THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

2000:

November

 

• Early November: In the last week before the election, the long-simmering story of George W. Bush's 1976 drunken driving conviction becomes public. The story is simple: during a visit to his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine, the then-30-year old Bush was arrested while driving home, admitted to being drunk, cited for a DUI, had his driving privileges in Maine suspended, and paid a $150 fine. The story has long been suppressed by Bush's various campaigns for office in Texas, and during his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, Bush never admits to the conviction, saying only that he had "made mistakes in [his] youth." (A local Democratic activist goes public after obtaining the relevant court documents.) The campaign immediately goes into high-profile damage control. Political strategist and speechwriter Karen Hughes calls a late-night press conference and has Bush admit to the conviction, telling the gathered reporters, "I regret that it happened. But it did. I've learned my lesson. ...I'm the first to say what I did is wrong and I corrected that. I think the people of America will understand that." (Stories of other drunken driving incidents by Bush go largely unreported, including the story of a 26-year old Bush flattening garbage cans on his route home, then challenging his father to a fistfight when confronted.) He says that he was not required to take a sobriety test, though the next day he is forced to admit that he indeed had to take such a test, and failed it. However, the candidate who stumps on the principle of personal responsibility quickly, and repeatedly, tries to redirect the issue onto the Gore campaign: "Why now, four days before an election? ...I do find it interesting that it's come out four or five days before an election. ...I got my suspicions." Campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes says that Americans are tired of "gotcha politics" and says, "[T]he Democrats owe the American people an explanation."
• The attempt to pin the blame for the story on the Gore campaign is largely successful. Nevertheless, the question for many reporters was not if Bush had concealed the details of his arrest, but had he lied about it? Proof that Bush had lied would strike at the heart of the character-driven campaign mounted by Bush, Rove, and Hughes. In 1978, Bush lied to get his drivers' license back, telling a Maine hearing officer that he drank only "once a month" and then only "an occasional beer," a story at odds with his own admissions of heavy, sustained drinking during this time period. While that story was reported in the Boston Globe, few, if any, other media outlets picked up on it. In 1998, reporter Wayne Slater had asked the then-governor directly if he had ever been arrested for anything other than the already-revealed incident involving the prankish theft of a Christmas wreath during his college days; Bush told Slater "no" and then appeared to rethink his answer, but was cut off by Karen Hughes before he could say any more. In 1996, Bush and campaign counsel Alberto Gonzales had avoided disclosure of the conviction when Bush was tapped for jury duty; the case was a drunken driving one, and the district attorney intended to quiz Bush on his own DUI record. While Bush chatted up reporters outside the courtroom (and told them how eager he was to serve on the jury), Gonzales convinced the judge in the case that Bush's service on the jury might constitute a conflict of interest if he, as governor, was later called on to pardon the defendant, though the true reason was to keep Bush's own history of drunken driving secret. Bush also failed to completely answer the jury pool questionnaire, failing to answer a question asking if he had ever been accused of a crime. After the DUI story hits the press, Hughes falsely suggests that the 1998 interview with Slater had been off the record (implying that Slater was unethical for revealing Bush's answer), and says Bush does not recall giving the answers that Slater reported. With less than five days to go, the effort to downplay the story works, with the help of a compliant media who refuses to dig deeper into the story, an interesting contrast to the media sensation created after Bill Clinton's 1992 admission that he had tried marijuana.
• Paul Waldman observes, "Just days before, Bush had proclaimed that he wanted to usher in a 'responsibility era.' 'For too long,' Bush said, 'our culture has sent the message, if it feels good, do it and if you've got a problem, go ahead and blame somebody else. Each of us must understand that's not right. Each of us must understand that we are responsible for the decisions and choices we make in life.' But when he got into hot water over concealing his drunk-driving arrest, Bush blamed the Democrats."
• It is also worthy of note that, when pressed for an explanation as to why he covered up his drunk-driving conviction, Bush used his children: "I made the decision that, as a dad, I didn't want my girls doing the kinds of things I did, and I told them not to drink and drive.... I didn't want to talk about that in front of my children.... I'm trying to teach my children right from wrong. I chose the course that -- that to my daughters I was going to tell them they shouldn't drive and drink and that's the course of action I took." In 1998, when Bill Clinton used his family as one reason why he failed to admit to his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he was roundly pilloried in the media by Republicans and commentators alike. In 2000, Bush is complimented for, in William Bennett's words, "the manly way" he handled the issue. Like Bennett, most media commentators use the incident to praise Bush's "responsible" handling of the issue, and either ignore it or comment on it in the context of how it might affect the election. The incident also fleetingly revives the rumors of Bush's cocaine use, which he successfully dodges by reiterating the mantra, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible." Apparently that is enough for most journalists. (Moore and Slater, David Corn, Paul Waldman)
• Early November: Speculation in the press and in Washington rises over the possibility of Bush winning the popular vote but Gore winning the electoral vote. Republicans plan to raise objections to such a victory. "I think there would be an outrage," says Republican congressman Ray LaHood; when the scenario is turned on its head, with Gore winning the popular vote and Bush winning a narrow electoral victory, LaHood's outrage is nowhere to be heard. The GOP plans a massive operation, focusing on an assault on Gore's legitimacy led by Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio hosts. "We'd have ads, too," a Bush aide tells the press. Court challenges and massive protests are planned. After the election, Karl Rove says that any such ideas of such challenges were never considered, but Rove is proven a liar by, among others, CNN's Jeff Greenfield, who verifies that at least two conservative talk show hosts were given preparation from the Bush campaign on the assault; in addition, former Bush I chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein confirms, "It was part of the talking points." Instead, the Bush campaign flip-flops on its planned assault on the Electoral College when Bush is granted an electoral victory in Florida. (Paul Waldman)

The 2000 Election and the Theft of the Presidency

Disputed Presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush; numerous election problems in Florida are found, including massive voter fraud and collusion on the part of the Bush campaign

• November 7-8: In an excruciatingly close Presidential election, Al Gore is declared the winner by exit polls measured by various media concerns after putatively winning Florida, one of the last states in contention. The victory gives him a narrow electoral vote majority over George W. Bush. (Gore wins the popular vote count by almost 540,000 votes.) Two hours later, triggered by a report from Fox News, the networks pull their prediction and reclassify Florida as "too close to call." The Bush campaign has a Bush cousin, John Ellis, handling election coverage at Fox; shortly before Ellis instructs the network to call the election for Bush, Ellis speaks to George W. Bush by phone. In October 2006, former pollster David Moore reveals in his book How to Steal an Election that Ellis makes the call for Bush after being instructed to do so over the phone by Jeb Bush. Moore, who is working the CNN/CBS joint desk during the election returns, later writes that Ellis screamed ecstatically, "Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it!" Ellis then defies the VNS report of "too close to call" and has Fox declare the election for Bush, prompting the other networks to follow suit. Fox calls the election for Bush at 2:15 am, NBC calls it for Bush moments later, then the CNN/CBS joint desk, and finally ABC, all within the span of five minutes. Ellis later claims he made the call after looking at the vote tallies and doing some calculations on the back of an envelope. Moore later says the networks were blinded by competition and rushed to call the race after Fox, a charge the other networks deny. He says the pressure is too great for the network to wait and the rush to be first still affects accuracy in calling races.
• At 2:20 am, Gore calls Bush to concede the election after networks erroneously report that Bush has a 50,000 vote lead in Florida and predict the state is his. (Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, who owns NBC and is a major contributor to the Bush campaign, directs NBC to declare the election for Bush.) An hour later, the networks correct themselves and Gore retracts the concession. The final margin is reported to favor Bush by 1,784 votes, though initial recounts immediately begin eating into that margin. Allegations of election fraud begin flooding in from around the state. Some of these include voters queued to cast their ballots being turned away after the 7 pm deadline, over 7,100 ballots being destroyed and/or tampered with in Escambia and other northern counties, GOP votes being duplicated (possibly 6-7,000 duplicated Bush votes were recorded in 26 counties), 27,000 Gore votes were illegally disqualified in Duval County, minority voters being given ballots pre-punched for Bush, and more. (As a side note, in Duval, 27,000 ballots are supposedly ruined, 11,000 from five precincts alone. Of course, those five precincts are heavily African-American and heavily Democratic. Duval elections superviser Dick Carlberg, a Republican, runs the ballots through the machine counter once, and thousands indicate no vote for president. Carlberg runs them through a second time, and the second run opens up some of the incompletely punched chads: Bush garners 80 more votes and Gore 160. Carlberg, knowing that Bush holds a tiny lead in Florida, refuses to run the ballots through any more. Investigative journalist Greg Palast later asks Carlberg, "so, Dick, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president?" Carlberg grins and said nothing.)
• The biggest fraud was the illegal purging of the voter rolls by Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Katherine Harris, who paid Texas computer firm Database Technologies to do a search for convicted felons of the Florida voting rolls. Over 57,700 legitimate voters were culled from the rolls and not allowed to vote; the vast majority of those voters were black. 93% of Florida's black voters chose Gore in the election. After the election, Database admits that only 3,000 of the voters on their culling role were ineligible to vote. A company official will testify that the company was ordered by Harris's office to scrub anyone whose name is a 90% match of an identified felon; when the company objected that such a standard would result in many legitimate voters being scrubbed from the rolls, Harris orders the company to lower the standard to 80%. In response to a lawsuit from the NAACP, Florida's state government agrees to remedy the purged rolls -- after the 2002 election, when Jeb Bush will win re-election. (CBS News, Floridagate, Boston Globe, Buzzflash, Laura Flanders, Paul Waldman, Greg Palast)
• An interesting side note: the voter purge story is uncovered by investigative journalist Greg Palast. When Palast provides his information to CBS News in hopes that they would conduct their own investigation, he is told by a producer, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." How did CBS determine that Palast's story was unsubstantiated? "We called Jeb Bush's office." And that was the end of the story for CBS and the remainder of the mainstream media. Palast's BBC team is sent a copy of the original computer program used to create lists of purged voters several weeks after the election. Almost all of the purged voters are blacks characterized as felons and denied their right to vote. Of the 94.000 voters purged by the office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris, 91,000 were innocent of any crime and should have been allowed to vote. One such voter interviewed by Palast, Bernice Kines, was listed as having been convicted of a felony on July 31, 2009. The scrub list was 54% African-American (in a state with only a 13% African-American population) and 80% Democratic. "And that's how Bush 'won' Florida in 2000," Palast concludes.
• The story was #1 on the BBC and other world news outlets, but goes almost unreported in the US. (The New York Times did do a story on Florida's ethnic voter purge of 2000 voters...in 2004, and only to report that everything had now been corrected.) In 2004, Jeb Bush will secretly order a new purge list of 45,000 voters, including many like Kines who had been illegally denied their right to vote in 2000. CNN and other mainstream news outlets does report on the purge that time, but is "refuted" by a spokesman from the American Enterprise Institute, John Lott, who falsely claims on CNN that the US Civil Rights Commission "was not able to identify even one person" wrongly disenfranchised. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund echoes Lott's statement almost word for word in the Journal's editorial pages. Palast and his investigators are able to find several thousand wrongly purged voters in Tampa and Jacksonville alone, including Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran working at the Florida Orthopedic Center in Tampa (Florida law prohibits felons from working at hospitals). The NAACP sues Florida and the creators of the purge list, ChoicePoint, prompting Jeb Bush to admit "error," tossing the purge list, and promising never to do it again. So the BBC decides to film Steen attempting to vote on November 2, 2004. Sure enough, Steen is told he cannot vote because he is a convicted felon. The Republican elections supervisor, after learning that the BBC is filming the incident, rushes down to the polling place; his clerk tells the reporters, "Wow, this is extraordinary! Steen's status was just changed this morning!" With the cameras rolling, Steen is allowed to vote, but tens of thousands more are not. (Greg Palast, Paul Waldman)
• Among Bush's many lies during the campaign:
  
  • He claimed that tax cuts during his administration in Texas benefited the entire state. The reality is far different. In 1997, he pushed legislation that would reduce property taxes, but increase the sales tax and add a new business tax. The legislature refused to pass Bush's tax bill, and instead passed a $1 billion cut for property taxes. School districts across the state were forced to ask for local tax raises to compensate for the loss in revenue; most taxpayers ended up paying the same amount of taxes, or more. Bush's Texas tax breaks for the wealthy left the state unable to provide basic services for working people. After Bush left office, a conservative Republican introduced legislation to repeal Bush's $2.9 billion tax cut.
  • Bush repeatedly, and effectively, claimed, "The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum." Analyses of Bush's proposed cuts showed that Bush was wildly and deliberately inaccurate: almost 43% of his tax cuts would go to the top 1% of American earners (those making over $319,000 a year), while less than 13% would go to the lowest 60% of wage earners. This analysis was confirmed when Bush's tax cuts were passed early in his administration; the money was, indeed, distributed as the analyses predicted. Bush created a mythical single waitress (whom he falsely claims is a personal friend; in reality, the waitress does not exist) with two children to serve as an example of how his tax cuts would benefit the working poor; according to Bush, with an income of $22,000, this waitress would benefit because the new tax laws would not require her to pay any taxes whatsoever. The accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche was asked to analyze her tax burden; they replied that she already had no tax liability under current law, so the tax reform would not affect her one way or the other. (This mythical waitress would gain $878 from Gore's tax reforms.) Another fraudulent example was Bush's example of a two-parent family with an income of $26,000: according to Bush, this family would enjoy a "100% reduction" in taxes. True enough, but under the current law, the family would only pay $20 to begin with, less than 1% of their income.
  • In a related item, Bush touted his proposal to eliminate the estate tax as relief for farmers who would be able to "keep family farms in the family." No farm-industry expert could find a single example of a family farm lost because of the estate tax. David Corn writes, "Asked about this, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, 'If you abolish the death tax, people won't have to hire all those planners to help them keep the land that's rightfully theirs.' Caught in a $300 billion lie, the White House was now saying the reason to abolish the tax -- a move that would be a blessing to the richest 2% of Americans -- was to spare farmers the pain in the *ss of estate planning." The estate tax's repeal benefited the very wealthy almost exclusively. (It's worth noting that as far back as the mid-1990s, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was encouraging the use of the term "death tax" as opposed to "estate tax," even going so far as to force staffers who used the wrong terminology to contribute to a fund.)
  • Far from being a protector of the working citizen, Bush's administration eliminated even the most basic workplace protections. When meatpacking plant workers won lawsuits over job injuries, Bush shoved through a "tort reform" package that made it virtually impossible for employees to sue their employers. A Bush Supreme Court justice later made it a firing offense for an employee to even consult a lawyer about workplace hazards.
  • While he claims to be a proponent of a balanced budget, in Texas he inherited a $6 billion surplus that he turned into a $10 million deficit, most of which went for tax breaks to large property owners. He promised that his tax breaks would "grow the economy;" they did the opposite. In 1999 he said, "I'd like to have the opportunity to show Washington how to handle a budget surplus." He will promptly turn a $127 billion surplus into a $288 billion deficit in less than a year.
  • Bush unveils his plan to revamp Social Security during the campaign, though he will not make a major effort to implement his plan until his second term. The first three parts of his four-part plan are standard boiler-plate promises that current retirees will not lose benefits, that the government will not dip into the Social Security trust fund (a lie; Bush will strip the trust fund virtually bare in his first three years in office), and payroll taxes will not increase to fund the program. The fourth plank is a curveball -- Bush proposes to create "personal retirement accounts" for current workers. The idea, long pushed by economic conservatives, is to allow workers to place some of their Social Security money into stocks and bonds. What he fails to acknowledge is that such accounts will gut Social Security within a very few years, threaten the retirement of those now retired or about to retire, and put billions of government dollars into the pockets of Wall Street stockbrokers and stockbroking firms in the form of fees and charges. He fuels his call for Social Security reform by falsely claiming that Social Security will collapse under its own weight in 2037, a lie; he spins the lie by accusing Gore of "spreading fear and panic" by attacking the proposal. Bush tells PBS's Jim Lehrer, "It's more likely [that younger workers would] go to Mars than to receive a check from the Social Security system," a claim that is pure fiction. Most objective analyses project that, if implemented, Bush's plan would cause Social Security to run dry in 2023, fourteen years before his projection of collapse. As criticism of his proposals grow during the campaign, Bush moves farther and farther away from providing specific numbers, and relies more and more on accusing Gore of "fuzzy math" regarding Social Security and his proposed tax cuts. It's worth noting that Gore's arithmetic panned out quite accurately on the Bush tax cuts.
  • Under Bush, the energy industry wrote most of the bills passed by the Texas legislature, epitomizing the model of "cash-and carry" government he will bring to Washington. Bush's position is that he is independent of corporate influence. He secretly turned over the writing of his energy legislation to lobbyists for Marathon and Exxon, and unsurprisingly was rewarded with legislation that stifled penalties on polluters, and instead "encouraged" industry to "voluntarily" reduce emissions. As a result, Bush left Texas with the most polluted air in the country. Molly Ivins writes, "No one in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio was shocked to see Vice President Cheney turn the nation's energy policy over to the oil companies and then refuse to turn over the records of those meetings to the public. Seen that." After Bush left office, the voluntary-emissions law was rescinded in favor of a law compelling industries to clean up their toxic messes.
  • Bush claims to be in favor of Medicaid spending, but under his administration, so many roadblocks were enacted that most people eligible for Medicaid could not get through the application process. After he left office, some of those roadblocks were removed.
  • Bush claimed that he supported a hate-crimes law enacted after a black man was killed by being chained to a car and dragged down the road. In fact, Bush refused to support the bill because of its provision that gays and lesbians receive protection; the bill was passed by the Texas Legislature and signed into law by Bush's successor, Rick Perry.
  • In an ironic twist, Bush repeatedly accuses opponent Al Gore of being a "nation-builder," and says he would never do such a thing.
  (The Nation, Bush-Kerry Timeline, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, David Corn, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
• One problem for Democrats is that relatively few voters and supporters find a lot in the Gore campaign to motivate them, nor in the Bush campaign to motivate them to work for Bush's defeat. The New York Times notes that "the gap in intensity between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year," with Republicans far more passionate in their support of Bush than Democrats' support for Gore. In polls taken after the Florida recounts, by a two-to-one margin Gore voters are more likely to accept a Bush victory than vice versa. Liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan says, "There is no great ideological chasm between the two candidates...the country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other." This can be partially explained by Gore's ill-conceived strategy of distancing himself from the Clinton administration as well as by Bush's successful attempt to convince voters that he is far more moderate than he actually is. Joe Klein assumes that Bush will pursue "a quiet, patient, and persistant bipartisanship." Klein is dead wrong in his assessment. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)

"Government regulation and the much-maligned trial lawyers are the two instruments by which we control corporate greed. It seems to me government is neither good nor bad but simply a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build with, or a hammer to destroy with. The virtue of the hammer depends on the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used." -- Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose

• Historian Kevin Phillips observes that another shift has occurred within America's religious communities, overall contributing to support for conservative candidates. Devout Catholics have shifted substantially towards support for Republicans. While secular Jews remained strongly Democratic, Orthodox Jews have shifted rightward over the past several decades. Even Muslim voters slant heavily towards Bush, though it is possible they vote more against the Gore/Lieberman ticket, which featured a Jew as a vice-presidential candidate, rather than supporting Bush. As this shift continued in 2000 and beyond, Democrats will become more and more identified with secular voters. (Kevin Phillips)
• Commentator Laura Flanders notes that the Bush campaign and administration both make an extremely cynical, and extremely successful, use of what she calls "Bushwomen" to cloak its anti-women, anti-minority policies. "While Bush's administration, even in its earliest days, pursued policies that took a disproportionate toll on the lives of women and people of color, the women and people of color on Bush's staff acted as his cover from those who charged him with racism or sexism. The Bushwomen do for the Republican Party's image what 'pro-life' language did for its rhetoric. They provide a shield that makes the party's anti-civil rights, anti-feminist agenda acceptable to those who don't like to think of themselves as backward or, heaven forbid, racist." New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, soon to be Bush's head of the EPA, will fly to Florida to help the GOP put a "moderate face" on the Bush efforts to stop the Florida recounts. While staffers from the offices of Trent Lott and Tom DeLay work undercover to intimidate vote-counters, Whitman goes in front of the cameras to talk earnestly about the importance of counting the votes. New Jersey blacks attempt to warn the Gore campaign about Whitman, having their own unpleasant experiences with Whitman's attempts to disenfranchise blacks in that state. In 1993, Whitman was endorsed by virulently racist talk show host Bob Grant; Whitman hired Larry McCarthy, the author of the infamous 1998 Willie Horton ad campaign, to handle her own campaign advertisements. After Whitman's 1993 victory, campaign manager Ed Rollins bragged about spending $500,000 to keep African-Americans from voting. (Though Rollins will later retract his claim, the gubernatorial election was marked by an unusually low black voter turnout.) Whitman is remembered as denying racial profiling by New Jersey police long after the practice was proven. (Laura Flanders)
• November 7: In a minor but notable incident, outgoing president Clinton calls the progressive radio show Democracy Now at 9 a.m. to make what is supposed to be a two-minute, unannounced get-out-the-vote exhortation. Instead he runs into a buzzsaw in the person of liberal journalist Amy Goodman, who without preparation grills him on the corporate nature of the two political parties, a pardon for Native American activist Leonard Peltier, Democratic support for the death penalty, the sanctions against Iraq, and Ralph Nader's candidacy, among others. Clinton, though clearly irritated with the probing nature of the questions, remains on the line for the better part of a half-hour sparring with Goodman. The next day, the White House communications staff lets Goodman know that they are "furious" with the treatment of Clinton on the program, accusing Goodman of violating nonexistent "ground rules" and keeping Clinton on the line far past the intended two to three minutes. Goodman responds, "President Clinton is the most powerful person on earth. He can hang up when he wants to." Goodman later writes that not only were there no ground rules set before Clinton came on the air, that she and her network would not have agreed to any. "The only good ground rule for good reporting I know is that you don't trade your principles for access," she writes. "We were treating the president not as royalty, but as a public servant accountable to the people." (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
• November 7: Tens of thousands of black, mainly Democratic, voters in Florida are illegally disenfranchised. The anecdotal evidence of election-day voter fraud is overwhelming. Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, isn't allowed to vote because she is told she already voted absentee, although she did not. Broward County voter Cathy Jackson, registered since 1996, is turned away by poll workers who say she is not on the rolls; when she sees a white voter casting an affidavit ballot, she requests one for herself, and is turned down. Miami voter Donnise DeSouza is also told she isn't registered; she is moved to the "problem line," where she is forced to wait until the polls close, and she is then sent home without voting. Lavonna Lewis is registered, and waited hours to vote; the polls close while she is still waiting, and she is sent home without being allowed to vote, though she says she saw at least one white voter admitted to the line and allowed to vote. US congresswoman Corrine Brown, followed into her polling place by a local television crew, is told her ballot had been sent to Washington, DC, and so she can't vote in Florida. Only after hours of wrangling is she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown has registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. "We put them on buses," she says, "took them down to the supervisor's office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!" Like thousands of other black voters in Florida, Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County goes to the polls and is told he can't vote because he is a felon -- even though he is not. The phone lines at the NAACP offices ring off the hook with stories like these. "What happened that day—I can't even put it in words anymore," says Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. "It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I've ever experienced in my years of organizing." In January and February of 2001, the US Commission on Civil Rights will hear over 30 hours of damning testimony from over 100 witnesses, and concludes that there was powerful evidence to show that the Florida elections violated the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The commission will pass their findings on to John Ashcroft's Justice Department, who ignores the findings. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
• November 7: A perfect case in point for Florida's voting problems can be seen in the case of Gadsden County. One of the smallest and poorest counties in the state, the population is 57% African-American, but its elections are supervised by white conservative Denny Hutchinson. "He thought things were 'fine as they were,'" says county commissioner Ed Dixon. "He never advocated for anything." When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson refused. "He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll," says Dixon. "In the only county that's a majority African-American, you want a decreased turnout." Hutchinson's deputy, Shirley Green Knight, who has recently defeated Hutchinson for the office of elections supervisor but has yet to assume the office, notices something odd after the votes have been tallied.
• Out of the 14,727 ballots cast, over 2,000 are not counted in the tally. Why not? Gadsden's central optical scanning machine has a switch that, when "on," tallies overvotes and undervotes in separate categories for later review. Hutchinson had insisted that the switch be left off. Knight says she has no idea why Hutchinson decided to leave the switch off; she argues that the discarded votes need to be run through the machine with the switch on, but Hutchinson refuses. Only after the Gadsden canvassing board insists are the ballots run through. They examine the ballots, and discover that they are all overvotes, caused by the usage of a variant of the so-called "caterpillar ballot." With this ballot, the list of presidential candidates runs over to two separate columns, with the second column including a line for a write-in candidate. Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote "Gore" in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed. More sophisticated machines, such as those used in more affluent counties, would have refused to scan the ballot, giving the voter a chance to correct the mistake.
• Gadsden's system was an older, cheaper system. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee. Neither Katherine Harris nor her director of elections, Clay Harris, bothered to make the necessary changes. Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county's "automatic recount," giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count. However, Duval County voters weren't so fortunate. In Duval, which also has a large African-American population, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes. The Duval County elections supervisor, John Stafford, had published a sample-ballot insert in the local papers just before the election that instructed citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process. During the 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, will spend hours with Stafford, a white Republican. "I asked John Stafford how many under-and overvotes there were, and he said, 'Oh, just a few,'" recalls Langton. Shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford reveals that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic. None of these votes are counted. Stafford will consistently refuse to discuss the situation even four years later. His assistant, Dick Carlberg, will speak, but only in the presence of his attorney. He claims he sent an e-mail to the state's Division of Elections two days after the election -- before the deadline to ask for a manual recount -- informing the Division of Elections of the thousands of overvotes. "I was told, 'O.K.,' and that was about it," Carlberg recalls. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
• November 7: In a problem that encompasses every county in Florida, tens of thousands of African-American voters are denied the right to cast their ballot because their names improperly appear on a list of supposed "felons." Florida is just one of 7 states who deny convicted felons the right to vote unless they go through a long and convoluted process to regain their rights, but in this case, thousands who are not convicted felons are turned away. (The provision has its roots in Jim Crow laws designed to keep blacks from voting; In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and "grandfather clauses," by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remains.
• In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Florida state representative Chris Smith recalls trying to register voters outside of a Fort Lauderdale grocery store. "A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, 'Felony,' 'Felony,' and not even attempt to register to vote," Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are "aimed at African-American people." Meanwhile, black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. Wilson recalls one such proposal that was smacked down by Republican state senator Anna Cowin, head of the Ethics and Elections Committee. "I literally begged her, 'Please just agenda it,'" says Wilson. "she would not agenda it." Cowin retorts, "I philosophically did not believe that felons should automatically get their rights restored, and neither did the governor nor the leadership. It makes elections very expensive too, because you have all these thousands and thousands of people -- I mean tens of thousands of people -- to send literature to.... The people don't come to vote, anyway. So I think people need to go through a hoop."
• Former governors Bob Graham and Reubin Askew routinely granted tens of thousands of clemency requests for former felons, but Jeb Bush has stopped that process, allowing as many as 62,000 requests to pile up, unanswered, as of 2002.) Hillsborough County voter Willie Steen is a case in point. "The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon," says Steen. "I've never been arrested before in my life," Steen tells the poll worker. After listening to Steen's pleas for a few moments, the poll worker tells Steen to get out of line, effectively denying him his right to vote. The so-called felony, Steen later learns, took place between 1991 and 1993 -- when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf. Thousands of black voters experience similar problems to Steen's. Investigative journalist Greg Palast is the only reporter to look into the story, and eventually prints an explosive article on the entire sorry mess in England's Observer. The story causes a huge reaction in Europe, where hundreds of thousands protest the elections and deem Bush's victory illegitimate -- but the story is completely ignored in the American mainstream media. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
• November 7: Watching TV news from former ambassador Walter Stoessel's den, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor exclaims, "This is terrible!" upon seeing an announcement that Gore seems to have won the vote. It is well known that O'Connor wants to become the first female Chief Justice, a position she hopes she can land during a Bush presidency. After O'Connor angrily leaves the room, her husband John explains that she is upset merely because she wants to retire, but will not leave the bench during a Gore presidency, denying the putative Democratic president the chance to name a more liberal justice to replace her. The explanation is bogus. "I thought John was spinning us a bit to protect her since she had been so indiscreet," says a source who was there. The O'Connors' friends say they believe the O'Connors want to remain in Washington even after retirement. A close O'Connor friend, a prominent Democrat, confirms that. When told about the Election Night episode, he says, "Oh, no, no, no. That's not her plan. The plan is that, if Bush wins, Chief Justice [William] Rehnquist will retire, and Bush will then nominate Sandra to be the first female United States chief justice in history. That's the plan. I don't think they will ever leave Washington." O'Connor will not announce her retirement until July 2005. (Consortium News)

Hillary Clinton elected senator

• November 7: Hillary Clinton defeats Rick Lazio in the New York senate elections. Lazio attempts to paint Clinton as a terrorist sympathizer in ads that run in the last weeks of the campaign, accusing her of accepting donations from the same terrorist supporters who financed the attack on the USS Cole and exhorting her to "stop supporting terrorism. The ads backfire when the Clinton campaign discredits the charges. (H.R. Clinton)
• November 7: The vast majority of Florida polls close at 7 PM. CBS News decides not to project a winner in the Florida presidential race at poll closing, even though the best estimate, based upon exit-poll interviews from the 45 survey precincts, shows Gore leading Bush by 6.6 points. CBS's Decision Desk decides to wait for some actual votes from sample precincts to confirm the exit-poll results. By 7:40, Voter News Service (VNS) results show enough of a lead by Gore to make the call, but CBS chooses to wait for more data. 8 minutes later, NBC calls Florida for Gore. Within minutes, both CBS and VNS make the same call. VNS later identifies several problems with its projection, including underestimations of absentee ballots, slight "over-Gore" estimations in exit polls, comparisons with the 1998 Florida gubernatorial race as a basis for projections, and distortions caused by times of estimates compared with times of precinct closings. At 9:38, VNS discovers an error by one of its computer operators that incorrectly gave Gore 40,000 more votes in Duval County than Gore actually received (note: this is a problem with VNS's scoring, not the actual vote tallies). Based on this error, VNS simply deletes all of Duval County's results from its tally, and based on the results, CBS decides to withdraw its call for Gore and relabel Florida as still undecided.
• As time wears on, CBS relies on VNS projections to track what it considers a steady gain in Bush votes, giving Bush a razor-thin lead; CBS is not following the Associated Press tracking, which show Bush's slender lead disappearing, nor are its Decision Desk members listening to the network's own Ed Bradley reporting on irregularities and as-yet-untabulated Democratic votes all across Florida. At 1:43 AM, (now into Wednesday, November 8), Bradley points to the fact that a third of the vote is not yet in from Dade and Broward Counties, which are Democratic strongholds. At 1:48, Bradley says: "Bush ahead by 38,000 votes. And still out there, about 5 percent of the vote is still out, 270,000 votes. So that's a big chunk of votes." Bradley has been getting additional information from the AP wire, as well as from CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts, who is reporting from Florida that there are a number of counties still tabulating votes, many of them predominantly Democratic. Neither Bradley nor the CBS Decision Desk team is aware of the error in Volusia County which is falsely subtracting 16,000 votes from Gore's total. By 2:10 AM, the erroneous Volusia results show Bush with a 51,000 vote lead. Bradley warns that Volusia's totals are not complete, but the CBS team ignores Bradley.
• With 97% of the votes counted, and VNS showing Bush with a 51,000 vote lead, CBS begins discussing the idea of calling the state for Bush. CBS looks at how many votes are outstanding in three major Democratic counties (Dade, Palm Beach and Broward). The statistical analysis projects that Bush's margin of victory will remain greater than 30,000 votes even when those counties are factored in. But there is an error in the assumption: instead of the 179,713 votes the VNS model says have yet to be counted, there are in fact about twice as many outstanding votes, many of them absentee ballots from Palm Beach County. Bush's lead in the VNS count includes the 20,000-vote error undercounting Gore in Volusia County and does not include 4,000 additional votes for Gore in Brevard County. These 24,000 votes would have nearly eliminated the 30,000-vote final Bush margin the CBS News Decision Desk has estimated. There would have been no call if these errors had not been in the system. The AP count, still ignored by CBS, shows Bush's lead dropping to under 48,000 votes. (Scoop)
• November 8: At 2:16 AM, Fox News uses the erroneous and incomplete data from the Voter News Service to declare George W. Bush the winner in Florida, a victory which would give him the presidency. Within minutes, ABC, NBC, a frustrated CBS Decision Desk team, and CNN follow suit. The man who makes the call for Fox News is John Ellis, who is Bush's cousin and a partisan Republican. Ellis has spent the evening passing the latest polling information and projections to George Bush and Jeb Bush. "It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth," Ellis later tells the New Yorker. "Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool." Within four minutes, the other networks follow Fox's lead and project Bush as the winner in Florida, and hence the winner of the election. (This initial projection will become a cornerstone of the Bush team's profession of victory. "The notion you'd have the cousin of one presidential candidate in a position to call a state, and the election, is unthinkable," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Fox's call -- wrong, unnecessary, misguided, foolish -- helped create a sense that the election went to Bush, was pulled back, and it's just a matter of time before his President-elect title is restored." Fox head Rupert Murdoch will casually, and unbelievably, deny that his network displayed any partisanship during the entire election cycle.)
• Meanwhile, the AP tallies correct the Volusia error, and drop the Bush lead to below 30,000 votes. Though CBS's Ed Bradley continues to report on the corrections, the CBS election team is not listening to him. By 2:40, VNS shows Bush with a 55,537-vote lead, with less than 69,000 votes left to count. The AP, meanwhile, is reporting Bush with a much narrower lead of 9,163 after a large report from Palm Beach County. At 3 am, CBS anchor Dan Rather tells his audience that he is awaiting a concession from Gore; at 3:10, Rather's team is made aware of the AP results, and the precipitous drop in Bush's lead. At 3:30, Rather predicts that Gore may well refuse to concede and demand a recount. Around 3:40, Gore campaign chairman William Daley calls CBS News president Andrew Heyward and asks if CBS is considering withdrawing its call for Bush. Heyward is noncommital; meanwhile, news of the voting irregularities has reached Rather and the CBS election team. At 3:48, Rather says, "Now the situation at the moment is, nobody knows for a fact who has won Florida. Far be it from me to question one of our esteemed leaders [CBS management], but somebody needs to begin explaining why Florida has now not been pulled back to the undecided category." He goes on to say, "A senior Gore aide is quoted by Reuters as confirming that Gore has withdrawn [his] concession in the US President race." By 4 AM, Bush's lead has dwindled to fewer than 2000 votes, and within minutes, all the major networks withdraw their call for Bush. It is notable that the AP, whose vote tallies are the most accurate, never called Florida for either Bush or Gore, and neither did VNS.
• Meanwhile, at around 2:25 AM, Gore phones Bush to congratulate him on the win, and leaves his campaign headquarters to make his concession speech. Before he arrives at Nashville's War Memorial Auditorium, aides manage to grab him and tell him that the Fox call is incorrect, that Florida is still in doubt, and that according to Florida law, a recount is mandatory. Minutes later, Gore calls Bush to let him know that he is not yet giving up on Florida. Bush, predictably, is not happy with the call. Gore tells Bush on the phone, "Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you. The state of Florida is too close to call." Bush responds, "Are you saying what I think you're saying? Let me make sure I understand. You're calling back to retract your concession?" Gore replies, "You don't have to be snippy about it." Bush protests that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct he know because his brother Jeb has told him. "Your little brother," Gore replies, "is not the ultimate authority on this." Bush snaps, "You do what you have to do" and hangs up on Gore. By the time the votes are counted, the margin of Bush's lead is within 0.5 of a percentage point, close enough to trigger an automatic recount. This recount is almost perfunctory, a mere checking of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts of "undervotes" -- ballots with no machine-readable choice for president -- and "overvotes" -- ballots with two apparently different choices for president -- must be undertaken. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Guardian, Scoop)
• In October 2003, the story behind the Volusia County tally of negative 16,022 votes for Gore is revealed. The official story at the time, as reported by the Washington Post, was that a computer glitch caused the error. The Post's Dana Milbank wrote, "something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 pm, she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000 -- all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." Milbank continued, "'...faulty 'memory cards' in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed."
• But an investigation by Black Box Voting's Bev Harris finds a far different explanation. At the time of the "glitch," which happened in electronic voting machines supplied by Diebold, Diebold executives were themselves stumped by the error. According to Harris's investigation, substantiated by e-mails from Diebold's support technicians, a mysterious second memory card was surreptitiously introduced into the main tallying computer which subtracted 16,022 votes from the Volusia results. The card was then removed and was subsequently unable to be found. The second memory card apparently came, according to a Diebold technician, from an "unauthorized source." A Diebold security manager wrote sarcastically, "If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. Heh. Second shooter theory. All we need now is a grassy knoll." The error is corrected by reloading the first, proper memory card, but no investigation into the source of the second, fraudulent memory card is ever launched. The error, not rectified until much later, added the improper vote tallies to VNS's "official" projection that leads Fox News, CBS, and other media outlets to improperly call the Florida election in favor of Bush. (Another "error," this time in machines in Brevard County, lops an additional 4000 votes from Gore's totals, also figuring into VNS's projections.)
• Only because someone in Volusia County noticed the error and brought it to light was the error fixed -- the Diebold machines contain no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals reported by precincts. Therefore it is not only conceivable, but likely, that other voting machines were tampered with and their vote totals altered. Reporter Alastair Thompson writes, "How plausible is it that an error such as this -- of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night -– was really the simple result of a 'faulty memory card?' We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts. Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties? Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests? Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida? Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book The Best Democracy Money can Buy and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle." (Scoop)
• November 8: Early that morning, after a virtually sleepless night, former Gore chief of staff Ron Klain begins assembling a staff of hastily collected volunteers to handle the recount issue for Gore. He begins collecting data, and is astonished at the amount of anecdotal evidence of GOP-sponsored voter suppression: voters sent hither and yon to find polling places quietly relocated to different places on Election Day, thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of blacks refused the right to vote, police roadblocks at polling places in Democratic strongholds blocking voters from reaching the polls.
• Klain hears of problems with the so-called "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach County that have apparently cost Gore nearly 3,000 votes. (The "butterfly ballot" was a confusing ballot designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections, Theresa LePore, a former flight attendant in the employ of Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi, who later will switch to the Republican Party and lose her post in a later election. The ballot had candidates' names on facing sides of the ballot, with a central row of holes to be punched. The problem ensues when voters mistakenly punch the hole nearest Gore's name in an attempt to vote for Gore; unfortunately, the ballot design designates that hole for Pat Buchanan.) Buchanan wins over 3,400 votes in Palm Beach, around 2,600 more votes than he receives in any other county; his vote tally is even more suspect when it is noted that most of Palm Beach's voters are elderly Jews, many of whom were thrilled to be voting for an Orthodox Jew, Joseph Lieberman, and consider Buchanan a Holocaust trivializer who is anathema to them. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer tries to tell the country that Palm Beach is a "Buchanan stronghold," but even Buchanan himself freely admits that the vote totals are probably wrong, saying, "Most of these are probably not my votes, and that may be enough to give the margin to Mr. Gore." James Baker then insists, falsely, that the butterfly ballot has been used in earlier Florida elections and no one has ever complained before. He also insists that no one complained until after the results were initially tallied, another lie; many Palm Beach voters were registering complaints as early as Election Day morning. (A 2001 analysis concludes that Gore probably lost between 3000 and 9000 votes due to the butterfly ballot, a number far higher than Bush's eventual 537-vote margin of "victory.")
• GOP spokespersons deride Palm Beach voters as being too stupid or too senile to understand the ballots, an ugly allegation that has no basis in fact. Architect Ken Weitz, 48, tells Newsweek that the ballot was "anything but crystal-clear;" 52-year old chiropractor Andre Fladell initially dismisses complaints about the ballot as lack of paying attention, but is horrified to realize during a conversation with friends that he inadvertently voted for Buchanan instead of Gore. "A ballot is supposed to lead me to my vote," he says. "This one led me away." Worse, almost 20,000 votes in Palm Beach are not counted because of "double-punching," at least 5000 of which were punched for both Buchanan and Gore.
• Further problems begin to crop up: in Palm Beach, over 10,000 votes were thrown out because the machine did not recognize any vote for president -- 4% of Palm Beach voters, almost all Democrats, voted for senator, but not for president, according to the machine. That is highly suspect. Miami-Dade County experiences similar problems. In the third of Florida's largest counties, Broward, rumors are flying about missing ballot boxes and vote totals radically different from what are predicted. And no one has yet to explain the "computer glitch" that gave Gore negative results in Volusia. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Larry Kolb)

• November 8: Ron Klain, heading up the Gore campaign's recount team, tries in vain to recruit help from a number of Florida law firms. He gets little or no cooperation, and is told that if the firms want to continue doing business in Jeb Bush's Florida, they can have nothing to do with the Gore campaign. Klain puts together an ad hoc team of lawyers and volunteers, and asks former Secretary of State Warren Christopher to head the team. He selects Christopher in hopes that the Democratic eminence will create an atmosphere of, in the words of Vanity Fair reporters David Margolick, Evgenia Peretz, and Michael Shnayerson, "decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead," the authors write, "Christopher sets a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats' efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation." The response of the Bush team, headed by James Baker, another former secretary of state and a longtime troubleshooter for the Bush family, is quite different. The Vanity Fair authors call Baker "a pit bull." Baker's message is clear from the outset: Bush won the election fair and square, and any attempts to say otherwise is an attempt to unseat the legitimate president. (Almost as soon as he disembarks from his plane, Baker begins declaring that the votes have been counted and recounted, and accuses Gore of demanding "recount after recount" until he gets the results he wants. In reality, the votes have not been counted thoroughly even once.) Behind the scenes, though, Baker knows he is on far shakier ground than he will admit to the press. "We're getting killed on 'count all the votes," he tells his team. "Who the hell could be against that?"
• Meanwhile, strategizing is going on in the Secretary of State's office. The SoS is Katherine Harris, the co-chair of the Florida Bush campaign as well as the state official delegated to supervising a free and fair election; later examinations will prove that Harris has done a fine job trying to get her candidate elected and a criminally poor job in running a fair election. Initially, Harris seems overwhelmed, uninformed, and unprepared to handle the sudden spotlight of media attention and questioning. After flubbing her first few media appearances, the Bush campaign assigns her a "minder," J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich, a veteran party lobbyist from Tallahassee. Stipanovich, a former campaign advisor for Jeb Bush, is successful at focusing Harris by appealing to her sense of grandiosity and history, to the point where she begins identifying herself with Queen Esther, who in the Old Testament saved the Jews from genocide. Stipanovich tells Harris again and again that history rests on her shoulders. "You have to bring this election in for a landing," he tells her again and again. (It is interesting to note that neither Harris, Stiponavich or anyone else on the Bush team seems interested at all in finding out the intent of the Florida voters and producing a fair and accurate result. One would think that Harris in particular would be concerned with obtaining proper results, but instead it becomes obvious that Harris's concerns lie wholly with her Republican colleagues, and she spares no concerns for the Florida electorate. As for Stipanovich, he is well remembered for his comment after the close of the last Florida congressional session: "I got everything. I don't know what the poor people got, but the rich people are happy and I'm ready to go home.") (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, David Corn, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 9: The electoral votes stand at 260 for Gore and 246 for Bush, with Florida's 25 votes hanging in the balance. News breaks that ballots in Palm Beach were flawed, resulting in thousands of votes going to extreme right-wing candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Gore. Buchanan readily concedes that the huge numbers of votes in Palm Beach, largely made up of left-leaning Jewish voters, are unlikely to be his. Secretary of State Katherine Harris says that vote recounts won't be completed until November 14. An unofficial AP recount shows Bush in the lead by 362 votes after most Florida counties complete their recounts. (CBS News)
• November 9: Though Gore declares that he wants all the votes counted, his team decides to ask for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties only: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Baker sees his chance, and leaps to accuse the Gore campaign of "cherry-picking" counties for recounts to serve his own ends, a charge that will resonate throughout the election process. In reality, Gore has little choice. According to Florida law, Gore has no right to ask for a statewide recount. He can ask for manual recounts on a county-by-county basis within 72 hours; if he wants a statewide recount, he has to wait until the election is certified (by Katherine Harris). The recounts must be requested on the basis of perceived problems, not just because a candidate wants a recount; while the four counties were areas in which Gore could be expected to gain votes, they are also the counties that actually experienced serious problems. Unfortunately, the Baker team is much more successful than the Christopher team in getting its message across (a task made easier by a mainstream media that is by and large far too willing to buy into Baker's message at the cost of impartiality and truth). The message proclaimed by Baker across the headlines and TV screens is simple and damning: Gore is trying to cherry-pick Democratic strongholds and reverse a fairly, and thoroughly, counted election. The success of Baker's media blitz staggers the Gore team, which thought that its strategy would be perceived as evenhanded and fair. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
• November 9: Automatic recounts of Florida's votes provide sobering results for the Bush team. Even though 18 of Florida's 67 counties did not in actuality recount their votes, but merely resubmitted the original tallies, after the numbers are in, Bush's lead shrinks from 1,784 votes to a slender 327. (There is no way to know what the totals would have been if the other 18 counties, representing a quarter of the Florida electorate, had properly recounted their votes.) It seems likely that a manual recount will continue the trend and give Gore an unchallengable lead. After the initial recount figures were received, the Bush campaign decides on a simple strategy: no more recounts. Baker files the first lawsuit of the post-election process, a suit in federal court asking that all manual recounts be prohibited. (Later the Baker team will accuse the Gore team of first taking the election to court, an allegation that is as false as it is successful.) Baker says the lawsuit seeks to preserve the integrity of the election. At the same time, the Bush campaign is agitating in favor of hand recounts in New Mexico. Baker begins his insistence, repeated throughout the process, that all votes have been machine-counted twice, a falsehood never challenged by the Gore team. The team of legal advisors to the Bush campaign working to give the presidential election to Bush is larded with Enron lawyers, including Baker and Robert Zoellick. It does not come out until well after Bush's installation as president that Enron is heavily funding the Bush support team in the Florida recount. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, CBS News, Kevin Phillips, David Corn)
• Around this time, and continuing for the entire 36 days of recounting, large mobs of Republican staffers and Bush supporters gather outside Blair House, the Washington residence of the vice president currently occupied by the Gore family, and scream, "Get out of Cheney's house!" among other epithets and vituperation, 24 hours a day. (Among the regulars is Doro Bush, George W.'s sister.) Many of the crowd members are bused in by the Bush campaign. Daughter Karenna Gore says she feels physically threatened when she leaves the house and has to push through the screaming mob; she tells her father, "We've got to fight back harder! And where are our crowds?" Gore tells her, "We have to do what's best for our country, and it is not good for the country to have this kind of divisiveness." In fact, Gore calls off more than one counter-demonstration, fearing that the competing crowds may get violent. The crowd of Republicans issue a number of coarse verbal threats to individual members of the Gore family, focusing on the children; Karenna says later, "It was just very upsetting that someone would yell those things at us. It felt -- we felt sort of like -- trapped in this, you know, little house with all those people yelling mean things. ...It -- it wasn't a good situation." The Gore family is interviewed by Barbara Walters on November 15, 2002, on ABC's 20/20, but the section of the interview dealing with the "siege" of Blair House is never aired; instead, the transcript of that portion of the interview is put on ABC's web site. (ABC/Mark Crispin Miller)
• November 10: New Mexico, with five electoral votes, is removed from Gore's column by CBS News, which considers the race there too close to call. CBS News calls Oregon for Gore. The net result gives Gore two more electoral votes, to push his total to 262. (CBS News)
• November 10: Three of Florida's four requested counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach -- begin weighing whether to conduct, at first, a "sample" recount of 1% of the votes and then, if the numbers warrant, recounting the other 99%. The issues are complex: everyone has to consider the problem of "undervotes," ballots where a choice of president is not recognizable to the machines. Precincts using optiscan machines also have to consider the issue of "overvotes," ballot sheets that are marked with multiple choices. In the case of overvotes, Florida law states that the intent of the voter must be considered first. For example, a ballot marked for both Bush and Gore can fairly be discarded, as no voter intent can be ascertained. However, a ballot with the space for Gore marked, and then Gore's name written beside it, can readily be determined to be intended as a vote for Gore, even though the machine kicked that ballot out. Stray pencil marks also resulted in votes being kicked out. In total, there are around 175,000 undervotes and overvotes to consider throughout the four counties. Harris and Stiponavich are prohibited by law from directly giving the four counties instructions on how to do their recounts; instead, they send a pretty young lawyer, Kerry Carpenter, to Palm Beach to "help" the three-person canvassing board. Carpenter tells the board that she is a lawyer, but fails to note that she is from Harris's office. During the recount, when the results have given Gore 50 more votes, Carpenter impugns on board chairman Judge Charles Burton to change the recount standards to a more stringent set of guidelines; under the new guidelines, Gore's 50 votes become a mere half-dozen. Carpenter also encourages Burton to confer with Harris as to what grounds would be acceptable for a manual recount; Burton agrees. Even so, all four requested counties decide to do recounts. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 12: Hand recounts commence in Palm Beach and Volusia Counties in Florida. Katherine Harris informs Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties to inform her as to why they cannot meet the recount deadline. (CBS News, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 12: On Meet the Press, James Baker decries the accuracy of manual recounts, and accuses the Gore campaign of asking for manual recounts in just those counties that would benefit Gore. "Now the other side wants to proceed with a manual recount in a few selected counties that are predominantly Democratic under a procedure that has no standards, no uniform rules," he says. "The country is moving towards automated voting machines because that's the best way to get the most accurate results." Baker either ignores the reality or is not aware that studies have consistently proven that dispassionate hand recounts are almost always more reliable than machine recounts. Baker says, "The electoral officials look at the ballots and simply divine the intent of the voter.... That's extraordinarily inaccurate. ...Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats, and therefore can neither be consciously nor unconsciously biased." He also falsely states that the Florida recounts are taking place with "simply no standards to guide." Even election machine manufacturers admit that hand recounts are more accurate, an admission that Baker ignores. Two officials of the Association for Computing Machinery recommend hand recounts for all of Florida, a recommendation that the Gore team will later echo. Bush himself signed a 1997 law in Texas that mandates hand recounts for close elections, a law he chooses to forget; when asked about the Texas law, Baker lies, saying that the Texas law mandates a set of "uniform rules and objective standards," when in reality the law reads very much like Florida law in granting vote counters a wide latitude of discretion and judgment. Bush lawyer Theodore Olson will repeat the same lie to a federal judge. (David Corn)
• Historian Kevin Phillips, in his examination of the Bush family, American Dynasty, is voluble in his criticism of the recount procedures and both the Bush and Gore campaigns' handling of the issue. He writes that in four Florida counties -- Volusia, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward -- there was enough questions about inaccurate counts to warrant a hand recount. The Gore campaign tilted towards advocating a limited recount, though for a moment, on November 11, Gore himself advocated a statewide recount, which would have most likely awarded him the state and the presidency by a 5,000-to-8,000 vote margin. Approximately 60,500 ballots were considered "undervotes," where the choice for president was either left blank or marked incomprehensibly; around 105,000 ballots were considered "overvotes," where more than one choice for president was marked or, in many cases, the same candidate was both marked and then written in as a "write-in" candidate. (Undoubtedly many voters felt that they were ensuring their ballot would be cast for their candidate by marking the candidate twice; instead, their ballots were not tallied at all.)
• Some counties, such as Palm Beach, employed confusing ballots that misled many voters (i.e. the five thousand or so Palm Beach voters who wound up voting for Pat Buchanan instead of, or along with, Al Gore, and another 3,000 who voted for both Gore and Socialist candidate David McReynolds), others employed inaccurate and outdated punch-card voting systems (the source of the infamous "chads"), and some counties had an inordinate number of voters who could be expected to make mistakes marking their ballots. Any of these three reasons were considered justifications for recounts under Florida law. In addition, many voters, mostly minority members, complained that election officials refused to properly assist them in marking their ballots. Some filed their improperly marked ballots, while others left the polls in frustration without voting for anyone. In all three cases, such problems tended to be reflected in heavily Democratic counties. Additionally, tens of thousands of voters, largely Democrats, were illegally denied a chance to vote because their names improperly turned up on a state-produced "scrub list" of ineligible voters.
• In the early days of the recount, both the Gore and Bush legal machines mounted their offensive. Like Texas under then-Governor Bush, Florida's election law mandated hand recounts when questions arose, and mandated that a ballot be given every consideration in judging the intent of the voter. (For example, an overvote that marked a presidential candidate as well as wrote that candidate's name on the ballot would properly be counted as a vote for that candidate.) Instead of backing recounts in line with Florida (and Texas) law, the Bush team, led by family friend James Baker, fought tooth and nail to oppose any recounts. Phillips writes of the focused Bush campaign efforts to oppose any recounts, and the chaotic, confused, and contradictory response from the Gore team, "It is hard to avoid concluding that top Democrats were outsmarted by the much larger, better financed, and shrewder Bush Florida team."
• Gore chooses two outsiders to head his recount team, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and former secretary of commerce Bill Daley, son of Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Daley is immediately targeted for scorn by the GOP team over his father's reputation for vote tampering. Neither Christopher nor Daley know anything about Florida's political structure, though "[t]he cracker courthouse cliques and Everglades swamp foxes lined up with the Republicans most assuredly did." The Bush team insists from day one that their candidate is the winner, and conduct themselves as a presidency-in-waiting; the Democrats, shy about claiming victory before the votes were counted, allow the Bush campaign to claim victory in the media. Worse, the Gore team pay little attention to the ethical breaches made by the Bush campaign, including the "scrub list" and the patent impropriety of having the Bush campaign's co-chair, Katherine Harris, also serve as the election arbiter. "...Gore's Florida recount team seems not to have understood the imperative of quickly establishing the election-tampering culpability of state officials," later documented as a network of illegal collusion between Harris, Governor Jeb Bush, and the Bush campaign.
• Even the favorable rulings by the Florida Supreme Court don't help the Gore campaign. Gore fails to ask for a statewide recount, which would have been granted upon request, and no statewide recount basis was mandated, leaving it to individual counties to handle recount procedures. Had the Gore campaign been on the ball, the overvotes alone would have given Gore the election. Gore would have won major gains in Volusia and Gadsden Counties. Additionally, 300 overvotes in Jackson County had been illegally "fixed" by Bush campaign workers by using blank labels to cover up the extra markings. 131 Gore votes were rejected by the voting machines in Lake County that were later picked up by investigators. Most importantly, a later investigation proved that Gore would have picked up 19,000 overvotes in Florida's eight largest counties, a margin that would have eliminated the paper-thin 537-vote margin eventually certified by Harris as giving Bush the victory. It was later proven that some of these 537 Bush votes were from overseas ballots that had been illegally tampered with by Bush operatives to be counted in the initial results. Most of these ballots had been postmarked after the cutoff date. Similar ballots cast for Gore were not allowed to be counted.
• Bush's recount team was determined all along to get the issue in front of the Supreme Court, where privately they believed, correctly, they had the votes to take the election if the justices could be given even the most tissue-thin legal rationale for awarding the election to Bush. The Supreme Court's decision was fundamentally flawed and biased. Two of the five justices who voted in favor of Bush, Scalia and Rehnquist, had children who knew they would be offered positions in a Bush White House. Scalia's son Eugene worked for the same law firm as Bush's lead counsel, Theodore Olson. Under the law, both Scalia and Rehnquist should have recused themselves from the deliberations and the decision; neither did so. The eventual basis of the decision, written by Scalia, was based on the 14th amendment's equal protection clause, a ridiculous basis for overturning a state supreme court's decision. (Republican lawyers later admitted that the equal-protection argument would have not worked against a claim for a statewide recount.) Dissenting justice John Paul Stevens, a Republican, will write, "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner in this year's presidential elections, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." The Bush recount team will spend $13.8 million on lawyers, salaries, travel, and hotels, compared with $3.2 million spent by the Gore team. The Bush team sent about 100 lawyers to Florida, and much of the team's travel was provided courtesy of jets owned by Enron and Halliburton.
• Phillips writes of the media's all-but-unquestioning acceptance of the Bush victory and the widespread perception that Bush, not Gore, was cheated out of legitimacy, "What could have been a debacle of Bush legitimacy turned out to be a celebration of ideological and tactical triumph. Many of the GOP lawyers and spokespersons involved were rewarded when high administration posts were handed out, as well they should have been. In addition to securing the presidency, they kept any debate from focusing on issues of restoration, legitimacy, and a thwarted popular plurality in a context tailor-made for raising such themes." Harvard historian Alexander Keysar writes about "one of the stranger developments of the post-election conflict: the blunt expression of a legal argument denying that Americans actually possess a right to vote in presidential elections." As it turns out, Scalia's argument that Americans do not actually have the right to vote is centered in an eighteenth-century interpretation of the Constitution that the State is an instrument of God. Scalia will write, "That consensus has been upset by the emergence of democracy." He continues that "the reactions of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible." Scalia's interpretation is one short step away from advocacy of the divine right of kings. (Kevin Phillips)
• November 13 - 17: Early Monday morning, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chairman of the Florida Bush campaign, issues her opinion: no manual recounts in any Florida county unless the voting machines were broken. Harris is overruled by the courts within hours; she retaliates by declaring that she will halt all recounts by the end of business on November 14 at 5 pm. Only Volusia is slated to have finished its recounting by November 14; Broward cannot finish that quickly, and Palm Beach and Miami-Dade haven't even decided how to recount their votes yet. A judge supports Harris's decision if she can show a reason for her deadline. She asks the three counties for explanations why they cannot finish by her arbitrary deadline. Palm Beach cites the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount; Broward tells of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems; Miami-Dade argues that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she receives the responses, Harris rejects them all. Gore team leader Warren Christopher charges that Harris's decision is politically motivated. Meanwhile, a federal judge rejects the Bush team's request to halt all manual recounts. By the 17th, all of the absentee ballots have ostensibly been counted, and Harris announces that she will certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court stops her, and gives the three target counties until Sunday, November 26 to finish recounting, with the option for Harris to give the counties through the 27th. As the undervotes are slowly added to the totals, Gore votes steadily accumulate. The Bush team becomes frantic to stop the hemorraghing, and has GOP lawyers fiercely challenge every possible vote going into Gore's column. Democratic lawyers respond, and the recounts in the three counties become fractious and combative. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, CBS)
• November 14: Palm Beach County election officials decide to delay their recount until they can clarify if they have the legal authority to continue. Election officials in Miami/Dade County begin manual recounts as requested by the Gore campaign, though due to virulent protests by its heavily Republican Cuban-American community, they dawdle with procedures and logistics until November 20. Circuit Judge Terry Lewis upholds the 5 pm Tuesday deadline for Florida vote certification, a victory for Harris and the Bush campaign. Lewis says supplemental returns can be filed after the deadline, but can be ignored or counted after circumstances are considered, at Harris's option. An appeal by the Gore campaign to the Florida Supreme Court is expected. Democratic election officials report receiving death threats. (CBS News, The American Prospect, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 15: Katherine Harris files a lawsuit at the behest of the Bush campaign to stop all recounts, a request denied that evening by the Florida Supreme Court. Broward County begins recounting its votes. Gore proposes a full, statewide recount if the GOP continues to refuse to accept the recounts, and promises to forego further legal proceedings if the Bush campaign will accept the selected recounts; the Bush campaign refuses, and Bush refuses Gore's suggestion for a face-to-face meeting. Harris refuses to accept the recounted totals from three counties. (CBS News)
• November 15: Bush goes on television to inform the country that his campaign supports the automatic recount of all Florida votes (by law, his campaign has no choice in the matter). He also repeats the lie that manual recounts will add inaccuracies to the vote tallies, and adds his own lie to the stack by claiming that "Everyone in Florida has had his or her vote counted once." (Around 10,500 so-called undervotes had not been counted, perhaps more, and are the subject of heated debate in election offices throughout Florida.) He also says, wrongly, that "Each time these voting cards are handled the potention for error multiplies," implying that with punchcard ballots, "chads" might fall out with repeated handling. A later examination of those ballots will show that routine handling would never cause an unpunched chad to fall out. Miami-Dade elections supervisor David Leahy says, "You can run a ballot through a reader 100 times and you'll never get any chads inadvertently punched out. The ballots won't disintegrate on the basis of normal handling." Bush calls for the process to be handled with "respect and dignity," and insists that "we have a responsibility to respect the law, and not seek to undermine it when we do not like its outcome"; a week later, when a Florida court rules that hand counts must be included in the state totals, Bush will accuse the judges of "using the bench to change Florida's election laws and usurp the authority of Florida's election officials." He also shows his gross misunderstanding of the separation of powers when he informs reporters that "it's the executive branch's job to interpret law." Any high school student should know that it is the courts' place to interpret law, not the executive branch. The courts, not the executive branch (in this case, Bush's brother Jeb), are mandated by the Constitution to sort out conflicting standards in providing for manual recounts. It's understandable, but legally indefensible, that Jeb Bush would be the preferred final arbiter for the Florida vote tallies by his brother, though officially, Jeb Bush has recused himself from the proceedings. Unofficially, he is heavily involved. (David Corn, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 16: Gore and the Florida Democratic Party file a motion in state court to compel Harris to accept the recounted results, a motion which will be denied on November 17. The appeal is channeled straight to the Florida Supreme Court. (Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 16: Republican senator Trent Lott says he hopes that lightning will strike Hillary Clinton and prevent her from taking her Senate seat. (Mark Crispin Miller)
• November 16: Iowa, which gave its 7 electoral votes to Gore, will not be challenged by the Bush campaign. The Florida Supreme Court authorizes recounts to continue; Palm Beach resumes the recount. Gore's lawyers successfully challenged Harris's refusal to continue counting votes, saying that her decree that hand recounts can only take place in the event of "machine failure and hurricane" was "bunk," an opinion echoed by the Florida Attorney General. (CBS News, US News and World Report)

"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff [two Washington society mavens famous for their support of Democrats] are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores." -- Ann Coulter, quoted by Joe Maguire, November 16

• November 17: Judge Lewis upholds Kathrine Harris' decision to reject late vote tallies resulting from manual recounts. The Florida Supreme Court bars Harris from certifying the state's presidential winner "until further order of this court," and issues an "interim order" authorizing vote recounts to continue, but does not mandate that Harris accept the results. Broward and Palm Beach resolve their logistical difficulties and officially begin recounting votes. Miami-Dade will not begin recounting until November 20. Republican observers of the Palm Beach recounts are causing tremendous dissension during the recount procedures, shouting and hurling accusations every time someone accidentally drops a ballot and demanding continual interventions from sherriff's deputies and election officials. After one ballot is dropped and sheds a chad, chaos reigns among the Republican observers until one of their own picks up the tiny sliver of paper and places it in a small plastic bag, obviously for "evidence." (CBS News, The American Prospect, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 17: James Baker, the head of the Bush response team, is so agitated by the Florida Supreme Court's decision to allow the three recounting counties to have until November 26 to complete their recounts that he threatens to have the incoming Republican Speaker of the House, Tom Feeney, vote in a slate of electors to cast their votes for George W. Bush no matter what the outcome of the recounts. Feeney has the ability to do this in Florida's Republican-dominated state congress. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)
• November 17: Absentee ballots become a big issue in the Florida recounts. Both sides fear what the other may bring to the table: Democrats worry that large numbers of military voters will favor Bush, while Republicans worry about large numbers of Jewish Democrats voting from Israel. Bush team advisor Mac Stipanovich decides for Harris that the absentee ballots are likely to favor Bush over Gore in numbers, and resultingly, Harris issues a decision to allow absentee ballots to be counted up to November 17, as long as they are from overseas and postmarked on or prior to Election Day. Harris either doesn't know or doesn't care that she has just issued an edict that changes Florida law, which requires absentee ballots to be postmarked well before Election Day. A Democratic legal analysis of Florida law on absentee ballots finds its way into the hands of the GOP, who uses it to throw accusations that the Democrats intend to disenfranchise US military voters. On November 19, the panicky Gore response team sends Joseph Lieberman to make the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, assuring Americans that the Democrats would never block the counting of military absentee ballots, whether they meet legal standards or not. That decision opens the way for hundreds and possibly thousands of absentee ballots from military bases in the western Panhandle to be counted, even though they did not meet legal standards. (It is later proven that thousands of absentee ballots cast for Bush were "rescued" by Republican election workers, who add, change, or alter the ballots as needed so they will be counted; similar ballots voting for Gore are discarded. See item below.) Bush lawyers in Okaloosa County, with its six military bases, fiercely argue that all absentee ballots must be counted; meanwhile, in strongly Democratic counties elsewhere in Florida, Bush lawyers are simultaneously arguing that absentee ballots must be strictly vetted according to the law, and any ballots not meeting the standard must be discarded, the exact opposite of what is being argued in Okaloosa.) It takes a ruling from the Florida Supreme Court, who orders absentee ballots not be discarded because of "hypertechnical" reasons, before the issue is settled. Net gain for Bush: 123 votes. After receiving the vote totals from the absentee ballots, Harris announces that she will not accept any more recount totals, and says she will call the election for Bush on November 18. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 18: Bush triples his lead over Gore after overseas absentee ballots are counted and new totals are announced. He now leads, unofficially, by 930 votes. Later, many of the ballots were proven to have been tampered with by Republican election officials in a number of counties, having postmarks and information changed to make the ballots valid. Some military members voted twice, once by absentee ballot and once at home; one, CPO Nicholas Challen, when told he had successfully cast two votes for Bush, raised his fists in the air and said, "Yes!" (CBS News, Mark Crispin Miller)
• November 19: Republican efforts to stop recounting in Miami/Dade (because machine sorting the ballots might damage them) are halted by the Florida courts. (US News and World Report)
• November 20-21: The Florida Supreme Court hears arguments about the vote recounts. The Court rules that all hand recounts must be counted in the state's final election results, reversing the earlier court ruling. The Court, echoing an earlier case, says it will rely on "the will of the people, not a hypertechnical reliance upon statutory provisions" to be its "guiding principle in election cases. ...Ours is a government of, by, and for the people. ...The right to vote is also the right to speak, but more importantly, the right to be heard. ...By refusing to recognize an otherwise valid exercise of the right of a citizen to vote for the sake of sacred, unyielding adherence to statutory scripture, we would in effect nullify that right." The Court rules that the counties have until 5 pm Sunday, November 25, to complete their recounts, and if the Secretary of State's office is not open, until 9 am Monday, November 26, at Harris's discretion. The Court finds a discrepancy between two statutes, one mandating a "reasonable" amount of time to complete ballot recounting and another statute mandating that all votes be counted and recorded within seven days of the election -- in this case, November 14. It resolves the discrepancy in favor of counting the votes. The Bush campaign tries, and fails, to have overseas ballots from civilians thrown out while simultaneously insisting that all military overseas ballots be counted. Miami/Dade begins manually recounting its votes, a recount that will not be completed. (CBS News, US News and World Report, The American Prospect, Vincent Bugliosi)

Republican mob attacks Miami-Dade recount headquarters

• November 22: The Miami-Dade election board makes an ill-fated decision to move the counting from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where large numbers of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more private environs of the 19th floor (where representatives from each campaign will be allowed to observe the recounts). So begins the "Brooks Brothers riot," though it is now known that the riot was already planned and scheduled by Republican operatives in Florida and Washington. It is not so well known that Bush's campaign manager and political mentor Karl Rove, along with James Baker and House majority whip Tom DeLay, masterminded the entire set-piece. The cover story for the riot, given by, among others, Florida Republican Clay Shaw, is that scores of angry Miami citizens spontaneously come together to protest what they feel is the election being stolen from under their noses. They bang on the windows and the doors, screaming, "stop the count! Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" They attempt to force their way into the room where the count is going, assault Joe Geller, chair of the Dade County Democratic executive committee (accusing him of stealing a ballot; Geller was holding a sample ballot), trample, punch, and kick a number of people in their attempt to rush the doors, and succeed in intimidating the election officials into stopping the recount. (The voting board chairman, David Leahy, later denies that the mob had anything to do with the decision to stop recounting the votes, saying that the board realized that they could not meet the November 26 deadline, but this seems unlikely, as the board seemed certain just hours before that they could meet the deadline with time to spare. Originally Leahy tells the press that the protests are one factor in his decision to stop the recounts.)
• The mob is later proven to be composed of young Republican congressional staffers, fundraisers, and lawyers, who are financed by the Bush campaign, flown and bused to Miami (using a fleet of jets provided by, among others, Enron and Halliburton: "The Bush administration literally flew into power on Enron's and Halliburton's private jets," says DNC spokesman Bill Buck), and put up in local hotels. At a "victory "dinner that evening, they receive congratulatory calls from both Bush and Cheney, and Wayne Newton sings "Danke Schoen" to the revelers. It is later reported by conservative commentator Paul Gigot that two GOP operatives informed Bush campaign official John Sweeney that the election officials were moving the recounts behind closed doors. Sweeney snaps, "shut it down." The mob then begins its assault on the offices. Sweeney later tells an AP reporter, "What I essentially told my people is, 'You've got to stop them.'" Some Republicans later say that the riot is no different from the Jesse Jackson-organized protests on the sidewalks outside the Clark Center; the Jackson protesters demonstrate peaceably, if vocally, and neither enter the building, interfere with the election recounts, or physically assault election and party officials. Intimidated by the rioters, Miami/Dade officials unexpectedly calls off the recount, costing Gore 157 votes at the least.
• While the mainstream press all but ignores the mob riot that forcibly, and violently, stops the lawful recount in Miami-Dade, it faithfully reports allegations that Jackson's peaceful demonstrations are, themselves, violent attempts to sway the election. Conservative spinmeister Mary Matalin calls the demonstrators, largely blacks, "rent-a-rioters" and accuses them of "fomenting turbulence." Meanwhile, she is effusive about the efficacy of the Republican rioters. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Reuters/CommonDreams, CBS News, Floridagate, Moore and Slater, David Corn, Vincent Bugliosi, Mark Crispin Miller)

• November 22: Bush's running mate Dick Cheney is hospitalized with a mild heart attack. (CBS News)
• November 22: Republican representative Steve Buyer, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, asks the Pentagon to rush him contact information for Florida servicemen and women whose absentee ballots have been disqualified. Under a strict interpretation of Florida law, those absentee ballots are disqualified because of a variety of reasons, including late postmarks, no postmarks, a lack of witness signatures, ballots mailed from within the US, and even ballots from voters who had voted twice. Most of these ballots are for Bush. Buyer's move is part of the Bush/Cheney effort to claim that the Gore campaign is attempting to unlawfully disqualify military voters who voted from overseas, a false claim that nevertheless resonates with the media, and leads Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman to make the fatal error of saying that he and Gore would welcome all of those votes being counted. In a post-election analysis of those votes, the New York Times will find 680 absentee ballots for Bush that were illegal -- more than the 537-vote margin of victory later mandated as "official." (Mark Crispin Miller)
• November 22 - on: The Bush recount team asks the US Supreme Court to stop the entire proceedings in Florida and simply award them the state, calling the Florida Supreme Court ruling a "lawless exercise of political power by the court...designed to thwart the will of the electorate as well as the considered judgment of Florida's executive and legislative branches." They base their argument on two highly abstruse and technical legal decisions, both barely applicable to the case (both concern themselves with electors, and one is a 1789 law designed to handle the conflict in case more than one slate of electors claim to represent the same state). It is hard to understand how ensuring that all votes are counted can thwart the will of the voters, and it is interesting to note that Bush, a vocal states' rights proponent, can argue that federal law should supersede a state's rights to conduct its own elections. His third argument is that the election recounts violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause because Florida, like most states, has no statewide standard for the tabulation of votes, and therefore causes him, as a candidate, "irreparable harm." (Obviously the argument applies equally to Gore, but that was never stated.) It is also notable that according to federal guidelines, Bush's case should have been summarily thrown out for the simple reason that Bush is not a Florida voter and therefore has no standing to file such a case, nor are there any statutory grounds for such a petition.
• Justice Anthony Kennedy is the one to initially handle the request; he ignores a Gore team request to leave the issue to the Florida courts and pushes the other justices to take up the case. Kennedy argues in a memo to the other justices that although Bush's case seems legally weak, it is the responsibility of the Supreme Court to handle such a weighty decision. Under the Court's rules, Kennedy needs only three other justices to join him in order for the Court to take the case; the Court's entire conservative bloc -- Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and O'Connor -- sign on. With oral arguments slated to begin on December 1, the justices and their clerks have their work cut out for them to be prepared. The conservative justices' clerks work feverishly, while the more liberal justices' clerks look on in amazement. To them, the only hopeful sign is Kennedy's skepticism about Bush's chances. "We changed our minds every five minutes about whether the fix was in," one clerk remembers.
• For the public, and both Bush and Gore's legal teams, it was none of their business who signed off on the request for a hearing, and Gore's team does not really want to know. They prefer to try to keep some faith in the institution of the Supreme Court. They find it inconceivable that the Court would intercede in a state election, much less decide the outcome of the national election among themselves. But the liberal justices' clerks are far more pessimistic. Why, they ask, would the justices agree to take the case if they didn't intend to overturn the ruling and shut down the recounts? Fearing what may happen, the liberal justices and their clerks begin writing a dissent before the case is even presented. This material eventually makes up the bulk of John Paul Stevens' dissent. (Stevens, a Republican appointed by Gerald Ford, is the most liberal of the justices, which speaks volumes in and of itself.) Stevens' dissent, with input from justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter, lays out in elaborate detail why the Court should never have taken the case. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 23: Gore's campaign requests that the Florida Supreme Court force Miami/Dade to continue its stalled recounts, a request that will be denied. (CBS News, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 24: The US Supreme Court agrees to hear a Bush campaign argument that would bar the recounts, saying that they will consider the first two arguments but not the equal protection argument -- an interesting decision considering most of the final decision is based on just that argument. Dick Cheney is released from the hospital. The notorious "sore Loserman" signs begin appearing outside canvassing boards; it is later revealed that the signs and banners were professionally produced by the Bush campaign, who is coordinating the anti-Gore protests throughout Florida. The Bush campaign professes ignorance of the campaign, saying that it is being conducted "spontaneously" by ordinary citizens; it is later proven that many of the GOP protesters were paid to appear (see above item). A large number of the protesters are the same people who were paid to protest during the Elian Gonzalez incident. A Democratic election observer notes, "It's a regular cottage industry -- have sign and clever slogan, will travel." (CBS News, US News and World Report, The American Prospect, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 25: Bush drops his lawsuit to force Florida counties to reconsider overseas military ballots that were rejected for technical reasons. Broward County completes its hand recount. A well-coordinated protest takes place outside the Gore residence in Washington, DC; Gore's wife and daughter later say they have never heard such savagery and filthy language from protesters. Other observers later compare the protesters to a mob lusting to break down the doors and rip into the family within. (CBS News, US News and World Report)
• November 26: At 7:30 pm Secretary of State Katherine Harris certifies Bush the winner in Florida, but ongoing legal action by both parties keeps the election outcome uncertain. The official margin of victory is 537 votes. Harris, defying the Florida Supreme Court's ruling, denies an urgent Palm Beach County request to extend the 5 pm deadline to turn in completed vote totals. (Harris, though she has the Supreme Court's permission to extend the recount through the following Monday, November 29, at 9 am, consults with Bush campaign liason Stipanovich and refuses the request.) Palm Beach leaves around 2,000 ballots uncounted; their request was to turn their totals in at 9 am the following morning (later they modify their request to 7 pm, which is also denied). Palm Beach submits results from 584 of 637 precincts at 4:54 pm, with a net gain of 174 votes for Gore; Harris refuses to accept them, saying she will have all of the precincts' totals or none. At 7:07 pm, Palm Beach submits complete recount totals, with net gains of 215 votes for Gore; Harris refuses them, saying that Palm Beach failed to meet the deadline. As a result, the entire county's recount efforts are deemed null and void. Harris's certification of the votes includes Bush's net gain in absentee ballots, but does not include recount totals from either Miami-Dade or Palm Beach.
• It later becomes clear why Palm Beach was unable to complete its recounts: thousands of legitimate Gore votes were improperly pulled out by Republican observers and placed in the recount stacks. One member of the recount team recalls: "In one precinct...the prior [recount] team had designated 414 ballots as questionable. Two county workers, a Republican observer and I [a Democratic observer] looked at those 414 ballots and we were able to agree that 382 were clear votes for one candidate or under or overvotes. Of these, about 280 were clear votes for Gore and 45 were clear votes for Bush. This means that the Republican observer in the original group had pulled out those 280 votes just to stall. If the Board had to go through the entire group of 414, it would have taken them an extra hour and we were racing against the clock. Unfortunately, these stalling tactics were widespread. Because the Republican observers had caused the Board to review so many frivolous challenges, it probably added a full day's work for the Canvassing Board, and now we were in real danger of missing the 5:00 pm deadline for certifying the recount totals to the Secretary of State." The observer explains the issue with challenged votes: "The Republican spin is that all votes have been counted by machine at least twice in every county. The only trouble is the machines don't read every vote. The counting includes much more than simply reading the dimpled ballots. In our hand recount, we found many, many ballots on which the voter had indicated a preference, but not punched the ballot in the prescribed way. On some ballots, the voter had darkened in the numbers in each race for the candidate he or she wanted. On others, the voter punched out two different numbers, but wrote 'Mistake' or something equally as clear, with an arrow pointing to one of the holes. This shows clear intent to cast a vote for one candidate. The tabulating machine records this as an 'overvote' because more than one candidate's number is punched, and the ballot is disqualified in the machine count." Florida election law mandates that ballots showing clear intent must be counted in the final tallies.
• The Gore campaign promptly challenges the results. Bush takes to the airwaves and declares, "The election was close, but tonight, after a count, a recount, and yet another manual recount, Secretary Cheney and I are honored and humbled to have won the state of Florida." Bush is lying: only two of the four requested counties, Volusia and Broward, have had their totals added into the recount. This failure of two counties to have their recounted totals tallied is part of the basis for the Florida Supreme Court's later decision to order a statewide recount, an order nullified by the US Supreme Court. (CBS News, US News and World Report, The American Prospect, Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, David Corn, Vincent Bugliosi)
• Katherine Harris, previously well known only in Florida for her reputation as a cutthroat politician with a history of participating in campaign fraud, vaults into the national spotlight, but the media focuses not on her history as a GOP operative and illegal campaign manipulations, but on her overly made-up looks. Her mascara, her lipstick, and her hair become a nine days' media wonder, but her checkered political past is conveniently overlooked. The GOP and her attorney, Joe Klock, portray the millionaire veteran of Florida politics as an overworked, harried housewife unwillingly thrust into the spotlight, and the mainstream media buys the story. The perhaps cruel observation that her makeup "seems to have been applied with a trowel" (by Washington Post writer Robin Givhan) sticks in the public consciousness; her efforts to throw the election hardly make the news at all. As Florida's official in charge of running a fair and impartial election, she also serves as the Bush campaign co-chair in Florida, a clear and illegal conflict of interest, but the officials charged with overseeing Harris's activities all work for Governor Jeb Bush, and are massively uninterested in enforcing the law when it comes to restraining Harris's activities on behalf of the governor's brother. Harris energetically campaigned for Bush during 1999 and 2000, visiting New Hampshire to battle the McCain primary challenge, and allowed GOP operatives to work out of her state government offices, use her computers, and access supposedly confidential files and databases filled with information about Florida's voters, election monies, and more. (As noted elsewhere, Harris illegally had her office computers purged of almost all incriminating evidence before they could be inspected, though partisan speeches written by Harris were found on the computers' hard drives.) As part of her election activities, she hired former general Norman Schwarzkopf to speak at pro-Bush rallies; as secretary of state, she hired Schwarzkopf, at taxpayer expense, to make supposedly non-partisan public service announcements related to the election. (Schwarzkopf was so closely associated with the Bush family in the public mind that there was no need to have him make partisan pronouncements in the PSAs.)
• Author Laura Flanders speculates that Harris's GOP handlers deliberately steer media attention towards Harris's looks and makeup in order to deflect attention from Harris's actions and history as a public official. Harris's successful delivery of Florida to Bush helps her land a seat in the US House of Representatives in 2002, where she is immediately made assistant majority whip; during the January 2001 inaugural ball, Harris will be praised by country singer Larry Gatlin, who compares her to Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Florence Nightingale, and Joan of Arc. (NNDB, Laura Flanders)

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
-- Josef Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

• November 27: Gore challenges the Harris figures in a Florida Circuit Court, arguing that the vote totals accepted by Harris for Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Nassau counties are inaccurate. (As noted before, under Florida law, Gore has to wait until the vote is certified before he can challenge the results.) Judge N. Sanders Sauls refuses a Gore request to expedite the case, and schedules initial hearings for December 2, costing the Gore campaign precious time. (Sauls will conduct the case at what former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi calls an "elephantine pace," dawdling through proceedings and showing up late to court, to the clear delight of the Bush team.) Bush campaign officials try and fail to take over the official presidential transition offices; they are rebuffed by the GSA. Bush and Cheney announce they will begin setting up their own privately funded transition offices. (CBS News, US News and World Report, Vincent Bugliosi)
• November 27: Journalist Hunter S. Thompson writes in his usual florid fashion, "There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . .Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory.... Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's." (ESPN/Buzzflash)
• November 29-30: Gore appeals to the Florida Supreme Court for an immediate recount of about 13,000 disputed ballots in two heavily Democratic Florida counties. Governor Jeb Bush and the Republican-controlled Florida legislature announce the possibility that it will convene a special session of electors to cast Florida's ballots for Bush no matter what the results; the governor says this would be "an act of courage." It is actually a strategy announced by Bush campaign coordinator James Baker days before. (CBS News, US News and World Report)
• November 29 - 30: While the perception among legal observers is that the US Supreme Court's upcoming decision about the Florida election will hinge on the decision made by the Court's two moderate justices, Kennedy and O'Connor, the reality is that O'Connor intends to overturn the Florida decision using any legal pretext that she can. O'Connor speaks forcefully to this issue during a dinner attended by several of the more liberal justices' law clerks. O'Connor is known to decide many legal issues viscerally, letting her gut make the decision and leaving it to her clerks to find legal grounds for her rulings. In this instance, one clerk recalls, O'Connor "thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it." Blithely ignorant of what view she actually held, the Gore campaign acts as if she were up for grabs.
• In fact, the case will come down to Kennedy. Kennedy is not the most well-respected justice on the Court. Generally a conservative, he is known to be pompous and grandiloquent, in love with the trappings and circumstances of power. His office, and his writings, reflect this bent. The clerks see his public persona -- the very public way in which he boasted of often agonizing over decisions -- as a kind of shtick, a very conspicuous attempt to exude fairness and appear moderate, even when he'd already made up his mind. But conservatives consider Kennedy anything but reliable. His votes to uphold abortion and gay rights have long angered conservatives, and many doubt both his intelligence and his independence of thought. Some conservatives feel that Kennedy has previously been led astray by a liberal law clerk formerly in his employ, and steps have been taken to surround Kennedy with properly conservative law clerks. "The premise is that he can't think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school," one liberal clerk explains. In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the Federalist Society, what the Vanity Fair article calls "the farm team of the legal right." "He had four very conservative, Federalist Society white guys, and if you look at the portraits of law clerks on his wall, that's true 9 times out of 10," another liberal law clerk recalls. "They were by far the least diverse group of clerks." Law clerks for both Scalia and O'Connor pay exploratatory visits to the clerks of the other side (the conservative clerks rarely socialize with the liberal clerks, and vice versa), which some see as attempts to bridge a wide and divisive gap and others see as reconnaisance missions. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable)

 

Quick Navigation Menu

• Main Page

• 1897-1960
• 1961-1970
• 1971-1979
• 1980
• 1981
• 1982
• 1983
• 1984
• 1985
• 1986
• 1987
• 1988
• 1989
• 1990
• 1991
• 1992
• 1993
• 1994
• 1995
• 1996
• 1997
• 1998
• 1999
• 2000
• 2001
• 2002

2003 Month by Month

• Jan 03
• Feb 03
• Mar 03
• Apr 03
• May 03
• Jun 03
• Jul 03
• Aug 03
• Sep 03
• Oct 03
• Nov 03
• Dec 03

2004 Month by Month

• Jan 04
• Feb 04
• Mar 04
• Apr 04
• May 04
• Jun 04
• Jul 04
• Aug 04
• Sep 04
• Oct 04
• Nov 04
• Dec 04

2005 Month by Month

• Jan 05
• Feb 05
• Mar 05
• Apr 05
• May 05
• Jun 05
• Jul 05
• Aug 05
• Sep 05
• Oct 05
• Nov 05
• Dec 05

2006 Month by Month

• Jan 06
• Feb 06
• Mar 06
• Apr 06
• May 06
• Jun 06
• Jul 06
• Aug 06
• Sep 06
• Oct 06
• Nov 06
• Dec 06

2007 Month by Month

• Jan 07
• Feb 07
• Mar 07
• Apr 07
• May 07
• Jun 07
• Jul 07
• Aug 07
• Sep 07
• Oct 07
• Nov 07
• Dec 07

Other Pages On This Site

• 9/11
• They Said
• Stolen!
• Katrina
• Who Is?
• Citations
• Links
• Biblio
• Impeach
• Imperial
• Cabinet
• Rationale
• Assist
• Updates