Bush v. Gore: Episode 4 – Spin-Off

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 visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode previously on Fiasco.

Some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.

The Gore campaign is trying to lengthen out the timeline.

Florida Democratic officials will be requesting a handcount of ballots of Palm Beach County as well as three other counties.

It was unsettling to me that a candidate would cherry pick four counties out of sixty seven to recount fifty teams.

We'll start to handcount more than four hundred and sixty thousand ballots.

There's been a lot of discussion about the Hanging Chad and the dimple chat.

The fundamental framework was to slow walk the count.

Gore advisor accusing Florida's Republican Secretary of State just trying to ensure.

A Bush victory.

I had no idea to who benefit it would accrue. I just know I had had to follow the law.

Florida's highest state court has blocked the Secretary of State.

Voice wins one round, Gore wins the next. It is a legal slug fest that won't end soon.

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.

So.

The judge says, the five o'clock deadline stands. But it's not that simple, because the judge also says.

Balance, Natalie, All of what John Zurella just explained was complicated, but it did seem to be a little bit consistent.

But there was more, and it was murkier. There were just so many names and subplots to keep track of.

There are so many claims and counter claims, so many numbers flying through the air.

We hope you all have your scorecards out, because this one's getting more complicated.

All the time, and no one knew how long it was going to take to resolve.

Everybody is starting to lose patience with this election.

The process seems doomed to work its slow and painful way through a series of court rooms.

No matter what happens, it certainly leaves Florida in a sort of legal state of limbo.

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 of them needed to frame the churn of the recount on their terms, and to do so in ways that

The postmarks come from all over the world, votes usually overlooked.

This year, they could determine the election.

More than six million Americans live overseas, which is.

Roughly the size of the population of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Just how many of those absentee ballots are author are still to be.

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 the outcome of the race, they were thrust into the center of a bitter confrontation between the two campaigns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Vice President's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces.

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.

The Bush team pushed the story to every news out what they could, and organized press conferences to publicize the issue.

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.

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.

The Democrats have launched a statewide effort throughout as many military ballots as they can.

Democratic lawyers had been given guidelines on how to challenge military ballots, and the wife of one sailor spoke out.

It was the first that he had heard that his ballot was one of the votes that did not count.

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.

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 is completely to the contrary, and this was one of those examples.

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 score points on cable news or win hearts and minds.

Gore.

Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in the courts, but not on the streets.

Republican demonstrators stormed the hallway.

It sounds like you're in the middle of a prison riot.

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 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

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.

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.

Senator Joseph Lieberman is with us, welcome back, warning Tim still a senator, not Vice president.

Russert brought up the Heron memo almost immediately.

And people are very, very concerned.

They point to a memo written by.

Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists the Gore campaign, telling Democratic lawyers, this is how you knock out balance from military people overseas.

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.

He was getting pounded, and the answers should have been we're for counting all votes that were cast on before election day.

This is Nick Baldick, one of Gore's top lieutenants in Florida.

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.

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.

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.

If Joe Lieberman said this morning, count those.

Baldick watched in disbelief as Lieberman threw Mark Herron and the Gore campaign as a whole under the bus.

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.

But the here's Baldick again.

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, 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.

Heron, who was also watching the interview from gore headquarters, did not take it well.

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.

Lieberman told me in an interview that he still remembers meeting with Gore after his TV appearance.

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.

But Lieberman maintains he did the right thing, the patriotic thing, the morally defensible thing by distancing the campaign from the Haroan memo.

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.

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.

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.

Lieberman wanted the campaign to commit to its count every vote mantra, even if he saw Republicans making contradictory arguments of their.

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

After Liberman's appearance on Meet the Press, other Democrats joined him in calling for lenient standard on military ballots.

That's the order from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth.

Among them was Bob Butterworth, the Democratic Attorney General of Florida.

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.

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.

The public relations fight over rejected overseas absentee ballots.

On NBC's Meet.

The Press, Joe Lieberman supports giving them quote the benefit of the doubt.

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 had been added for several days, Volusia was already done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It all began at nine to oh two. If you're counting, and these people certainly are to our Day County.

The recount began on Monday, November twentieth, two days after the Big Florida Florida State football game.

Four at each table in the highest stakes card game in the land, and.

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.

Al Gore has picked up a net gain of eighteen votes, but there are six hundred and fourteen precincts total that must be recounted.

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.

Good evening.

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.

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

The court saying hand counts in three Florida counties must be included in the state vote totals.

This was a huge and potentially decisive victory for the Gore campaign.

The court halls that amended certifications from the county canvassing boards must be accepted by the Election Canvassing Commission.

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.

Until nine am on November twenty seven. The opinion of the Court is.

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 the ruling as a major victory.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 a political war they want. It's a political war. They should get lost.

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

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.

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.

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.

Count the undercounted ballots approximately ten thousand, seven hundred and fifty public.

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.

There were slow grumblings that, you know, wait, what they're doing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Words spread quickly that the Canvassing Board was throwing some kind of curve ball a.

Decision, eliciting an angry response by Republicans.

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.

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, Blakeman had worked for the Bush campaign as an advanced man, basically a high level event planner.

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.

Once the recount started, Blakeman knew how to make himself useful.

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.

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.

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, let's create a ruckus.

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.

He wasn't there.

He wasn't there at all.

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.

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.

All right, just to add a little more drama to this situation, Republican recount.

Observers, I had a little scuffle with police this morning.

Republican demonstrators stormed the hallways and demanded access to the recount room.

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 this is something that we need to do to send a message upstairs.

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.

He's on the phone with us.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That the protesters pounded on the window leading to the tabulation room, Coolish felt the atmosphere change.

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 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.

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.

At one point, they charged the Democratic attorney. It turned out to be a sample or practice ballot.

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 kids and babies in the crowd and that there was

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.

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.

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.

Regardless. The three members of the canvassing board seemed rattled by what happened, and they halted the undervote plan in order to regroup.

We've been listening to a hearing down in Miami Dade Canvassing Board.

There's ongoing dispute about the hand count, exactly what they will count and what they will not.

But the few hours later they reconvened for another public meeting to make an important announcement.

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.

I do agree with Judge King and mister Lahy that it is not physically possible to continue with this task.

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.

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.

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.

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 into abandoning the recount.

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 of the other side, you know, around and threatening people

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, and that weighed heavily in our minds. Once again, the Republicans appeared to have outmatched the Gore team through raw

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 said that Democrats are going to be out in force, and they never showed up anywhere.

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 put out word to Jackson that he would prefer it

Those rejected absentee military ballots. Hundreds of servicemen's ballots were initially tossed out statewide for, among other things, missing or late postmarks.

Ballots.

Republicans have been beating the drum.

To have counted.

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.

They're having people like Senator Bob Dole, military heroes speak out, they.

Went on TV, they gave press conferences.

If they're going to count a dimple, then they need to count a vet's vote.

They even got retired General Norman Schwartzkoff to issue a statement, just not fair.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Republicans sensing that Gore is vulnerable on the issue of military ballots.

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.

It was postparked from the United States, but I see no reason not.

To include this here again is Mark Herron.

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 show that they had backbone to follow the law.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If you do the math.

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.

Catherine Harris, the Secretary of State, is inside the administrative building here inside at work today on the Sunday afternoon.

Now, around half past noon, Judge Burton organized a press conference and read a letter out loud to Catherine Harris, pleading for more time.

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

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.

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.

Will not happen.

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.

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.

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 supervisor elections.

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.

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.

Hours after the five pm deadline passed, Catherine Harris presided over a certification ceremony at the state Capitol.

Once again, Catherine Harris coming in to this room in the state capital to begin the certification process. I think we want to listen.

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.

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, nine hundred and twelve two hundred and fifty three votes for Gore and two million, nine hundred and twelve thousand,

They said originally Friday, and we said we'd stay open till Sunday to give people more time.

No, I think they said Sunday. They said Sunday. This was the beginning of a pretty drawn out debate.

Sunday.

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.

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.

Certify if you were if you were open.

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.

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 honorably and fairly, but that doesn't mean they remember it correctly.

Good evening, from the beginning of this extraordinary period of time.

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 what he was supposed to.

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 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.

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.

Good evening.

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 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.

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 police car and mailed them to Washington from an out of the way post office where no one would be

I don't know wh