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