Who said cheaters never prosper? #Republicansdo

In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.

Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.

At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.

That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)

Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, then 48, a widely respected jurist who in his leisure time played pickup basketball and wrote legal thrillers, rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27.

James Baker, the Bush team’s consigliere, issued a public threat after the Florida Supreme Court’s maddening decision. If necessary, he implied, Florida’s leading Republican legislator, incoming House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November 21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush—no matter what. Since both the state House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could pass a bill to do that.

In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”

On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”

Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers.

Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do with the protest, only with the realization that the job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline of November 26. Yet the board had seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred within hours of the protest.