Pushkin.
It was an unprecedented circumstance. It was fraut with politics. I mean, we were in the process of choosing the leader of the free world, and she was not staffed for that.
I had I mean, I was just there. I certified the election. It was kind of a ministerial job.
Hey, Fiasco listeners, it's Leon Napok. Welcome back to this run of special bonus episodes of Fiasco Bush Vigor. Today we're going to focus on a Florida institution that played an absolutely pivotal role during the recount, the Secretary of State's Office, which, as you know, was in charge of overseeing the recount and certifying the vote totals once all
the ballots were counted. Sitting at the controls of the Secretary of State's Office was a woman who turned out to be one of the most memorable figures of the recount, Saga Catherine Harris.
And, in accordance with the laws of the State of Florida, hi hereby declare Governor George W. Bush, the winner of Florida's twenty five electoral votes for the President of the United States.
Harris was a Republican with ties to the Bush campaign. And because of the power she held over which ballots got counted in the official tally, Harris became a symbol to Democrats of everything that was unfair about the Florida recount process. Speculations swirled that Harris was motivated by partisanship, that she and others in her office were trying to
help Bush win. We'll hear directly from Harris in a little bit, but first we wanted to play part of our interview with someone who wasn't officially on her staff, but who did everything he could to exert his influence during the recount, the lawyer and lobbyist Max Dapanovitch. You
might remember Stapanovitch from episode three of the series. He's the guy who says he was secretly and by someone affiliated with the Bush campaign to embed with the Secretary of State's office and steer Katherine Harris towards decisions that would benefit the Republicans. When I sat down with Stapanovitch for our interview, he told me how he landed in Harris's office days after the election.
I was pursuing a master's in medieval French history at FSU, and I was in a Latin class when my phone buzzed and I stepped outside to take it, and someone said, can you get into Catherine Harris's office. This was on the ninth Thursday, two days after the election, and so I contacted Ben McKay, who was hurry, very young chief of staff, and said, you guys are besieged. Do you need any help? Ben said, boy, do we? And so I went into Catherine's office on the afternoon of the
ninth and we went to work. The first thing we did was we were sitting in his large conference room, which was on the plaza level at the Capitol. I had these floor to ceiling windows, and there were very tall ceilings, and so we taped cardboard over those so that folks wandering around the plaza and there were a lot of media folks wandering around the plaza would not see us because my presence, given my partisan reputation and all, would have been controversial at the time.
What was your partisan reputation?
Well, I've always been a Republican operative. If that's the right word. I don't know whether I like that phrase or not. I was the executive director for Reagan Bush in Florida and eighty four. I managed then mayor of Tampa Bob Martinez's givenatorial campaign in nineteen eighty six he
was elected. I was his chief of staff. I was a senior advisor on Jeb's first Jeb Bush's first huminatorial campaign, and over time helped or advise others, including then Senator Catherine Harris, who was running for Secretary of State, which was an elective office at the time. So when it was thought that Catherine could use some advice and counsel, I was asked to provide it.
Now, when you say you had a reputation as a part of them, is that just because you had worked for all these folks or you were a true believer and you were known as a true believer.
Probably depending on who you talk to, and you can ask the others you're going to talk to about that, the answer to your question is yes, depending on their perspective.
Sorry, yes, what, Yes?
I was very partisan and known for it. There was no doubt about who I was, how I felt, or why I was summoned. As Mary Madaline once said, I am a bush leech, a bush let l I e g. E. Bush Leech got a vassal.
So I mean beyond the very practical fact that they needed help. Why would you say you were.
Summoned because it was an unprecedented circumstance. It was fraught with politics. I mean, we were in the process of choosing the leader of the free world, and she was not staffed for that. She had very capable employees in the Secretary of State's office, but this was something of an entirely different order of magnitude.
Can you describe the atmosphere and Tallahassee in those days after the election?
It was very tense. It was almost circus like. I mean, there were remote trucks parked everywhere. The you know, the biggest names and most recognizable faces in national media were strolling up and down the plaza at the Capitol and doing stand ups outside, and you know, were conferences with Jim Baker for crying out loud and more than Christopher was here. I mean, it was a byguide circus.
Did you feel like you were a part of it?
I did not feel all of that tension. I was inside the building. I arrived at dawn, entered the building through the basement where the cabinet room is, took the stairs up to the plaza level, which accessed internally. The Secretary of State's office, and then at night in someone else's car, I was driven from the building so that people would not know that I was in there. So you know my feeling. My experience of the atmosphere was a conference table in a conference room with a handful of people.
Do you think you would have had a different role in the recount process if you hadn't gotten that phone call and been asked to join Secretary Harris's office?
I wouldn't have had if I hadn't been called. Uh, I don't think I would have had. I wouldn't anticipate I having had any role.
You don't think someone el would have called you about some other job. I feel like everyone in Florida got a phone call who had a law.
No, I don't think so.
I'm not.
I haven't practiced law in a while. My license remains current. But no one would call me to represent them in a piece of litigation relating to that or a stolen dog. I mean, just not what I did well?
So what are your special skills that they were looking for?
Oh gosh, this is somewhat difficult because while I'm not noted for my modesty, it would be immodest. But I will go ahead and take the chance to say that. Uh. You know, basically, I'm a strategist. If I have a skill, it is you can put me in the room with a rock, you know, room full of facts, and I will be able to ask the right question pretty quickly and suggest the best answer pretty quickly.
Uh, what was your assessment of what Secretary Harris's office and and the people working with her, including yourself, could bring to the table, Like there was this whole thing unfolding right outside of that room with the conference table. Sure, what was your what was it you were going to inject into that process?
Well, first place, she was the state's chief elections officer. Now that sounds much more impressive than it was in fact at the time and probably is in fact now, because you know, the individual supervisors of elections are powerful constitutional figures in their own right, but the Secretary of State's office did have considerable oversight. And you know, the first thing, basically I said to Catherine when I arrived that afternoon, is this again out of hand. We have
to bring this election in for a landing. And I'm not big on sports analogies, but it's like a football team, you do your job. I'll do my job and we might be able to win. The secretary of State's job was not to steal the election by breaking the law or bending the law. I took the view that it was her job to enforce the election laws of Florida, which brings me.
Actually to another to a question about her, like, I don't know how close you are with her or anything about your relationship, but I'm curious you could just describe her sort of state of mind during this time. How this was a fact her.
Is Catherine was able, and Catherine worked really hard at that job. She was there with the first employees. This is not having to do with the recount. This is on any day. She was there with the first employees in the morning and was one of the last to leave. She took she took the job very seriously. But this this was something different. This is this was it's never it had never happened before, it may never happen again. She was very tense, she was very nervous. She wanted
to get it right. She didn't want to be hated by half the country, and so she needed to be encouraged to do the job the way the statute said. And if that required her to be hated by half the country. That was part of the job. I told her at the time. You know, a lot of people run for public office, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, I assume that most of them want to do good do good things, and they believe that when that moment comes, when that you know, John Kennedy
profile encourage moment arise, that they will rise to the occasion. Now, what in fact happens is is that most of the time that moment doesn't arrive, or when it does arrive and it would cost you something to rise to the occasion, you fail to recognize it miraculously or you rationalize it away so that you don't have to make that sacrifice. I told her that this is that moment. It's not ten years down the road when you're in Congress or
anywhere else. This is that moment. If you're going to do something, do it today.
And what did you what did you tell her was her her mission? And what was what was the thing that you that she needed to do.
Yeah, to not be cowed, to not be browbeaten, whether by you know, the Democrats, the judiciary, or the press, to just do the job play a position forced the law.
But I guess, I guess I'm what I'm trying to get at. It is like, how overt was it in your conversations within the state Secretary State's office that your goal was to deliver the election to Bush.
We didn't have to deliver the election to Bush. He'd won, he had the votes, they'd been counted twice. The goal was to maintain the integrity of the election and not let it be altered by others.
But you're smiling as you say that, so I don't know if you're trying to you know.
Well, George Bush, with two counts statewide counts, had won the election. I think after those two state white counts, before some of the recounts come in by a bigger margin than it was at the end. What kind of damn food would sit around and say, you know what, we need to just keep counting until the other side wins. That seemed like a good thing for us to do.
But where your critic every day? Forgive me, but what are your critics saying, like, you guys shouldn't think of yourselves as being on the other side of the Democrats.
Well, that was the advantage we had one is that we were on the side of the wall. The laws said what the dates were, and we were on the side of the results. They'd been counted twice. So if you wanted to fault somebody for trying to cook the books, I would fault ron Klean and those guys, as competent as they were, because they were the ones who would not accept what the law in Florida said and would not accept what the two vote counts had resulted in.
They wanted to just keep working until they could figure out how to win an election they had lost.
To put yourself in their minds, and how to tell me how they thought of these deadlines. You clearly thought these were deadlines to be enforced.
What was to them, Well, they thought, they thought, I think I think, you know, in all fairness, I think their perspective was is that what this entire exercise was about was divining in some fashion the will of the electorate and taking as much time as it was necessary to do so.
We thought, maybe a good idea, just to comply with the law.
And so they mean they thought of these deadlines as fungible. They thought they were what.
They thought they were advisory suggestions. We thought that they were statutory deadlines that a court would enforce, and with some deviations and some minor exceptions, we were right and they were wrong.
When the Florida Supreme Court issued the injunction against the certification on November fourteenth, A couple of questions about that. One is did that come as a surprise to you guys in the Secretary of State's office? And two, how did you react? Where did that put you?
I don't have a specific memory of that. I was tempted to make one up, but I don't have a specific memory of that. I will tell you this. There were any number both you know, the Supreme Court level and at the district court level, of what, from our perspective were legal setbacks, opinions with which decisions with which we did not agree. But again, no sense crying over spilt beer. When something like that occurs, you just keep going, You do the next thing, you play your position. So
that was a disappointment. What we wanted to happen didn't happen. So we needed to work harder to make what we wanted to happen happen.
There seemed like there's so many what if moments in the story you know, oh, if it had gone this way, forget that way, could have been on you know, could have had a defending Do you like a do you have a favorite what if moment? A fork in the road that went your way, or you know, and could have gone the other.
I really don't. Again, I would like to say something dramatic, but I really don't. The way that I approached it in most of the people. When I say most of the people, you're talking about a handful of people. Me Adam Goodman. The lawyers, when we consulted with them, was just keep pounding away, just keep doing it, day after day after day, with nineteen days until it's done. And so there was never a eureka moment as far as
I almost concern. I mean, on the last day, we were keeping the office open to cut the thing off at five o'clock. So there was never a time when I thought, well, we want it now, this is over. It's just all we got to do is just count the bodies. No, it was right until they again, dumb ass Sports Matter four played to the whistle.
All right, That was Max to Panovitch. It's worth saying here that there is some ambivalence and even disagreement among alumni of the Florida Secretary of State's Office about how influential Stepanovitch really was during the recount, and we heard from a few people that his role has been inflated over the years. That includes Catherine Harris herself. We'll hear from her after the break. Here's how Catherine Harris reacted when I asked her about Stepanovitch's role on her team.
The team He's telling me we where did he feel in?
That's just funny. I mean, I've heard he makes quips, and I know you've interviewed him, but I considered him a friend. He would stop by the office occasionally, and I could probably count how many times he did, but he would come in and just talk about things off the topic because I wasn't going outside. He was just great to keep a calm. I've heard that he said he advised me, which is I'm glad he thinks he did. He was never at our legal meetings, he was never
at our strategy meetings. He was never one time at our office meeting. Never. He was not a go between us and the bushes. Because I shut all of that down.
He definitely told me that he was in there.
Never, not one time in one legal meeting, not one time with Debbie Kerns, not one time with Joe Clas.
I was at a conference table, like we blocked out the windows. No one know I was there never.
I can't remember one thing that he directed us to do, because the things we did we decided in our with our attorneys. And by the way, with the attorneys were never sitting at a conference table. We're sitting in my office on the sofa and chairs always.
I'm just trying to square this with what yeah, yeah.
No, I mean he can say that, but that's he wants to insert himself as important, and I understand, and I value I valued his friendship.
This was one of many issues that Harris wanted to set the record straight about. When I talked to her, and when I asked her what the biggest misconception was about her role in the two thousand election, she went to consult a notebook where she had written down specific claims that she wanted to address.
There are so many misconceptions.
Is this as you bring a list, No, I start now.
I started writing on the way home from Disney World and taking our grandchildren. I was just wondering what would be the greatest misconception. There are so many I mean, there were so many things perpetuated, perhaps that I stopped the recounts, or that I arranged that some would be disenfranchised, you know, which was never We were always we thought, we were always bending over backwards to do more.
I'll be honest, I'm skeptical of this framing. To my mind, it just doesn't square with all the decisions that Harris and her staff made that had the effect of limiting the scope of the recount. But I'm not here to argue with Harris. Those thirty six days were not easy for her. As you heard on Fiasco. She faced all kinds of ridicule and sexist comments from the media, not to mention death threats. She also had to make tough choices in the course of enforcing laws that were contradictory
and vague. That's why I wanted to talk to her to find out what her frame of mind was during the recount that made her famous. But it wasn't that easy. As Harris warned me going into our interview, she doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the details of the recount, and nearly twenty years later, she just doesn't remember the particulars of what happened or what she was
thinking at the time. Time Still, I think it's in the spirit of this podcast to give everyone a chance to explain where they were coming from as best they can, and to make their case for Harris. Part of that case was that a show called Fiasco shouldn't even be tackling the Florida recount at all.
It wasn't a fiasco, it wasn't a constitutional crisis. It was close election. And what people didn't understand typically is that Florida is not a red state. We're not a blue state. We're a purple state, and we are always going to have these close elections. And there's nothing wrong with Florida. It's pretty remarkable that rule of law prevailed and there wasn't a gunshot fired and a new president was elected. So I would say what was fiasco esque was the way the media handled it, and we're so
out of control with incorrect information. We had never had this kind of situation before. They were quoting their own state laws instead of looking at Florida's laws, and Florida has unique laws. They did and understand a real critical process called the protests and the contest face and even al Gore's attorneys advised him illy wrongly from out of the state, and those state attorneys that he had were saying,
don't do this like Catherine's heart. So I would not say that the election was a fiasco, because the laws were sufficient to elect a president in a peaceful manner.
Yeah. And I've talked to now a number of people who have told us stories about like going abroad and talking to people in different countries, especially countries where they aren't necessarily democratic, and kind of being telling them like, you know, yes, this was I'm sure it looked like a big mess from outside. We guess what. We didn't have a single you know, there's no generals marching in the street. There was no you know, there was no
no coup. Right, this was a rule of law situation that got resolved through the courts.
He did. In fact, the law was my only safe harbor. I said early on that I asked my husband, who had just become a citizen, what am I going to do? Just kind of rhetorical question. He said it was really simple.
He was Swedish. He said, you just have to protect your staff because Secretary of State when I finished my term would become an appointed position, and I'll speak to that in a moment, but he said, you just have to protect your staff, to make sure that they're not put in positions or squandered for the future, and you have to act with the most extraordinary integrity because you have to live with yourself the rest of your life.
And I think that advice served me well. People still come up to me and say thank you a weekly. I'm in airports every week, so I'm surprised by that. But I've never accepted that compliment. I just say, hey, I didn't do anything special. I just followed our laws and they were efficient. Gratefully, I don't have liberals come up and say anything mean to me, at least my face, behind my back eyes, but not to my face. And so I do appreciate that gesture or lack of gesture.
You mean, the folks who are saying thank you are like, there are people who are glad that Bush became president, and they think that you are to thank for that.
Well I had. I mean, I was just there, I certified the election. It was kind of a ministerial job. Just thanked me for not caving into the pressure and doing something that was contrary to the law.
Did you feel like you were you and your team were Maxi's family's notwithstanding. Did you you feel like you and your team were like in the trenches.
Yeah, we did, and we sort of felt like we because I never could go outside. I never could leave the office. All of a sudden, I had death threats, windows were shot out, people were on my property taking pictures inside my house.
Oh on, you had windows shut up?
Yep.
I had. My State Senate window was shot. I had a guy who was a murderer and released from Brazil. He began stalking me. It just was a crazy time. FBI had credible threats, people calling before I went into my very first interview, and I'd never seen a sea of camera importers like that. I opened the door, I saw them, and then the chief of police until last he said, don't worry about that credible threat from the FBI about blowing up your house. I've got it under control.
I shut the door that I said, what, So, I feel like we felt like we were in the trenches of it. Yeah. You look out the windows and you see hundreds of people and endless media trucks, and I would watch TV occasionally and see they would say things that were so outrageous, so pat land true, and I understand. I mean, if you look at politics today, it's become a roadmap discredit them intellectually, discredit them their appearance, their intellect,
and then discredit their integrity. And so they were doing that, and they were acting like I was some dilettante. They said, she's the baronial Florida, She's the brahmin of the highest order, she's old money. I mean, all these.
Crazy things, She's the baronial one.
I can't even remember what it was, you know, just saying that I was so wealthy to be discredited anyway, It didn't matter appearance, intellect, never mind that I did my master's at Harvard double course load did it while I was in office. And then they of course attacked my integrity. So you know, none of those things are pleasant. But I was elected, I swore an oath, and I was going to do it.
When did all that stuff start with what you were just describing day one or two? Day one or two. What was your reaction when you learned that there were these problems with the butterfly ballot like, I've talked to a bunch of people are like, oh, the first time I heard there was an issue, like someone called me and so they were really upset. Like do you remember how you learned there were robot calls?
I knew that the Democrats had hired a big marketing firm to do these robo calls to all the people on beach, and they got really scared. We all of a sudden said, what's going on? Oh, we got a phone call that said about the butterfly ballot. So there were these calls that went out that everyone got concerned about the butterfly ballot. And I don't I could see that there could be a confusion, But you know, I wasn't there on the ground for that.
Did you did you get why people were upset?
Oh? You could look at the ballot and see that it was confusing. I don't know what the remedy was other than what we did right, but I could see that some people were confused. I'm sure that the phone calls and the creation of that anxiety and fanning the fire flames really high, that that stoked a lot more concern. But of course I could see that.
I guess I'm asking not like, do you can you imagine yourself making the same mistake on that belot, But I'm asking like, do you get why people were sad and freaked out?
If you were confused? I see why they were confused. I don't think I would have made that mistake. I don't think it was not that hard to vote for Gore. That was actually kind of simple. But if somebody wanted to be confused, or I mean not wanted to be confused, but they're getting nervous in their voting, then perhaps they were. But I think that the robocalls that went out to the voters of Pabach County really stoked it up.
Do you think a lot fewer people then, like the three thousand something Buchanan votes, were actually trying to vote for Gore.
I think a great number of them were certainly certainly voting for Gore. But I can't you know, I can't anticipate that, I can't judge that. But yes, I do think that there would be a number, a significant number, that would have voted for Gore. And I think there would be dens of alsands that would have voted for Bush in the Panhandle of the Media hadn't told them that al Gore had already won.
So then the butterfly ballot thing was entirely separate, right from the undervote over vote problem that the Gore team was pointing to in Miami Dade, Broward, Volusia, and Palm Beach. Right, that's correct, they were like connected, but they weren't actually connected.
That they weren't. They were not one and the same. They were two separate issues.
Yeah, but they kind of became one story in the media, right, or at least, like, I don't know, I I'll be promly honest with you when I started, Before I started working on this, I didn't realize the butterfly ballot was not really part of the legal maneuver like legal fight.
No, the butterfly ballot was only registered for Palm Beach County because that was only created in that county, right, And.
So basically the problem the problem is, I understand it was that in each each of these four counties, there were ballots that the machine hadn't where the machine hadn't registered to vote, right, So it was either an undervote where it seemed like no, like the person hadn't voted for president at all, or it was an over vote where they seemed to have voted for two presidential candidates, and that there were like significant numbers of these these ballots,
like tens of thousands of ballots, and those are the ones that I gather, like the Gore people were trying to get counted by hand. Was any part of you like, man, would be really great if we could count those votes.
I petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to count them very first week of the recount, I mean of the election. We petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for a manual recount statewide. Therefore, you'd have equal protection under the law and uniform standards.
God, why haven't I read about that anywhere?
I don't know. It's kind of annoying, isn't it. I'll get you the information.
And why do you want to do? Why did you want that?
Because it would be a way too for everyone to feel good that every vote was counted correctly by a uniform standard and no one got special treatment, and we knew the results we wanted. We wanted who the people of Florida elected to be the person that was the victor.
Now I need to step in for a second here, because this is important and it's something Katherin Harris really pressed with me that the Secretary of State's office petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to order a state wide hand recount a week after the election, and that the Florida Supreme Court turned the petition down. As far as I
can tell, this just isn't true. While the Secretary of State's office did submit a petition with the Florida Supreme Court on November fifteenth, the petition was not asking for a statewide manual recount. It was asking for the Court to take control of all the election related litigation that was flying around the state, including the recounts that were already under way and the counties where Gore had asked
for them. The petition calls on the Court to make clear that quote, the election of the president and vice president is not a matter of local pleasure. It is at least a statewide matter of concern. This Court must assume control over this litigation to preserve its ability to establish standards and to protect the voters of the state. But it does not request a statewide manual recount. As Harris told me, all right back to the interview, and you were. I mean, you were obviously you were against
the extension of the deadline. They moved the deadline all the way from the fourteenth to the twenty sixth, right.
Right, I remember if I voiced an opinion on that or not. I don't. I don't know.
Well, you guys argued in court against it.
I didn't. I never went to any of the judiciary issues. I felt I was so politically charged. I didn't want to bring anything to the table.
I don't feel like it's I'm saying anything controversial by saying that you wanted to certify the election, and you thought you're supposed to certify it on the fourteenth.
Well, and then the Supreme Court said no, no, you're gonna have to wait till the twenty sixth. I mean, if that's what I have to do, that's what you have to do. You what are you going to do?
Well, you appeal it, which.
You guys did, which we did, and we didn't win.
So I'm curious, like, so, why'd you peel it?
I can't answer you that we are going back and asking me what the legal quest was, and I absolutely have no recall.
I'm not asking you the legal question like I'm asking, like, why was it bad to give a little more time to people for those kinds account of votes.
I don't remember the legal reasons.
I'm not asking the legal reasons.
I don't know then, but I don't remember why.
You don't remember why you thought it was preferable to have the vost counted up early.
I really, I'm not going to venture a guess on what I thought then because I can't remember. I mean, I was in the midst of all the legalities. I was in the midst of all of the laws and indivisional elections, and so there must have been grounds that we felt that that wasn't correct, But I can't recall those, so I don't I'm not going to even try.
Can I ask you just to I mean, I know you said you don't want to like talk about how you felt it or anything, but yeah, can you tell me, like how you felt at the end.
Oh, let's see. Well, I remember my family came down from Georgia back with me. I just said, do you guys want to go back to tellhow Se'm for the certification? And they did. My sister had three year old twins, and I remember asking them in my office. What do you think I should say to them? And the little one of the little three year olds said, just tell.
Them thank you, say thank you to whom.
He's the three year old to the audience.
What audience.
So the certification occurred in the cabinet room. So there were three of us on the certification, the head of the Division of Elections, Clay Roberts, Bob Crawford, the ad commissioner, and I, and our role was to add up the votes of sixty seven counties and announce it. So I announced it, I said thank you, and we left and
I flew home. I flew home that night. It was a my husband's best friend's wife's birthday, and I had a pilot with me, but I flew on instruments and I said, gosh, you got to get thirty thousand feet up because your feedback on the ground, because you know, you could only focus on flying. You couldn't think about anything else. So that's what I did that night.
It was your role, like over after you certified.
And it's not that we weren't highly engaged after the for the Supreme Court issues. It's just that I didn't go there. And I mean they were calling back. We were talking about things, but it didn't feel the same as as previously.
Yeah, who do you think on in Florida?
I'm sure George Bush. Too many things could have gone differently. We just know that indivision of elections. We felt that we followed the law exactly and that's all we could do. We didn't know who it would help and who it would not help. We would hear sometimes that the Bush camp wasn't happy, but we never heard that they were.
But you got a lot more bouquets from Republican voters then you got anger from the Bush campaign.
Oh gosh, I mean, I don't. I mean it was I just heard that a few times. One time I heard I would never get to run for politics again and be elected.
But but didn you say that you get thank yous from Republican voters?
Yes?
I do, So how does that make you feel?
It's odd that they still recognize me, because I don't think I look the same. I'm way older. And it's it's odd that that that's kind of a flashpoint for people and that they feel gratitude because all I did was follow the law and I say that and they're like, well, thank you for following the law because other people would cave. And I don't know what caving men. I don't know what everybody's opinion was. But they felt that I had
followed the law and that the results were good. And I don't know if they felt that someone didn't follow the law that there would have been a contrary result. I can't. I don't know why they say it, but it's it is odd that you know that people were pretty gracious about that.
I mean, would it like, would it like be like would it like embarrass you to know that like Republican voters like think I feel like they have you to thank for Bush's presidency.
Yeah, wouldn't like that. And I've never accepted the compliment, not one time, not one moment in my life. I say, oh, you can't thank me. All I did was follow the law the results or that the results are what you saw. I've always uh said that without exception.
Yeah, what's the decision that you wish you could get a duo over on? From there? We hunt?
Thank you? That's a really good question. I would say that because my husband gave me the greatest advice, and I just act with integrity. You have to live with yourself the rest of your life. I am so grateful for that because I don't have one single solitary regret. I had no idea the consequence of my actions and following the law every time. Like I said, there's some things I didn't want to do at all. I had no idea to whose benefit it would a crewe. I just know I had had to follow the law. I
had no idea who was going to benefit. So that I'm very grateful for and I can live with myself. And yeah, I couldn't do it over. I mean, and if I could do it over, many people say, boy, if you could wave a wand and it never had to happen to you, would you do it? And you know, it's not the hallmark of my greatest and most fun times by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm so grateful and all the world that kind of it fell on me. And I'm grateful that I had a chance
to be honorable in my actions. And so if someone could waive a match, you wine take it away, I wouldn't let them.
Why are you grateful for it?
I'm just grateful that I was, you know, in a spiritual sense, because I'm Christian. You know that maybe in all the earth thought I got chosen to handle that. I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I feel like I was found worthy. There would be those who would disagree, and they're entitled to their opinion, but I don't know what I could have done differently in terms of following the law.
Yep, I think that's everything. I think we got it great.
I thought you know, I told you and you pushed me. I told you I didn't remember these catchy feeling feeling stuff. I don't remember.
It's all right. That was Catherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State during the two thousand recount. And that's it for this bonus episode. Fiasco Bush v. Gore is produced by Prologue and distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Madelin kaplan Ulla Culpa, Andrew Parsons and me Leon Nafak. We had additional editorial support from Lisa Chase and Daniel Riley. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.