The eighteenth floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center
in downtown Miami was converted into a publicly accessible recount room.
Rows of tables and chairs were set up for the
people doing the counting and the partisan volunteers who had
been sent to watch over the proceedings. The three members
of the canvassing board sat at a special table up
front where they examined ballots that have been deemed ambiguous.
Speaker 14 (19:01):
It all began at nine to oh two. If you're counting,
and these people certainly are to our Day County.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
The recount began on Monday, November twentieth, two days after
the Big Florida Florida State football game.
Speaker 14 (19:13):
Four at each table in the highest stakes card game
in the land, and.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
At first it looked like they might actually get it done.
This was a very happy development for al Gore. As
long as ballots were being counted, it meant he still
had a chance of picking up new votes and eating
into Bush's lead.
Speaker 14 (19:30):
Al Gore has picked up a net gain of eighteen votes,
but there are six hundred and fourteen precincts total that
must be recounted.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
In the next night, just before ten o'clock, the Gore
team received even more good news, this time from Tallahassee,
where the Florida Supreme Court had just issued a ruling.
Speaker 7 (19:49):
Good evening.
Speaker 26 (19:50):
My name is Craig Waters. I'm the spokesman for the
Florida Supreme Court. I'm now going to read to you
a statement that was authorized by the entire Court, the
court halls that amended certifications from the county.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Camp Remember, at this point, the manual recountscore had requested
were being threatened by the Florida Secretary of State, who
was refusing to accept what she called late vote counts.
A few days earlier, the Florida Supreme Court had stepped
in and blocked Catherine Harris from certifying the election results
until they could weigh in. Oral arguments have been held
on Monday, November twentieth. The central question at hand was
(20:22):
whether Catherine Harris had acted improperly by refusing to accept
late vote totals from the three counties still conducting handcounts.
And now the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court
had handed down a unanimous ruling they were siding with Gore.
Speaker 27 (20:35):
The court saying hand counts in three Florida counties must
be included in the state vote totals.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
This was a huge and potentially decisive victory for the
Gore campaign.
Speaker 26 (20:45):
The court halls that amended certifications from the county canvassing
boards must be accepted by the Election Canvassing Commission.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
As part of their ruling, the court set a new
certification deadline of Sunday, November twenty sixth, at five pm,
thereby giving the canvassing boards in Miami Dade, Palm Beach,
and Broward five more days to count ballots. The ruling
further specified that if the Secretary of State's officer was
not open on that Sunday, the counties could turn in
their vote totals on the following Monday morning at nine am.
Speaker 26 (21:16):
Until nine am on November twenty seven. The opinion of
the Court is.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
But that wasn't all. In addition to granting the deadline extension,
the justices also ruled that hyper technical adherence to voting
instructions was less important than the intent of the voter.
The fundamental purpose of election laws, the court wrote in
its opinion, was to facilitate and safeguard the right of
each voter to express his or her will. Gore celebrated
(21:41):
the ruling as a major victory.
Speaker 10 (21:43):
The Florida Supreme Court has now spoken, and we will
move forward now with a full, fair and accurate count
of the ballots in question. Our democracy is the winner.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Tonight, the Bush side was apoplectic. As they saw it,
the Florida Supreme Court had just retroactively changed Florida election
law by pushing back the certification deadline. To the Republicans,
that looked like a violation of the US Constitution, which
said that election laws had to be in place before
the voters went to the polls, and they were to
(22:15):
be drafted by state legislatures, not state courts. Just before
midnight on the night of the ruling, James Baker, the
head of the Bush recount effort, offered some pointed thoughts
at a press conference in Tallahassee.
Speaker 9 (22:27):
It is not fair to change the election laws of
Florida by a judicial fiat after the election has been held.
It is simply not fair, ladies and gentlemen, to change
the rules, either in the middle of the game or
after the game has been played.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Bush's supporters and media surrogates moved swiftly to paint the
Florida Supreme Court as a biased institution run by Democrats
who were trying to swing the election toward Gore. Charles Wells,
the chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court at the
time remembers one remark especially vividly.
Speaker 27 (23:01):
I had read a comment by Congressman at the time,
Joe Scarborough from Pitscola, and his comment was, Tonight the
Florida Supreme Court declared war on the rule of law
in Florida. Seven radical Democratic lawyers have chosen to ignore
the clear intent of Florida's legislature and executive branches. Is
(23:26):
a political war they want. It's a political war. They
should get lost.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Amid all this heated rhetoric was that the Florida Supreme
Court ruling actually came with a major silver lining for
the Bush campaign. Specifically, the part about how voter intent
matters more than strict adherence to the technical requirements provided Republicans
with a perfect weapon with which to attack the Democrats
on the issue of overseas absentee ballots. Prior to the ruling,
(23:52):
Bush's lawyers have been having trouble persuading canvassing boards around
the state to accept overseas absentee ballots that lacked signatures,
proper postmarks, and so on. A total of four hundred
and twenty ballots have been thrown out as of November seventeenth.
Now it seemed possible that hundreds of those ballots would
be back on the table, and the deadline extension for
certifying the election results gave the Bush lawyer's time to
(24:14):
make their case. To the Gore campaign's chagrin, there was
another way the Florida Supreme Court ruling turned out to
benefit Bush, one that had nothing to do with overseas
absentee ballots and everything to do with the ongoing recount
in Miami. Because while the intention of the Supreme Court
had been to give the counties more time, the Miami
(24:36):
Dade Canvassing Board had been banking on getting even more.
In their initial estimate, the board had figured that the
work of reviewing all six hundred and fifty thousand ballots
in the county was going to take them until December first.
The new deadline of November twenty sixth meant they had
five fewer days than they'd budgeted for, and so the
morning after the Florida Supreme Court ruling came down, the
(24:58):
Canvassing Board held a public meeting to review their options.
The Supervisor of Elections was audibly anxious about how the
recount process could be sped up.
Speaker 28 (25:05):
We could not, given our best efforts of this board,
the best effort to the county, the best efforts of
all these people sitting here, complete the manual recount the
way we've been doing it, even adding more tables, adding
more staff.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
After some discussion, one of the board members proposed an idea.
What if instead of counting all the ballots by hand,
the board did a recount of just the ambiguous ballots
that the machines couldn't read. By separating out the roughly
ten thousand ballots that had not officially recorded a vote
for president, the so called undervotes, the board could focus
their energies and their time on ballots that required human attention.
Speaker 29 (25:44):
And so the board voted unanimously a ditch the results
of their two day county wide recount and focus on
ten thousand under votes and.
Speaker 28 (25:52):
Count the undercounted ballots approximately ten thousand, seven hundred and
fifty public.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
It was a little before nine am when the board
members decided to give the plan a world franchise. After
explaining to everyone gathered in the counting room what they
were doing, the three of them headed upstairs to a
private area on the nineteenth floor to separate out the
undervotes and start examining them. The Republican observers who had
been helping with the count reacted to the board's announcement
with profound suspicion.
Speaker 22 (26:19):
There were slow grumblings that, you know, wait, what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
What this is Lena m Conky pelt here In two thousand,
she was a young lobbyist based in Washington, DC, and
like many of her Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, she
flew down to Florida to lend a hand with the
recount after the Bush campaign put out a call for
volunteers to.
Speaker 22 (26:38):
Take it behind closed doors and say they're going to
finish the count. Just it's stunk. It didn't look good,
didn't sound good, and we couldn't believe they were doing
it with a straight face.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Not wanting to let the Canvassing Board members out of
their site, ma Conki pelt Here and a group of
other Republicans followed them up to the nineteenth floor.
Speaker 22 (26:58):
We had been good, dutiful volunteers, and they were taking
it out of our hands and shutting down the process,
and that really didn't go overwell.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Words spread quickly that the Canvassing Board was throwing some
kind of curve ball a.
Speaker 29 (27:11):
Decision, eliciting an angry response by Republicans.
Speaker 19 (27:14):
This is the most brazen attempt by the Gore people
and the Democrat machine and the thugs in that building
to hijack the American presidency.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Outside the Clark Government Center, a crowd of Bush supporters
had been protesting the recount for several days. They led
Chance of No More Gore, weaved American flags and held
up signs that said Sore losermen. Overseeing the protest was
a Republican operative named Brad Blakeman. He was huddled inside
a parked RV in the plaza outside the Clark Center. Previously,
(27:45):
Blakeman had worked for the Bush campaign as an advanced man,
basically a high level event planner.
Speaker 19 (27:50):
Generally speaking for W's presidential campaign. I was in charge
of major media events. So I was in charge of
the convention. I was in charge of the debates. I
was in charge of major rallies.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Once the recount started, Blakeman knew how to make himself useful.
Speaker 19 (28:05):
We saw a three legged stool, and we knew that
this battle would be fought in the courts. We knew
that this battle would be fought in the recount centers.
But the leg that was missing was the public relations.
Although the voting had ended, the campaign had not.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
When Blakeman caught wind of what the canvassing board was
up to on the nineteenth floor, he got worried. The
recount in Miami had already cut Bush's lead by about
one hundred and fifty votes. Who knew how many more
Gore votes the board might find among the remaining undervotes.
Blakeman decided to make a move.
Speaker 19 (28:38):
When we found out that they were going to go
to an expedited system and that we could very possibly
lose the momentum and Gore would be ahead, we had
to figure out what are we going to do? What
are options? And one of the options I thought of
was why don't we do what democrats do? I said,
let's do some civil disobedience, Let's have a sit in,
(28:59):
let's create a ruckus.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I should say here that there is someone else who
takes credit for instigating the ruckus from inside the RV,
and that is self styled dirty trickster Roger stone. Stone
was not available for an interview, but for what it's worth,
Blakeman insists that he had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 19 (29:15):
He wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
He wasn't there at all.
Speaker 19 (29:17):
That was my RV. I rented it, and I could
assure you if he was in there, I would have
known about it, and he wouldn't have been there for.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Long in any event, When the canvassing board went up
to the nineteenth floor, a procession of Republican protesters, mostly
young men, streamed into the Clark Center and piled onto
the elevators.
Speaker 17 (29:36):
All right, just to add a little more drama to
this situation, Republican recount.
Speaker 14 (29:40):
Observers, I had a little scuffle with police this morning.
Speaker 11 (29:44):
Republican demonstrators stormed the hallways and demanded access to the
recount room.
Speaker 19 (29:50):
And you know, first we had to get permission. Spoke
to the sheriff and the people that you know, what
we're going to do, why we're going to do it,
That we're not dangerous, a lot of us are lawyers.
We're not going to be arrested. We're not there to
be disrespectful. But we feel like we're being taken advantage
of and that the system is not working and that
(30:10):
this is something that we need to do to send
a message upstairs.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The protesters joined Maconkey pelt here and the other Republican
observers and demanding to be let into the counting room.
We're joined now by our Frank Buckley.
Speaker 17 (30:28):
He's on the phone with us.
Speaker 30 (30:29):
Frank, it sounds like you're in the middle of a
prison riot. I mean, are you getting the feeling that
this is out of control?
Speaker 31 (30:36):
Clearly, this is a raucous crowd. It was a raucous
and confined crowd on the nineteenth floor with people trying
to get into the room where the canvassing board was
going to commence operations.
Speaker 32 (30:52):
The people who came out to protest were wearing, you know,
button down shirts, tucked into khaki pants and got probably
in those days, braided belts. If we consume in enough
on the photos.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
This is Nicholas Cololish. He was covering the Miami Dade
recount as a twenty five year old reporter for the
Wall Street Journal, and he was on the nineteenth floor
of the Clark Center when the protesters arrived.
Speaker 32 (31:14):
You definitely have the impression that these were the people
who did not protest in college, and that they didn't
really necessarily know how to protest, that they're sort of
sort of winging it. For the very first time.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That the protesters pounded on the window leading to the
tabulation room, Coolish felt the atmosphere change.
Speaker 32 (31:39):
And what I remember very vividly was they were pounding
on the glass and on the other side of the
glass there were municipal workers and some deputies. I mean,
people were really fired up. The rhetoric that they were
using was very much of a stolen election, of democracy
(32:00):
being undone, and I couldn't judge to what extent it is
sincere or cynical, but there is something that can happen
where people can start to under the spell of their
own rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
The demonstration reached a climax when one of the Republicans
on the nineteenth floor accused the Democratic Party official of
trying to steal a ballot.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
At one point, they charged the Democratic attorney. It turned
out to be a sample or practice ballot.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The three members of the canvassing board moved back downstairs
to get away from the chaos. Eventually the nineteenth floor
quieted down. Later, the incident at the Stephen P. Clark
Government Center was nicknamed the Brooks Brothers Riot, and in
its aftermath there was a lot of debate about how
volatile and dangerous it had actually been. One Bush lawyer
claimed that a press conference that there had been little
(32:54):
kids and babies in the crowd and that there was
quote in some ways a holiday atmosphere. Leida McConkey pelt
here didn't go quite that far when I asked her
about it, but she still finds the allegations of violence absurd.
Speaker 22 (33:05):
I don't think it would have ever turned violent. I
think the anger was palpable. I mean, everybody who was
standing there was feeling it, and I'm sure they felt
it on the other side of the door.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
After the demonstration, Macnkie Peltier became a minor icon thanks
to a widely circulated photo in which you could be
seen wearing a red dress and brandishing her fist alongside
a group of guys and white button downs.
Speaker 22 (33:30):
So I would say that there was an element of anger,
but not violence. I mean, come on, I'm standing there
in the Liz Claiborne dress. I'm not going to be
taking anybody out.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Regardless. The three members of the canvassing board seemed rattled
by what happened, and they halted the undervote plan in
order to regroup.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
We've been listening to a hearing down in Miami Dade
Canvassing Board.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
There's ongoing dispute about the hand count, exactly what they
will count and what they will not.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
But the few hours later they reconvened for another public
meeting to make an important announcement.
Speaker 13 (34:01):
I do not believe that there is time to carry
out a complete, full manual recount that is accurate and
that will count every vote because of the limitations put
on this board in terms of time.
Speaker 30 (34:17):
I do agree with Judge King and mister Lahy that
it is not physically possible to continue with this task.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
We do want to the Miami Dade recount was over,
none of the new gore votes that have been discovered
would be counted in the final vote tally.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
That is the unanimous decision of this Canvassing Board that
we will not be proceeding further with a manual recount,
and that the certification of November eighth, two thousand be
accepted by the Secretary of State for the valid cast
votes of Miami Dade County.
Speaker 30 (34:53):
All right, the Miami Dade County Canvassing Board taking a
vote to end the recount. There there will be no
more counting of votes in Miami Dade County, the largest county.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
The Gore team watched in horror as the canvassing Board
announced their decision on live tele division. The main reason
they gave for stopping was that there just wasn't enough
time to finish before the deadline. But what was different
at one thirty pm compared to eight that morning, when
completing the count had still seemed feasible. Common sense seemed
to suggest that the protesters had intimidated the canvassing board
(35:26):
into abandoning the recount.
Speaker 32 (35:27):
The whole tone of things had changed, and it was
certainly the biggest thing that happened between when they were
counting the ballots and when they suddenly decided not to
count the ballots. You know, you're you're on an election board,
and like your job is to ensure like a free, fair,
you know, and impartial election, and the idea that sort
of that sort of people chanting and chasing partisans from
(35:51):
of the other side, you know, around and threatening people
causes you to stop counting votes. It seems like almost
as undemocratic a thing as you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Right after the vote, one canvassing board member told reporter
that the protesters' concerns were a factor in the decision
that when it became clear that the board's work around
the deadline problem wasn't going to fly, they were left
with no other options. This was perceived as not being
an open and fair process, the canvassing board members said,
(36:24):
and that weighed heavily in our minds. Once again, the
Republicans appeared to have outmatched the Gore team through raw
political strength. Brad Blakeman told me that he was astonished
that it had been so easy.
Speaker 19 (36:37):
Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in
the courts and the recount centers, but not publicly on
the streets, and it was if it was a total
sterile environment, and that we were the only ones there
who seemed to, you know, fight for what we believed in.
We fully expected to be overrun, quite frankly, because we
(37:00):
said that Democrats are going to be out in force,
and they never showed up anywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
In fact, early in the recount, there were organized protests
in Gore's favor, particularly in Palm Beach, where Jesse Jackson
led rallies criticizing the butterfly ballot and calling attention to
the alleged disenfranchisement of Haitian American voters. But al Gore
worried about the spectacle coming across as unseemly, and he
(37:28):
put out word to Jackson that he would prefer it
if he left town. We'll be right back. While the
battle overhand recounts raged in South Florida, the Bush campaign
and their allies tried to gain an advantage in other
(37:49):
parts of the state by continuing to hammer Gore on
the issue of military ballots.
Speaker 25 (37:53):
Those rejected absentee military ballots. Hundreds of servicemen's ballots were
initially tossed out statewide for, among other things, missing or
late postmarks.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
Ballots.
Speaker 25 (38:02):
Republicans have been beating the drum.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
To have counted.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
As you recall, the controversy around military ballots initially played
out at the lefvel of public relations. For the first
few days after Mark Heron's memo got leaked, Bush's people
seem to be mostly focused on making Gore look bad.
Speaker 25 (38:17):
They're having people like Senator Bob Dole, military heroes speak out, they.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Went on TV, they gave press conferences.
Speaker 27 (38:24):
If they're going to count a dimple, then they need
to count a vet's vote.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
They even got retired General Norman Schwartzkoff to issue a statement,
just not fair.
Speaker 15 (38:32):
It's a sad day for this country when our military
people on the front lines don't get their ballot counted
when the selection of the Commander in chief.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
But then on November twenty second, the same day as
the Brooks Brothers riot in Miami, the Bush campaign raised
the stakes by bringing the issue into the legal realm.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Bush's lawyers file suits in thirteen Florida counties seeking to
have hundreds of rejected overseas absentee ballots counted, many of
them from sailors and soldiers serving abroad.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Bush filed suit against more than a dozen Florida counties
where overseas absentee ballots have been disqualified because they lacked postmarks, signatures,
or other elements required by law. The lawsuit accused the
Gore campaign of pressuring the canvassing boards into rejecting ballots
that should have been counted.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Republicans sensing that Gore is vulnerable on the issue of
military ballots.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
The lawsuit didn't end up having legs, but it didn't
need to. Before a judge had even made a ruling,
six of the counties named as plaintiffs in the suit
agreed to their own volition to reevaluate the overseas ballots
that they had earlier rejected.
Speaker 14 (39:35):
It was postparked from the United States, but I see
no reason not.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
To include this here again is Mark Herron.
Speaker 8 (39:42):
And so all these canvassing boards decide they're going to
meet again and review what they had done previously. Okay,
and so they started accepting ballots that do not have
any postmarks on them. To me, those ballots from a
legal point of view should not have been accepted. But again,
this furor over the issue led some people not to
(40:03):
show that they had backbone to follow the law.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
It was a case of perfect synergy between legal and
political warfare. By creating public pressure around the issue of
military ballots, the Republicans were able to shape how the
law was interpreted and applied. By the end of the week,
canvassing boards around the state had agreed to accept two
hundred and eighty eight ballots that had previously been rejected
as illegal.
Speaker 25 (40:25):
Those absentee ballots inched upward all afternoon for Governor Bush,
finally handling him one hundred and eight more overseas votes
at a time when Peter every vote matter precisely.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Thanks much with that, a pr misstep by the Gore
team had been converted into real gains for Bush. It
didn't matter that in order to make that happen, the
Republicans had been forced to stake out two mutually inconsistent
positions on ballot standards. So what if they were calling
for a looser approach to ballots that were likely to
benefit Bush while calling for precise adherence to the law
in counties that went for Gore. Unlike the Democrats, the
(40:58):
Republicans weren't afraid of looking like hypocrites. They were afraid
of losing.
Speaker 7 (41:07):
Let's turned out a Palm Beach county where the canvassing
ord is trying to be the deadline of five pm
today for completing it's hand raycot see it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
On Sunday, November twenty sixth, both campaigns were bracing themselves
for the arrival of the new certification deadline for vote totals. Remember,
according to the Florida Supreme Court ruling, the counties had
until five pm to turn in their numbers if the
Secretary of State's office was open. If it wasn't, they'd
have until the following morning, in Palm Beach County, the
(41:35):
manual recount was still furiously underway. It had been going
well well enough that Charles Burton and Teresa Lapour, two
of the Palm Beach Canvassing Board members, had decided it
would be okay to take a break for Thanksgiving. This
turned out to be a grave mistake. By Sunday at noon,
the prospect of finishing the count on time no longer
looked so good.
Speaker 24 (41:57):
They're still counting in the Emergency Operations Center. Be behind me,
and time will tell. And indeed the clock is ticking
away here. They have been going now since eight am
yesterday morning, and they still now have about five hours
to go.
Speaker 31 (42:10):
If you do the math.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The Palm Beach Canvassing Board still had about five four
hundred ballots to get through, and since the Secretary of
State's office was open for business, the deadline was five pm.
Speaker 24 (42:20):
Catherine Harris, the Secretary of State, is inside the administrative
building here inside at work today on the Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Now, around half past noon, Judge Burton organized a press
conference and read a letter out loud to Catherine Harris,
pleading for more time.
Speaker 7 (42:35):
It says, Dear Secretary Harris, the Palm Beach County Canvassing
Board respectfully requests your assistance and ensuring that the most
accurate results of the two thousand presidential election are submitted
for certification. We have been working diligently, including the last
twenty four hour period, to complete this critical portion of
(42:57):
the handcount. Your consideration of our request to extend the
deadline for final submission of this handcount until Monday, November
twenty seventh, at nine o'clock am, would be he greatly appreciated.
As we know you were read.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Harris's office informed Burton that the five pm deadline was
non negotiable. The Florida Supreme Court had said that if
they were open on Sunday, then five pm was the deadline. Well,
they were open and that meant five pm was the deadline.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Getting confirmation out of the Secretary of State's office here
in Tallahassee has told the Vogue countersen in Palm Beached
at the extension for that deadline.
Speaker 11 (43:34):
Will not happen.
Speaker 24 (43:35):
Quite a blow to Judge Charles Burton. To Commissioner Carol
Roberts and Teresa Lapour, the three members of this canvassing
board here who have been working now since eight o'clock
yesterday morning with maybe just a two hour Burton.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Was devastated, and at four fifteen PM he held another
press conference, this time to announce that after ten grueling days,
the recount in Palm Beach had failed.
Speaker 7 (43:58):
So the Secretary of State has apparently decided to shut
us down. With approximately two hours perhaps left to go.
We believe there are approximately eight hundred to one thousand
balls left to come. So unfortunately, at this time, we
have no other choice but then to shut down the
(44:18):
supervisor elections.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Hardly up to that point, Palm Beach had discovered a
net of around two hundred new votes for Gore, but
now that no longer mattered. None of those votes would
be counted and there was nothing anyone in Palm Beach
could do about it.
Speaker 6 (44:43):
Live pictures of the Cabinet room at the Florida State Capitol.
We're told that this is the room where the official
certification of votes will take place.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Hours after the five pm deadline passed, Catherine Harris presided
over a certification ceremony at the state Capitol.
Speaker 6 (44:59):
Once again, Catherine Harris coming in to this room in
the state capital to begin the certification process. I think
we want to listen.
Speaker 18 (45:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, as the State Elections Canvassing Commission. We
are here today to certify the results of the election
that occurred November seventh, two thousand, because of the great
interest in our actions, we're meeting.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Probably the ceremony was just that a ceremony because everyone
knew that it wasn't actually going to end the election.
Gore and his team had already indicated that they would
be filing a lawsuit to contest the official results, and
that meant the beginning of a whole new stage in
the process. For now, the final tallies stood at two million,
(45:46):
nine hundred and twelve two hundred and fifty three votes
for Gore and two million, nine hundred and twelve thousand,
seven hundred ninety votes for Bush. Gore would be entering
the so called contest phase of the recount, trailing by
just five hundred and thirty seven votes. I have to
(46:06):
admit I was pretty flabbergasted when I learned about how
the hand recount and Palm Beach ended. And for the record,
I went into this project not knowing anything about what
the Secretary of State's office really did or didn't do
during the recount. I was aware of Harris's reputation, and
I understood that Democrats generally believed that she made decisions
to benefit Bush. But I was prepared to find out
(46:27):
that the truth was more complicated. And then I read
about this thing with Palm Beach, about how Charles Burton
begged Catherine Harris for a few more hours they could
finish counting, and how she wouldn't allow it no matter what.
And what I saw in this story was Harris making
a decision that was transparently and unambiguously motivated by a
desire to stop the recount. Yes, the canvassing board had
(46:49):
made a truly short sighted decision to take time off
for Thanksgiving, but the Florida Supreme Court had said that
having vote totals come in on Monday at nine am
would have been fine. Why couldn't Harris have just given
Palm Beach the extra couple hours. What possible reason could
she have had other than wanting to protect Bush's lead.
I asked Harris about this, and to my be she
(47:10):
remembered the story completely differently. In Harris's mind, she didn't
cut the Palm Beach recount short. She thinks she actually
extended the time they had.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
They said originally Friday, and we said we'd stay open
till Sunday to give people more time.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
No, I think they said Sunday. They said Sunday. This
was the beginning of a pretty drawn out debate.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Sunday.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
No, they said that the votes have to be in
by Sunday at five pm. If the Secretary of State's
office is open, or if the Secretary of State's office
is not open on Sunday, they can come in at
nine am on Monday.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
I remember the nine am on Monday, but I also
clearly remember that because we wanted it to be finished,
everybody argued, let's do it Friday, Let's do it Friday,
and we said, no, we're going to stay open. So
I'm not sure. Maybe I'm not remembering that exactly. I
do know about the nine but I thought that we
had to certify at five. It said you shall.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Certify if you were if you were open.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Yeah, and we chose to stay open so that they
would have the time. So you're you and I just
agree on that. But I can go back, you know,
we can both go back and check. But I clearly
in my mind, it was my understanding that we had
a choice of Friday or Sunday.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
I don't know what to make of this exactly, other
than Harris really truly remembers doing everything right, right according
to the law, right according to the principles of democracy,
right according to the duties of her office. And to
be honest, that's true of pretty much all the people
I interviewed for this show. Everyone remembers acting impartially and
(48:40):
honorably and fairly, but that doesn't mean they remember it correctly.
Speaker 20 (48:51):
Good evening, from the beginning of this extraordinary period of time.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Seven minutes after Catherine Harris presided over the vote certification
in Florida, Joe Lieberman was once again asked to go
on television to represent the campaign. Leeberman addressed reporters as
the Hey Adam's Hotel in Washington, Who's three days after
Thanksgiving and the interior of the hotel was already decorated
for Christmas. This time, the would be VP said exactly
(49:20):
what he was supposed to.
Speaker 20 (49:22):
This evening, the Secretary of State of Florida has decided
to certify what, by any reasonable standard, is an incomplete
and inaccurate count of the vote's cast in the state
of Florida. We have an opportunity here and we have
(49:44):
a responsibility to ensure that this election lifts up our
democracy and respects every voter and every vote, no matter
what the outcome. And that is precisely what Vice President
Gore and I will seek to do in the days ahead.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
George W. Bush gave a speech that night too. He
called on Gore to drop his plan to contest the
election and to concede instead. He also asked President Clinton
to formally open a transition office for his new administration.
Speaker 23 (50:24):
Good evening.
Speaker 15 (50:26):
The last nineteen days have been extraordinary once but now
that the votes are counted, it is time for the
votes to count. I've asked Secretary Cheney to work with
President Clinton's administration to open a transition office in Washington,
and we look forward to a constructive working relationship throughout
(50:47):
this transition. Together, we can make this a positive day
of hope and opportunity for all of us who are
blessed to be Americans. Thank you very much, and God
bless America.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
Just after Catherine Harris's certification ceremony, lawyers from the governor's
office rushed to prepare the documents that would officially seat
Florida's twenty five Republican electors. The Bush camp was concerned
that the Democrats would try to subpoena the documents and
prevent them from getting filed, so, out of an abundance
of caution, the lawyers transported the documents in an unmarked
(51:27):
police car and mailed them to Washington from an out
of the way post office where no one would be
expecting them. In the end, none of it turned out
to be necessary. The Democrats didn't even try to interfere.
On the next episode of Fiasco, Al Gore becomes the
(51:50):
first presidential candidate in American history to formally contest the
results of an election, while Republicans in the Florida State
legislature lay the groundwork for installing Bush as president by
any means necessary. For Their basic argument was, Hey, it's
a mass, it's confusing. How about we let these fine
legislators over here decide whether not Bush or Gore will
be president. Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and
(52:14):
it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by
Andrew Parsons, Madelin kaplan Ulakulpa, 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
music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode,
(52:35):
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 Raphael
and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special
Thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and
documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the
(52:58):
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.
Speaker 15 (53:21):
I don't know wh
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 goor right now
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage, or
(00:37):
visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode
previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
The Gore campaign is trying to lengthen out the timeline.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a handcount of ballots
of Palm Beach County as well as three other counties.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
It was unsettling to me that a candidate would cherry
pick four counties out of sixty seven to recount fifty teams.
Speaker 5 (01:08):
We'll start to handcount more than four hundred and sixty
thousand ballots.
Speaker 6 (01:12):
There's been a lot of discussion about the Hanging Chad
and the dimple chat.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
The fundamental framework was to slow walk the count.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Gore advisor accusing Florida's Republican Secretary of State just trying
to ensure.
Speaker 7 (01:25):
A Bush victory.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
I had no idea to who benefit it would accrue.
I just know I had had to follow the law.
Speaker 8 (01:30):
Florida's highest state court has blocked the Secretary of State.
Speaker 9 (01:34):
Voice wins one round, Gore wins the next. It is
a legal slug fest that won't end soon.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
In the weeks after election day, an overwhelming majority of
Americans between seventy seven and eighty seven percent, said they
were closely following the Florida recount. But the Florida recount
was not easy to follow. Staying up on the latest
developments could feel a cramming for an exam the procedural
debates between the two parties and intricacies of Florida law
could be a bit much.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The judge says, the five o'clock deadline stands. But it's
not that simple, because the judge also says.
Speaker 10 (02:10):
Balance, Natalie, All of what John Zurella just explained was complicated,
but it did seem to be a little bit consistent.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
But there was more, and it was murkier. There were
just so many names and subplots to keep track of.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
There are so many claims and counter claims, so many
numbers flying through the air.
Speaker 11 (02:27):
We hope you all have your scorecards out, because this
one's getting more complicated.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
All the time, and no one knew how long it
was going to take to resolve.
Speaker 12 (02:33):
Everybody is starting to lose patience with this election.
Speaker 13 (02:36):
The process seems doomed to work its slow and painful
way through a series of court rooms.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
No matter what happens, it certainly leaves Florida in a
sort of legal state of limbo.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The worst part might have been how impossible it was
to talk about the recount without using all these horrible
bureaucratic phrases like certification deadline and canvassing board and advisory opinion.
This deadening jargon was not just a problem for journalists
trying to make the recount story exciting or at least legible.
It was also a problem for the two campaigns. Both
(03:09):
of them needed to frame the churn of the recount
on their terms, and to do so in ways that
had at least some emotional residence. Democrats found that emotional
residence early with the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach. It
was easy to comprehend how terrible it might feel to
know that you wasted your vote in such a close race.
But about ten days after the election, the Republicans found
(03:30):
an emotional rallying point of their own, and they found
it in something exquisitely boring sounding called overseas absentee ballots.
Speaker 8 (03:38):
The postmarks come from all over the world, votes usually overlooked.
Speaker 14 (03:43):
This year, they could determine the election.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
More than six million Americans live overseas, which is.
Speaker 15 (03:48):
Roughly the size of the population of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Just how many of those absentee ballots are author are
still to be.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Counted, and who will get how many of them? Overseas
absentee ballots were used by American citizens living abroad in
recent presidential elections. The state of Florida had received between
fifteen hundred and three thousand of them in a normal election.
That was not a lot of votes. But in two thousand,
when it became clear that overseas absentee ballots could determine
(04:15):
the outcome of the race, they were thrust into the
center of a bitter confrontation between the two campaigns.
Speaker 16 (04:20):
There are battles going on in county offices all over
the state. We've heard reports of county officials screaming at
each other as Democrats and Republicans go to the map
for every overseas absentee vote.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
The process for tabulating overseas absentee ballots in Florida followed
its own special timeline, one that was intended to compensate
for the fact that mail coming in from far away
takes a long time to get where it's going. Here's
Mark Herron, a lawyer who became an expert on overseas
absentee ballots while working with the Gore recount team.
Speaker 8 (04:50):
In Florida. You could continue to receive and count overseas
absentee ballots until ten days after the election if they
had been postmarked prior to the close of election day.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
The voters who used overseas absentee ballots tended to belong
to one of several distinct groups American diplomats working at
four or embassies, American Jews living in Israel, expats in general,
and US military personnel stationed abroad. The Gore team expected
many of the overseas ballots to come from this last group,
and that they would overwhelmingly favor Bush.
Speaker 8 (05:24):
The military people were generally more conservative in terms of
their viewpoints on the world than Democrats, and I guess
the thinking would be that the military folks would vote
for Bush. As opposed to Gore.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
As overseas absentee ballots poured into Florida's sixty seven county
canvassing boards, the Gore team worried that their opponents would
try to take advantage of the system.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
There were reports and rumors that planes military planes were
flying into Panama City stuffed would oversee ballots that had
not been postmarked prior to election day.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
No evidence of such organized ballots stuffing ever emerged, but
at the time anything seemed possible, so higher ups on
the Gore recount team asked Heron to do some research
and write up a detailed memo under what circumstances would
it be appropriate, according to Florida law, to challenge the
validity of an overseas absentee ballot. The intended audience for
Heron's memo was the network of Democratic lawyers helping the
(06:22):
Gore campaign around the state. When Florida's sixty seven counties
started going through their overseas absentee ballots, these lawyers would
be responsible for challenging incomplete or legal ones.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
They could use it when they appeared before the canvassing
boards and say, hey, this one here can't be counted
because it isn't signed. This one here can't be counted
because there's no postmark on it. There's no postmark that
indicates that it was mailed or transmitted prior to the
close of election day, or it has a postmark that's
after election day, and therefore it can't be accepted.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
In its first paragraph, Heron's memo specifically mentioned members of
the Armed forces, along with other citizens of the United
States who are temporarily residing outside the country. The memo
went out to a group of Democratic Party lawyers on
November fifteenth, with the expectation that it would stay among friends,
but less than forty eight hours later, a copy made
its way to Bush headquarters in Tallahassee. The Republicans instantly
(07:21):
recognized it as a major opportunity. Here was a Gore
lawyer providing instructions on how to disqualify votes sent in
by American soldiers. The indignant TV appearances practically booked themselves.
Speaker 12 (07:33):
The Vice President's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment,
against the men and women who serve in our armed forces.
Speaker 14 (07:39):
I'm tired of hearing Democrats saying, including out Gore account
every vote, and yet they're all over the state of Florida,
challenging thousands of our military votes.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
The Bush team pushed the story to every news out
what they could, and organized press conferences to publicize the issue.
Speaker 17 (07:54):
We are concerned that a targeted effort by the Democratic
Party sought to throw out as many as a third
of the overseas absentee ballots received since election day, many
of them the votes of the men and women of
our United States Armed Forces who are serving the cause
of freedom throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
The Heron memo, as it came to be known, instantly
broke through the static of recount coverage. And if you're
wondering how the Bush communications team turned to phrase as
cumbersome as oversees absentee ballots into a hot issue, the
answer is they didn't have to because they could call
them military ballots instead.
Speaker 12 (08:31):
The Democrats have launched a statewide effort throughout as many
military ballots as they can.
Speaker 16 (08:37):
Democratic lawyers had been given guidelines on how to challenge
military ballots, and the wife of one sailor spoke out.
Speaker 18 (08:43):
It was the first that he had heard that his
ballot was one of the votes that did not count.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I don't think it's too cynical or unfair to wonder
how the Gore team didn't see this coming. But Heron
really thought that all he was doing was summarizing this
corner of Florida election law so that Gore's lawyers in
the ground would know what they were dealing with. Now
the campaign was being accused of trying to disenfranchise men
and women in uniform.
Speaker 8 (09:10):
The military is a somewhat sacred thing, and these folks
are giving up their lives, their family life, you know,
to defend the country. And then to say that, hey,
these Democrats are trying to take away their vote. It
kind of all fits into the narrative of what democrats
are all about, and it was very, very powerful. They
do a great job with spin even when the reality
(09:31):
is completely to the contrary, and this was one of
those examples.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
You may recall that in our previous episode you heard
a lot of people say repeatedly that all they did
during the recount was follow the law. But as Mark
Heron learned the hard way, the recount was about much
more than the law. It was also about politics as
a means of influencing how the law gets applied. By
using the Heron memo as the basis for a pr
onslaught against Gore. The Bush team wasn't just trying to
(09:57):
score points on cable news or win hearts and minds.
They were generating pressure that would make the law work
to their advantage. I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and
Pushkin Industries. This is Fiasco Bush v.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Gore.
Speaker 19 (10:13):
Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in
the courts, but not on the streets.
Speaker 11 (10:18):
Republican demonstrators stormed the hallway.
Speaker 17 (10:21):
It sounds like you're in the middle of a prison riot.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Episode four spinoff How the Bush campaign achieved crucial legal
victories by burying Al Gore in the court of public opinion,
Believe it or not. One of Al Gore's most effective
(10:47):
advocates in two thousand was his running mate Joe Lieberman.
During the recount, while Gore strategized with his lawyers behind
the scenes, Lieberman appeared on TV as something between an
attack dog and a cheerleader. Day after day he defended
the Democratic line and calmly predicted that when all the
votes were counted, he and Gore would be victorious.
Speaker 20 (11:06):
We think we want if we think if all the
votes in Florida. Aret it not only will we have
won the popular vote in America, Al Gore and I
would have won the election. Maybe our opponents think that too,
and that's why they don't want those votes to be counted.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
With Gore facing intense criticism over Mark Heron's memo, the
campaign looked to Liberman to come in and play the enforcer.
On Saturday, November eighteenth, Lieberman was briefed on the Haroan
memo over the phone, and the next morning he appeared
on Meet the Press with Tim Russard.
Speaker 20 (11:35):
Senator Joseph Lieberman is with us, welcome back, warning Tim
still a senator, not Vice president.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Russert brought up the Heron memo almost immediately.
Speaker 11 (11:43):
And people are very, very concerned.
Speaker 20 (11:45):
They point to a memo written by.
Speaker 9 (11:47):
Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists the Gore campaign, telling
Democratic lawyers, this is how you knock out balance from
military people overseas.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
They don't have a postmark to the Gore operatives in Tallahassee.
Watching Lieberman's appearance on TV, it was obvious how he
should have responded.
Speaker 21 (12:06):
He was getting pounded, and the answers should have been
we're for counting all votes that were cast on before
election day.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
This is Nick Baldick, one of Gore's top lieutenants in Florida.
Speaker 21 (12:16):
You know there are proceedures to make sure that illegal
votes don't come in after and those should be upheld.
That would have been roughly the response I would have given.
It was not the response he gave.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Instead, Lieberman took a trip to Waffle City. He didn't
even try to defend the campaign or make the argument
for enforcing election law in the way Heron's memo had suggested.
Speaker 20 (12:36):
Again, Al Gore and I don't want to. I don't
want to ever be part of anything that would put
an extra burden on the military personnel abroad.
Speaker 22 (12:43):
If Joe Lieberman said this morning, count those.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Baldick watched in disbelief as Lieberman threw Mark Herron and
the Gore campaign as a whole under the bus.
Speaker 20 (12:51):
My own point of view, if I was there, I
would give the benefit of the doubt to Bellot's coming
in from a military personnel generally, but particularly in light
of the letter and the kind of statements we've heard
about it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
But the here's Baldick again.
Speaker 21 (13:06):
I mean, I remember screaming at the television, being very
angry when lots of people working with me, young people volunteers,
had been across sixty seven counties trying to uphold the
law and make sure the ballots from Maryland and ones
that were sent obviously after election day were not counted illegally,
(13:28):
and they were screamed at and called unpatriotic and had
batteries thrown at them, and Senator Lieberman sold all those
people out by just caving on that morning.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Heron, who was also watching the interview from gore headquarters,
did not take it well.
Speaker 8 (13:43):
It was like I'd been kicked in the stomach. I
was quite sick, so to speak, and at that point
in time I had to leave the building and walk
around Tallahassee for a while. I just couldn't believe what
he had done.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Lieberman told me in an interview that he still remembers
meeting with Gore after his TV appearance.
Speaker 23 (14:03):
And it was actually, as I recall, the only time
during the whole campaign when now seemed to be disappoint
pointed in something I'd done.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
But Lieberman maintains he did the right thing, the patriotic thing,
the morally defensible thing by distancing the campaign from the
Haroan memo.
Speaker 23 (14:19):
We Democrats believe in the franchise, and in fact that
other parts of Florida were fighting because we were alleging
that the Republican officials prevented some people from voting.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Setting aside the legal merits of the Haroan memo, Lieberman
says that he was concerned about how the campaign would
look if he stood by it. What if Democrats ended
up winning the White House and American soldiers believed that
their own commander in chief had tried to disenfranchise them.
Speaker 23 (14:47):
And I must say the other thing that swung into
action as Tim Ruster to meet to Posess with this
question was wait a second, I don't want al Gaar
and me to be seen as people who are gonna
do anything to stop We want so much to win
that we're going to block the vote of a soldier
who's overseas serving us because he made some technical mistake.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Lieberman wanted the campaign to commit to its count every
vote mantra, even if he saw Republicans making contradictory arguments
of their.
Speaker 23 (15:19):
Own, because both sides were being inconsistent. The Republicans were
calling for technical adherence to the law in some parts
of the state about cutting ballots, but they were saying, oh,
you got to go a little easy on these soldiers.
We were saying, in some parts of the state, you
got to be a little easy on these voters, particularly
(15:40):
minority voters, and not exclude them from voting. But in
this case, we were saying, this is the letter of
the law, so that these absmptee ballots can't be count it.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
After Liberman's appearance on Meet the Press, other Democrats joined
him in calling for lenient standard on military ballots.
Speaker 24 (15:58):
That's the order from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Among them was Bob Butterworth, the Democratic Attorney General of Florida.
Speaker 14 (16:05):
Saying no man or woman in military service to this
nation should have his or vote rejected solely due to
the absence of a post bar.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
It was not exactly a legal victory for Republicans, since
neither Lieberman nor Butterworth had authority over any aspect of
the recount, but symbolically it was devastating.
Speaker 14 (16:23):
The public relations fight over rejected overseas absentee ballots.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
On NBC's Meet.
Speaker 25 (16:29):
The Press, Joe Lieberman supports giving them quote the benefit
of the doubt.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
More after the break. While the Gore campaign tried to
play defense on overseas absentee ballots, the hand recount of
regular old domestic ballots was continuing in fits and starts.
The four counties where Gore had requested recounts were all
at different stages of the process. Palm Beach and Broward
(17:00):
had been added for several days, Volusia was already done.
In Miami Dade, they hadn't even started yet. Now this
feels like a good moment to confess some thing, which
is that here at Fiasco, our journalistic bias towards the
dramatic and dysfunctional means that Volusia and Broward, where the
hand recounts went relatively smoothly, are getting short tripped on
(17:20):
this podcast. It's not exactly fair, but shout out to
them for doing such a good job counting votes. That
hearing about it is not all that interesting. In Miami Dada,
on the other hand, things were about to get turbulent.
To be fair, the task before the Miami Dade canvassing
board was enormous. It was the biggest county in Florida
(17:41):
by a huge margin, and they had about six hundred
and fifty thousand votes. To get through a recount would
require a lot of manpower and a lot of time,
and because of how many votes were at stake, both
the Bush campaign and the Gore campaign were watching the
process like hawks and fighting over it.
Speaker 5 (17:58):
Also like hawks, Republicans in Miami tried one last time
this morning to prevent a handcount in Florida's most populist county.
The effort failed, opening the door to a recount that
could add hundreds, maybe thous of new votes to the
state's total.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
The logistics of the recount in Miami Dade were pretty
much the same as in Palm Beach. After going through
a one percent sample of the overall vote, approximately six
thousand ballots, the Canvassing board debated whether or not to
conduct a full manual recount. After some hesitation, they decided
to proceed.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Miami Dade County, under pressure from the Gore campaign, decided
that it too, will recount ballots by hand, meaning that
heavily democratic Florida counties will be recounting more than one
point seven million ballots.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
The eighteenth floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center
in downtown Miami was converted into a publicly accessible recount room.
Rows of tables and chairs were set up for the
people doing the counting and the partisan volunteers who had
been sent to watch over the proceedings. The three members
of the canvassing board sat at a special table up
front where they examined ballots that have been deemed ambiguous.
Speaker 14 (19:01):
It all began at nine to oh two. If you're counting,
and these people certainly are to our Day County.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
The recount began on Monday, November twentieth, two days after
the Big Florida Florida State football game.
Speaker 14 (19:13):
Four at each table in the highest stakes card game
in the land, and.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
At first it looked like they might actually get it done.
This was a very happy development for al Gore. As
long as ballots were being counted, it meant he still
had a chance of picking up new votes and eating
into Bush's lead.
Speaker 14 (19:30):
Al Gore has picked up a net gain of eighteen votes,
but there are six hundred and fourteen precincts total that
must be recounted.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
In the next night, just before ten o'clock, the Gore
team received even more good news, this time from Tallahassee,
where the Florida Supreme Court had just issued a ruling.
Speaker 7 (19:49):
Good evening.
Speaker 26 (19:50):
My name is Craig Waters. I'm the spokesman for the
Florida Supreme Court. I'm now going to read to you
a statement that was authorized by the entire Court, the
court halls that amended certifications from the county.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Camp Remember, at this point, the manual recountscore had requested
were being threatened by the Florida Secretary of State, who
was refusing to accept what she called late vote counts.
A few days earlier, the Florida Supreme Court had stepped
in and blocked Catherine Harris from certifying the election results
until they could weigh in. Oral arguments have been held
on Monday, November twentieth. The central question at hand was
(20:22):
whether Catherine Harris had acted improperly by refusing to accept
late vote totals from the three counties still conducting handcounts.
And now the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court
had handed down a unanimous ruling they were siding with Gore.
Speaker 27 (20:35):
The court saying hand counts in three Florida counties must
be included in the state vote totals.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
This was a huge and potentially decisive victory for the
Gore campaign.
Speaker 26 (20:45):
The court halls that amended certifications from the county canvassing
boards must be accepted by the Election Canvassing Commission.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
As part of their ruling, the court set a new
certification deadline of Sunday, November twenty sixth, at five pm,
thereby giving the canvassing boards in Miami Dade, Palm Beach,
and Broward five more days to count ballots. The ruling
further specified that if the Secretary of State's officer was
not open on that Sunday, the counties could turn in
their vote totals on the following Monday morning at nine am.
Speaker 26 (21:16):
Until nine am on November twenty seven. The opinion of
the Court is.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
But that wasn't all. In addition to granting the deadline extension,
the justices also ruled that hyper technical adherence to voting
instructions was less important than the intent of the voter.
The fundamental purpose of election laws, the court wrote in
its opinion, was to facilitate and safeguard the right of
each voter to express his or her will. Gore celebrated
(21:41):
the ruling as a major victory.
Speaker 10 (21:43):
The Florida Supreme Court has now spoken, and we will
move forward now with a full, fair and accurate count
of the ballots in question. Our democracy is the winner.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Tonight, the Bush side was apoplectic. As they saw it,
the Florida Supreme Court had just retroactively changed Florida election
law by pushing back the certification deadline. To the Republicans,
that looked like a violation of the US Constitution, which
said that election laws had to be in place before
the voters went to the polls, and they were to
(22:15):
be drafted by state legislatures, not state courts. Just before
midnight on the night of the ruling, James Baker, the
head of the Bush recount effort, offered some pointed thoughts
at a press conference in Tallahassee.
Speaker 9 (22:27):
It is not fair to change the election laws of
Florida by a judicial fiat after the election has been held.
It is simply not fair, ladies and gentlemen, to change
the rules, either in the middle of the game or
after the game has been played.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Bush's supporters and media surrogates moved swiftly to paint the
Florida Supreme Court as a biased institution run by Democrats
who were trying to swing the election toward Gore. Charles Wells,
the chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court at the
time remembers one remark especially vividly.
Speaker 27 (23:01):
I had read a comment by Congressman at the time,
Joe Scarborough from Pitscola, and his comment was, Tonight the
Florida Supreme Court declared war on the rule of law
in Florida. Seven radical Democratic lawyers have chosen to ignore
the clear intent of Florida's legislature and executive branches. Is
(23:26):
a political war they want. It's a political war. They
should get lost.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Amid all this heated rhetoric was that the Florida Supreme
Court ruling actually came with a major silver lining for
the Bush campaign. Specifically, the part about how voter intent
matters more than strict adherence to the technical requirements provided Republicans
with a perfect weapon with which to attack the Democrats
on the issue of overseas absentee ballots. Prior to the ruling,
(23:52):
Bush's lawyers have been having trouble persuading canvassing boards around
the state to accept overseas absentee ballots that lacked signatures,
proper postmarks, and so on. A total of four hundred
and twenty ballots have been thrown out as of November seventeenth.
Now it seemed possible that hundreds of those ballots would
be back on the table, and the deadline extension for
certifying the election results gave the Bush lawyer's time to
(24:14):
make their case. To the Gore campaign's chagrin, there was
another way the Florida Supreme Court ruling turned out to
benefit Bush, one that had nothing to do with overseas
absentee ballots and everything to do with the ongoing recount
in Miami. Because while the intention of the Supreme Court
had been to give the counties more time, the Miami
(24:36):
Dade Canvassing Board had been banking on getting even more.
In their initial estimate, the board had figured that the
work of reviewing all six hundred and fifty thousand ballots
in the county was going to take them until December first.
The new deadline of November twenty sixth meant they had
five fewer days than they'd budgeted for, and so the
morning after the Florida Supreme Court ruling came down, the
(24:58):
Canvassing Board held a public meeting to review their options.
The Supervisor of Elections was audibly anxious about how the
recount process could be sped up.
Speaker 28 (25:05):
We could not, given our best efforts of this board,
the best effort to the county, the best efforts of
all these people sitting here, complete the manual recount the
way we've been doing it, even adding more tables, adding
more staff.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
After some discussion, one of the board members proposed an idea.
What if instead of counting all the ballots by hand,
the board did a recount of just the ambiguous ballots
that the machines couldn't read. By separating out the roughly
ten thousand ballots that had not officially recorded a vote
for president, the so called undervotes, the board could focus
their energies and their time on ballots that required human attention.
Speaker 29 (25:44):
And so the board voted unanimously a ditch the results
of their two day county wide recount and focus on
ten thousand under votes and.
Speaker 28 (25:52):
Count the undercounted ballots approximately ten thousand, seven hundred and
fifty public.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
It was a little before nine am when the board
members decided to give the plan a world franchise. After
explaining to everyone gathered in the counting room what they
were doing, the three of them headed upstairs to a
private area on the nineteenth floor to separate out the
undervotes and start examining them. The Republican observers who had
been helping with the count reacted to the board's announcement
with profound suspicion.
Speaker 22 (26:19):
There were slow grumblings that, you know, wait, what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
What this is Lena m Conky pelt here In two thousand,
she was a young lobbyist based in Washington, DC, and
like many of her Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, she
flew down to Florida to lend a hand with the
recount after the Bush campaign put out a call for
volunteers to.
Speaker 22 (26:38):
Take it behind closed doors and say they're going to
finish the count. Just it's stunk. It didn't look good,
didn't sound good, and we couldn't believe they were doing
it with a straight face.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Not wanting to let the Canvassing Board members out of
their site, ma Conki pelt Here and a group of
other Republicans followed them up to the nineteenth floor.
Speaker 22 (26:58):
We had been good, dutiful volunteers, and they were taking
it out of our hands and shutting down the process,
and that really didn't go overwell.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Words spread quickly that the Canvassing Board was throwing some
kind of curve ball a.
Speaker 29 (27:11):
Decision, eliciting an angry response by Republicans.
Speaker 19 (27:14):
This is the most brazen attempt by the Gore people
and the Democrat machine and the thugs in that building
to hijack the American presidency.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Outside the Clark Government Center, a crowd of Bush supporters
had been protesting the recount for several days. They led
Chance of No More Gore, weaved American flags and held
up signs that said Sore losermen. Overseeing the protest was
a Republican operative named Brad Blakeman. He was huddled inside
a parked RV in the plaza outside the Clark Center. Previously,
(27:45):
Blakeman had worked for the Bush campaign as an advanced man,
basically a high level event planner.
Speaker 19 (27:50):
Generally speaking for W's presidential campaign. I was in charge
of major media events. So I was in charge of
the convention. I was in charge of the debates. I
was in charge of major rallies.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Once the recount started, Blakeman knew how to make himself useful.
Speaker 19 (28:05):
We saw a three legged stool, and we knew that
this battle would be fought in the courts. We knew
that this battle would be fought in the recount centers.
But the leg that was missing was the public relations.
Although the voting had ended, the campaign had not.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
When Blakeman caught wind of what the canvassing board was
up to on the nineteenth floor, he got worried. The
recount in Miami had already cut Bush's lead by about
one hundred and fifty votes. Who knew how many more
Gore votes the board might find among the remaining undervotes.
Blakeman decided to make a move.
Speaker 19 (28:38):
When we found out that they were going to go
to an expedited system and that we could very possibly
lose the momentum and Gore would be ahead, we had
to figure out what are we going to do? What
are options? And one of the options I thought of
was why don't we do what democrats do? I said,
let's do some civil disobedience, Let's have a sit in,
(28:59):
let's create a ruckus.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I should say here that there is someone else who
takes credit for instigating the ruckus from inside the RV,
and that is self styled dirty trickster Roger stone. Stone
was not available for an interview, but for what it's worth,
Blakeman insists that he had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 19 (29:15):
He wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
He wasn't there at all.
Speaker 19 (29:17):
That was my RV. I rented it, and I could
assure you if he was in there, I would have
known about it, and he wouldn't have been there for.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Long in any event, When the canvassing board went up
to the nineteenth floor, a procession of Republican protesters, mostly
young men, streamed into the Clark Center and piled onto
the elevators.
Speaker 17 (29:36):
All right, just to add a little more drama to
this situation, Republican recount.
Speaker 14 (29:40):
Observers, I had a little scuffle with police this morning.
Speaker 11 (29:44):
Republican demonstrators stormed the hallways and demanded access to the
recount room.
Speaker 19 (29:50):
And you know, first we had to get permission. Spoke
to the sheriff and the people that you know, what
we're going to do, why we're going to do it,
That we're not dangerous, a lot of us are lawyers.
We're not going to be arrested. We're not there to
be disrespectful. But we feel like we're being taken advantage
of and that the system is not working and that
(30:10):
this is something that we need to do to send
a message upstairs.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The protesters joined Maconkey pelt here and the other Republican
observers and demanding to be let into the counting room.
We're joined now by our Frank Buckley.
Speaker 17 (30:28):
He's on the phone with us.
Speaker 30 (30:29):
Frank, it sounds like you're in the middle of a
prison riot. I mean, are you getting the feeling that
this is out of control?
Speaker 31 (30:36):
Clearly, this is a raucous crowd. It was a raucous
and confined crowd on the nineteenth floor with people trying
to get into the room where the canvassing board was
going to commence operations.
Speaker 32 (30:52):
The people who came out to protest were wearing, you know,
button down shirts, tucked into khaki pants and got probably
in those days, braided belts. If we consume in enough
on the photos.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
This is Nicholas Cololish. He was covering the Miami Dade
recount as a twenty five year old reporter for the
Wall Street Journal, and he was on the nineteenth floor
of the Clark Center when the protesters arrived.
Speaker 32 (31:14):
You definitely have the impression that these were the people
who did not protest in college, and that they didn't
really necessarily know how to protest, that they're sort of
sort of winging it. For the very first time.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That the protesters pounded on the window leading to the
tabulation room, Coolish felt the atmosphere change.
Speaker 32 (31:39):
And what I remember very vividly was they were pounding
on the glass and on the other side of the
glass there were municipal workers and some deputies. I mean,
people were really fired up. The rhetoric that they were
using was very much of a stolen election, of democracy
(32:00):
being undone, and I couldn't judge to what extent it is
sincere or cynical, but there is something that can happen
where people can start to under the spell of their
own rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
The demonstration reached a climax when one of the Republicans
on the nineteenth floor accused the Democratic Party official of
trying to steal a ballot.
Speaker 11 (32:21):
At one point, they charged the Democratic attorney. It turned
out to be a sample or practice ballot.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The three members of the canvassing board moved back downstairs
to get away from the chaos. Eventually the nineteenth floor
quieted down. Later, the incident at the Stephen P. Clark
Government Center was nicknamed the Brooks Brothers Riot, and in
its aftermath there was a lot of debate about how
volatile and dangerous it had actually been. One Bush lawyer
claimed that a press conference that there had been little
(32:54):
kids and babies in the crowd and that there was
quote in some ways a holiday atmosphere. Leida McConkey pelt
here didn't go quite that far when I asked her
about it, but she still finds the allegations of violence absurd.
Speaker 22 (33:05):
I don't think it would have ever turned violent. I
think the anger was palpable. I mean, everybody who was
standing there was feeling it, and I'm sure they felt
it on the other side of the door.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
After the demonstration, Macnkie Peltier became a minor icon thanks
to a widely circulated photo in which you could be
seen wearing a red dress and brandishing her fist alongside
a group of guys and white button downs.
Speaker 22 (33:30):
So I would say that there was an element of anger,
but not violence. I mean, come on, I'm standing there
in the Liz Claiborne dress. I'm not going to be
taking anybody out.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Regardless. The three members of the canvassing board seemed rattled
by what happened, and they halted the undervote plan in
order to regroup.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
We've been listening to a hearing down in Miami Dade
Canvassing Board.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
There's ongoing dispute about the hand count, exactly what they
will count and what they will not.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
But the few hours later they reconvened for another public
meeting to make an important announcement.
Speaker 13 (34:01):
I do not believe that there is time to carry
out a complete, full manual recount that is accurate and
that will count every vote because of the limitations put
on this board in terms of time.
Speaker 30 (34:17):
I do agree with Judge King and mister Lahy that
it is not physically possible to continue with this task.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
We do want to the Miami Dade recount was over,
none of the new gore votes that have been discovered
would be counted in the final vote tally.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
That is the unanimous decision of this Canvassing Board that
we will not be proceeding further with a manual recount,
and that the certification of November eighth, two thousand be
accepted by the Secretary of State for the valid cast
votes of Miami Dade County.
Speaker 30 (34:53):
All right, the Miami Dade County Canvassing Board taking a
vote to end the recount. There there will be no
more counting of votes in Miami Dade County, the largest county.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
The Gore team watched in horror as the canvassing Board
announced their decision on live tele division. The main reason
they gave for stopping was that there just wasn't enough
time to finish before the deadline. But what was different
at one thirty pm compared to eight that morning, when
completing the count had still seemed feasible. Common sense seemed
to suggest that the protesters had intimidated the canvassing board
(35:26):
into abandoning the recount.
Speaker 32 (35:27):
The whole tone of things had changed, and it was
certainly the biggest thing that happened between when they were
counting the ballots and when they suddenly decided not to
count the ballots. You know, you're you're on an election board,
and like your job is to ensure like a free, fair,
you know, and impartial election, and the idea that sort
of that sort of people chanting and chasing partisans from
(35:51):
of the other side, you know, around and threatening people
causes you to stop counting votes. It seems like almost
as undemocratic a thing as you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Right after the vote, one canvassing board member told reporter
that the protesters' concerns were a factor in the decision
that when it became clear that the board's work around
the deadline problem wasn't going to fly, they were left
with no other options. This was perceived as not being
an open and fair process, the canvassing board members said,
(36:24):
and that weighed heavily in our minds. Once again, the
Republicans appeared to have outmatched the Gore team through raw
political strength. Brad Blakeman told me that he was astonished
that it had been so easy.
Speaker 19 (36:37):
Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in
the courts and the recount centers, but not publicly on
the streets, and it was if it was a total
sterile environment, and that we were the only ones there
who seemed to, you know, fight for what we believed in.
We fully expected to be overrun, quite frankly, because we
(37:00):
said that Democrats are going to be out in force,
and they never showed up anywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
In fact, early in the recount, there were organized protests
in Gore's favor, particularly in Palm Beach, where Jesse Jackson
led rallies criticizing the butterfly ballot and calling attention to
the alleged disenfranchisement of Haitian American voters. But al Gore
worried about the spectacle coming across as unseemly, and he
(37:28):
put out word to Jackson that he would prefer it
if he left town. We'll be right back. While the
battle overhand recounts raged in South Florida, the Bush campaign
and their allies tried to gain an advantage in other
(37:49):
parts of the state by continuing to hammer Gore on
the issue of military ballots.
Speaker 25 (37:53):
Those rejected absentee military ballots. Hundreds of servicemen's ballots were
initially tossed out statewide for, among other things, missing or
late postmarks.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
Ballots.
Speaker 25 (38:02):
Republicans have been beating the drum.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
To have counted.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
As you recall, the controversy around military ballots initially played
out at the lefvel of public relations. For the first
few days after Mark Heron's memo got leaked, Bush's people
seem to be mostly focused on making Gore look bad.
Speaker 25 (38:17):
They're having people like Senator Bob Dole, military heroes speak out, they.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Went on TV, they gave press conferences.
Speaker 27 (38:24):
If they're going to count a dimple, then they need
to count a vet's vote.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
They even got retired General Norman Schwartzkoff to issue a statement,
just not fair.
Speaker 15 (38:32):
It's a sad day for this country when our military
people on the front lines don't get their ballot counted
when the selection of the Commander in chief.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
But then on November twenty second, the same day as
the Brooks Brothers riot in Miami, the Bush campaign raised
the stakes by bringing the issue into the legal realm.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Bush's lawyers file suits in thirteen Florida counties seeking to
have hundreds of rejected overseas absentee ballots counted, many of
them from sailors and soldiers serving abroad.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Bush filed suit against more than a dozen Florida counties
where overseas absentee ballots have been disqualified because they lacked postmarks, signatures,
or other elements required by law. The lawsuit accused the
Gore campaign of pressuring the canvassing boards into rejecting ballots
that should have been counted.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Republicans sensing that Gore is vulnerable on the issue of
military ballots.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
The lawsuit didn't end up having legs, but it didn't
need to. Before a judge had even made a ruling,
six of the counties named as plaintiffs in the suit
agreed to their own volition to reevaluate the overseas ballots
that they had earlier rejected.
Speaker 14 (39:35):
It was postparked from the United States, but I see
no reason not.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
To include this here again is Mark Herron.
Speaker 8 (39:42):
And so all these canvassing boards decide they're going to
meet again and review what they had done previously. Okay,
and so they started accepting ballots that do not have
any postmarks on them. To me, those ballots from a
legal point of view should not have been accepted. But again,
this furor over the issue led some people not to
(40:03):
show that they had backbone to follow the law.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
It was a case of perfect synergy between legal and
political warfare. By creating public pressure around the issue of
military ballots, the Republicans were able to shape how the
law was interpreted and applied. By the end of the week,
canvassing boards around the state had agreed to accept two
hundred and eighty eight ballots that had previously been rejected
as illegal.
Speaker 25 (40:25):
Those absentee ballots inched upward all afternoon for Governor Bush,
finally handling him one hundred and eight more overseas votes
at a time when Peter every vote matter precisely.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Thanks much with that, a pr misstep by the Gore
team had been converted into real gains for Bush. It
didn't matter that in order to make that happen, the
Republicans had been forced to stake out two mutually inconsistent
positions on ballot standards. So what if they were calling
for a looser approach to ballots that were likely to
benefit Bush while calling for precise adherence to the law
in counties that went for Gore. Unlike the Democrats, the
(40:58):
Republicans weren't afraid of looking like hypocrites. They were afraid
of losing.
Speaker 7 (41:07):
Let's turned out a Palm Beach county where the canvassing
ord is trying to be the deadline of five pm
today for completing it's hand raycot see it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
On Sunday, November twenty sixth, both campaigns were bracing themselves
for the arrival of the new certification deadline for vote totals. Remember,
according to the Florida Supreme Court ruling, the counties had
until five pm to turn in their numbers if the
Secretary of State's office was open. If it wasn't, they'd
have until the following morning, in Palm Beach County, the
(41:35):
manual recount was still furiously underway. It had been going
well well enough that Charles Burton and Teresa Lapour, two
of the Palm Beach Canvassing Board members, had decided it
would be okay to take a break for Thanksgiving. This
turned out to be a grave mistake. By Sunday at noon,
the prospect of finishing the count on time no longer
looked so good.
Speaker 24 (41:57):
They're still counting in the Emergency Operations Center. Be behind me,
and time will tell. And indeed the clock is ticking
away here. They have been going now since eight am
yesterday morning, and they still now have about five hours
to go.
Speaker 31 (42:10):
If you do the math.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The Palm Beach Canvassing Board still had about five four
hundred ballots to get through, and since the Secretary of
State's office was open for business, the deadline was five pm.
Speaker 24 (42:20):
Catherine Harris, the Secretary of State, is inside the administrative
building here inside at work today on the Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Now, around half past noon, Judge Burton organized a press
conference and read a letter out loud to Catherine Harris,
pleading for more time.
Speaker 7 (42:35):
It says, Dear Secretary Harris, the Palm Beach County Canvassing
Board respectfully requests your assistance and ensuring that the most
accurate results of the two thousand presidential election are submitted
for certification. We have been working diligently, including the last
twenty four hour period, to complete this critical portion of
(42:57):
the handcount. Your consideration of our request to extend the
deadline for final submission of this handcount until Monday, November
twenty seventh, at nine o'clock am, would be he greatly appreciated.
As we know you were read.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Harris's office informed Burton that the five pm deadline was
non negotiable. The Florida Supreme Court had said that if
they were open on Sunday, then five pm was the deadline. Well,
they were open and that meant five pm was the deadline.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Getting confirmation out of the Secretary of State's office here
in Tallahassee has told the Vogue countersen in Palm Beached
at the extension for that deadline.
Speaker 11 (43:34):
Will not happen.
Speaker 24 (43:35):
Quite a blow to Judge Charles Burton. To Commissioner Carol
Roberts and Teresa Lapour, the three members of this canvassing
board here who have been working now since eight o'clock
yesterday morning with maybe just a two hour Burton.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Was devastated, and at four fifteen PM he held another
press conference, this time to announce that after ten grueling days,
the recount in Palm Beach had failed.
Speaker 7 (43:58):
So the Secretary of State has apparently decided to shut
us down. With approximately two hours perhaps left to go.
We believe there are approximately eight hundred to one thousand
balls left to come. So unfortunately, at this time, we
have no other choice but then to shut down the
(44:18):
supervisor elections.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Hardly up to that point, Palm Beach had discovered a
net of around two hundred new votes for Gore, but
now that no longer mattered. None of those votes would
be counted and there was nothing anyone in Palm Beach
could do about it.
Speaker 6 (44:43):
Live pictures of the Cabinet room at the Florida State Capitol.
We're told that this is the room where the official
certification of votes will take place.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Hours after the five pm deadline passed, Catherine Harris presided
over a certification ceremony at the state Capitol.
Speaker 6 (44:59):
Once again, Catherine Harris coming in to this room in
the state capital to begin the certification process. I think
we want to listen.
Speaker 18 (45:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, as the State Elections Canvassing Commission. We
are here today to certify the results of the election
that occurred November seventh, two thousand, because of the great
interest in our actions, we're meeting.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Probably the ceremony was just that a ceremony because everyone
knew that it wasn't actually going to end the election.
Gore and his team had already indicated that they would
be filing a lawsuit to contest the official results, and
that meant the beginning of a whole new stage in
the process. For now, the final tallies stood at two million,
(45:46):
nine hundred and twelve two hundred and fifty three votes
for Gore and two million, nine hundred and twelve thousand,
seven hundred ninety votes for Bush. Gore would be entering
the so called contest phase of the recount, trailing by
just five hundred and thirty seven votes. I have to
(46:06):
admit I was pretty flabbergasted when I learned about how
the hand recount and Palm Beach ended. And for the record,
I went into this project not knowing anything about what
the Secretary of State's office really did or didn't do
during the recount. I was aware of Harris's reputation, and
I understood that Democrats generally believed that she made decisions
to benefit Bush. But I was prepared to find out
(46:27):
that the truth was more complicated. And then I read
about this thing with Palm Beach, about how Charles Burton
begged Catherine Harris for a few more hours they could
finish counting, and how she wouldn't allow it no matter what.
And what I saw in this story was Harris making
a decision that was transparently and unambiguously motivated by a
desire to stop the recount. Yes, the canvassing board had
(46:49):
made a truly short sighted decision to take time off
for Thanksgiving, but the Florida Supreme Court had said that
having vote totals come in on Monday at nine am
would have been fine. Why couldn't Harris have just given
Palm Beach the extra couple hours. What possible reason could
she have had other than wanting to protect Bush's lead.
I asked Harris about this, and to my be she
(47:10):
remembered the story completely differently. In Harris's mind, she didn't
cut the Palm Beach recount short. She thinks she actually
extended the time they had.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
They said originally Friday, and we said we'd stay open
till Sunday to give people more time.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
No, I think they said Sunday. They said Sunday. This
was the beginning of a pretty drawn out debate.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Sunday.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
No, they said that the votes have to be in
by Sunday at five pm. If the Secretary of State's
office is open, or if the Secretary of State's office
is not open on Sunday, they can come in at
nine am on Monday.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
I remember the nine am on Monday, but I also
clearly remember that because we wanted it to be finished,
everybody argued, let's do it Friday, Let's do it Friday,
and we said, no, we're going to stay open. So
I'm not sure. Maybe I'm not remembering that exactly. I
do know about the nine but I thought that we
had to certify at five. It said you shall.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Certify if you were if you were open.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Yeah, and we chose to stay open so that they
would have the time. So you're you and I just
agree on that. But I can go back, you know,
we can both go back and check. But I clearly
in my mind, it was my understanding that we had
a choice of Friday or Sunday.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
I don't know what to make of this exactly, other
than Harris really truly remembers doing everything right, right according
to the law, right according to the principles of democracy,
right according to the duties of her office. And to
be honest, that's true of pretty much all the people
I interviewed for this show. Everyone remembers acting impartially and
(48:40):
honorably and fairly, but that doesn't mean they remember it correctly.
Speaker 20 (48:51):
Good evening, from the beginning of this extraordinary period of time.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Seven minutes after Catherine Harris presided over the vote certification
in Florida, Joe Lieberman was once again asked to go
on television to represent the campaign. Leeberman addressed reporters as
the Hey Adam's Hotel in Washington, Who's three days after
Thanksgiving and the interior of the hotel was already decorated
for Christmas. This time, the would be VP said exactly
(49:20):
what he was supposed to.
Speaker 20 (49:22):
This evening, the Secretary of State of Florida has decided
to certify what, by any reasonable standard, is an incomplete
and inaccurate count of the vote's cast in the state
of Florida. We have an opportunity here and we have
(49:44):
a responsibility to ensure that this election lifts up our
democracy and respects every voter and every vote, no matter
what the outcome. And that is precisely what Vice President
Gore and I will seek to do in the days ahead.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
George W. Bush gave a speech that night too. He
called on Gore to drop his plan to contest the
election and to concede instead. He also asked President Clinton
to formally open a transition office for his new administration.
Speaker 23 (50:24):
Good evening.
Speaker 15 (50:26):
The last nineteen days have been extraordinary once but now
that the votes are counted, it is time for the
votes to count. I've asked Secretary Cheney to work with
President Clinton's administration to open a transition office in Washington,
and we look forward to a constructive working relationship throughout
(50:47):
this transition. Together, we can make this a positive day
of hope and opportunity for all of us who are
blessed to be Americans. Thank you very much, and God
bless America.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
Just after Catherine Harris's certification ceremony, lawyers from the governor's
office rushed to prepare the documents that would officially seat
Florida's twenty five Republican electors. The Bush camp was concerned
that the Democrats would try to subpoena the documents and
prevent them from getting filed, so, out of an abundance
of caution, the lawyers transported the documents in an unmarked
(51:27):
police car and mailed them to Washington from an out
of the way post office where no one would be
expecting them. In the end, none of it turned out
to be necessary. The Democrats didn't even try to interfere.
On the next episode of Fiasco, Al Gore becomes the
(51:50):
first presidential candidate in American history to formally contest the
results of an election, while Republicans in the Florida State
legislature lay the groundwork for installing Bush as president by
any means necessary. For Their basic argument was, Hey, it's
a mass, it's confusing. How about we let these fine
legislators over here decide whether not Bush or Gore will
be president. Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and
(52:14):
it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by
Andrew Parsons, Madelin kaplan Ulakulpa, 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
music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode,
(52:35):
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 Raphael
and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special
Thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and
documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the
(52:58):
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.
Speaker 15 (53:21):
I don't know wh
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