Too Close to Call by Toobin Jeffrey

Author:Toobin, Jeffrey.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588360632
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2001-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Thanksgiving Stuffing

With the recount halted in Miami-Dade on Wednesday, November 22, only Broward and Palm Beach were still counting ballots. If Gore was going to make up the 930-vote deficit before Harris certified the result, he would have to find the votes in those two counties by Sunday, November 26.

At first, the recount in Broward County roughly paralleled the developments in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. The three members of the local canvassing board—a judge named Robert W. Lee, a Democratic county commissioner named Suzanne Gunzburger, and the Republican supervisor of elections, Jane Carroll—met on the first Monday after the election to weigh Gore’s request for a countywide manual recount. For the 1-percent sample, the Democrats selected three precincts that had voted overwhelmingly for the vice president, but the manual recount of those ballots showed a net gain for him of only 4 votes. In light of this—and Katherine Harris’s opinion letter stating that manual recounts in such circumstances were contrary to Florida law—Lee and Carroll voted not to conduct a manual recount of the 500,000 votes in the county.

The next day, in response to Attorney General Bob Butterworth’s public repudiation of the Harris opinion, Judge Lee changed his mind. (Butterworth, a Democrat, who also happened to come from Broward County, issued a formal opinion letter stating that recounts were justified if there was evidence of errors in the initial count that could affect the outcome of the election.) Gunzburger, a fierce Democratic partisan as well as a longtime believer in the efficacy of manual recounts, had always wanted a recount in the presidential race, and now Judge Lee, a patient, easily amused Hispanic who had been appointed by a Democrat, agreed with her. So the manual recount of all the votes in Broward County began on Wednesday, November 15.

Like her counterparts in the other counties, the elections supervisor in Broward never wanted any part of a recount. Jane Carroll was one of the few Republicans in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, but she was also an exhausted and fed-up seventy-year-old woman who was in the process of stepping down after thirty-two years on the job. Still, after the board’s vote, Carroll set up for the recount in the county’s Emergency Operations Center. The scene looked like the one in Palm Beach. Teams of county workers, with Democratic and Republican observers hovering over them, examined each ballot. Any disputed ballots went to the three board members for a final determination. The overall pattern repeated itself: Democratic insistence on vote counting, Republican delay and obstruction, and a steady parade of Bush surrogates denouncing the recount process as unreliable and absurd.

At first, the Broward board operated by a very narrow standard, one that recognized votes only if two corners of a chad were dislodged. In one precinct, many ballots were just punctured through—they had no dislodged chads at all—and the mottled backs looked like pages of Braille. Obviously, a voting machine had been miscalibrated, and legitimate votes were not being counted, even though the voters’ intent was easy to discern.

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