A Political War to End All Waged Over Recount Votes

Al Gore clearly wasn’t happy when he called Chris Korge’s cell phone on the afternoon of Nov. 22.

Three little-known county officials on the Miami-Dade canvassing board had just aborted their recount of presidential ballots. Earlier, several dozen well-dressed Republicans had shouted, shoved Democrats and pounded glass partitions outside the 19th-floor election offices.

“Chris, what happened?” the vice president demanded of Korge, a major Democratic fund-raiser and lawyer here.

The answer: Gore had just lost one of the most remarkable political ground wars in modern times.

The U.S. Supreme Court now will decide whether the war is over for good. The court will hear arguments Monday on whether to resume manual recounts of disputed ballots across Florida. Without them, Gore’s battle to overtake Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the postelection race for the White House is probably doomed.

But not for want of trying. Behind the astonishing drama of the last month, two vast political armies secretly had clashed. Their generals had deployed hundreds of hardened field troops with a single goal: to win the hearts and minds of the 12 local officials responsible for recounting votes in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Volusia counties.

Psychological warfare and intelligence-gathering was key. In Broward, for example, Democrats drew detailed personal profiles of the three canvassing board members.

“We found out everything we could about these people--everything--and tried to subtly get to know them with this knowledge,” said a Democratic field commander who asked not to be identified.

Like a Civil War battle, both sides relied on state regiments. For Bush came New York’s self-proclaimed “dirty dozen,” plus political pros from Ohio and Texas. Democrats rushed in reinforcements from Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

The Democratic army--and its constant movements--became so unwieldy that Joseph Fraga, Gore’s Florida political director, kept 253 names on an Excel computer spreadsheet just so he could keep track. So many people crashed at his Miami home that it became known as Fraga’s flophouse.

So many Republicans heeded the call that more than 400 fled their shabby motels to hear Wayne Newton sing “Danke Shoen” at a Thanksgiving Day bash at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Fort Lauderdale. Hundreds more from both sides were scattered around the state.

For many who enlisted, it was a major notch on the belt, a way to forever answer: “What did you do in the recount wars, Daddy?” Party loyalty was important but so was the lure of history. “If you were in this game, you had to be in Florida,” said Ben Ginsburg, Bush’s chief lawyer and resident recount expert.

But the costs were high. Families were sundered, vacations ruined, jobs put on hold, tempers frayed to the breaking point.

Brendan Quinn and the rest of New York’s dirty dozen were ordered to so many places on such short notice--first to Tampa, then Fort Lauderdale, then Miami, then West Palm Beach--that at one point he exploded at Bush lawyer Kevin Martin, who had just announced yet another move.

“I threw a garbage can at him and threw him out of the room,” said Quinn, executive director of New York’s Republican State Committee.

Before Dawn Came, the Battle Began

The battle began before dawn on Nov. 8, when frantic calls rang out across the country: Gore had just canceled plans to concede to Bush. The election wasn’t over.

Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher got his call at 3:30 a.m. PST. His wife, Marie, passed him the phone in bed. It was Bill Daley, Gore’s campaign chairman. He summarized the situation and asked Christopher to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Nashville. Still groggy, Christopher agreed.

When he arrived, Christopher was ushered into a hotel suite where Al and Tipper Gore were huddled with their three daughters, vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, and key campaign aides. They all looked dazed.

Daley had already held a predawn meeting. His first command: “Get people on the ground.” He ordered Gore’s longtime aide Ron Klain, Democratic National Committee general counsel Joseph E. Sandler and others to Florida. Several dozen young staff members were recruited to hit every county--67 in all--to get to know every election board.

Gore’s top lawyers--including Sandler, Klain and Gore’s brother-in-law Frank Hunger--began recruiting a legal team. But first, John Hardin “Jack” Young, a Virginia lawyer who literally wrote the book on election recounts, briefed them on the battle ahead.

Young explained what Gore needed to win--or more to the point, what he needed to do to recover votes that the Gore camp believed he had unfairly lost. Find the votes, Young urged, then go after them. Start recounts and keep them going. “Counting shall make us free,” another lawyer said.

Some lawyers were itching to go to court right away. Indeed, Gore’s staff had asked overnight for a memo explaining their legal authority to petition a Florida judge to “set aside” the election.

Forget it, Young and Sandler said, no such authority existed. They already had thumbed through Florida’s laws. Two weeks earlier, Michael Whouley--a top Gore strategist who would become field marshal in the ground war--had identified 20 states, including Florida, where a recount might be necessary. He quietly had asked his legal hotshots to study up.

“I told them that night: Stop, look at the data before you make decisions,” Young recalled. “That’s the plan we adopted. Litigation doesn’t put votes on the board.” Even when Gore later launched a scorched-earth legal battle, Young noted, the team still “focused on one thing: Get back to the recount tables.”

Gore aides clutched photocopied pages from “The Recount Primer,” which Young had coauthored with two other recount veterans, Chris Sautter and Tim Downs. The obscure manual set the strategy that Gore and his aides would employ in coming weeks. Indeed, they hewed to its advice so closely that they sometimes seemed converts to a new political cult.

Once a recount started, the Democrats’ tactics were simple. Analyze each ballot. Take copious notes. Be calm. Above all, don’t antagonize the three officials making the ballot-by-ballot decisions in each county.

“Those three local people are the whole shebang,” said John Sasso, a Boston-based politico who supervised nearly 400 Democratic lawyers, observers and others in Broward County. “They’re the Congress, Supreme Court and president all rolled into one during the recount. . . . We realized early on they had to be appropriately prodded--but not hammered.”

GOP Assumed Attack Mode

The Republicans were on defense, so their style was more confrontational: Challenge every disputed ballot and, if necessary, challenge the boards themselves. Build a record of inconsistent standards for court. If that leads to delays, so much the better.

At times, after late-night conference calls between Tallahassee, Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C., Republican observer teams were ordered to ratchet down their obstinacy--at least for a few hours.

“There was fine-tuning all the time,” said Ginsburg, the GOP recount expert. “It’s a fluid situation where you have no rules.”

As the sun rose that first morning, about 50 weary Gore warriors boarded Lieberman’s campaign plane in Nashville and tried to sleep. But Young and Sandler turned the two-hour flight into an airborne training session. They explained how recounts work and urged the invasion force to schmooze local officials.

“It was crucial that they get the data they needed but also to win friends in the process,” Sandler said. Later, Young asked a flight attendant to help rouse the troops. “Thank you for flying Recount One,” she announced brightly as the plane taxied down the Tallahassee runway.

It was enemy territory. As the Democrats’ top tier gathered in an antebellum house near the state Capitol, Sandler began calling local law firms seeking office space. Not a single firm would take in the homeless Gore army.

The reason, Sandler concluded, was no one wanted to antagonize Bush’s younger brother, the Florida governor. “Just about everybody in Tallahassee,” he said, “was in the tank for Jeb Bush.”

They moved into a strip mall office recently vacated by state Democratic workers. It was a dump, with bare walls, a few dingy desks and six phone lines. The Democrats later moved to the seventh-floor offices of lawyer and Democratic bigwig Mitchell Berger.

The Republicans were just as frantic in those first few days. But they were far less prepared for the bruising battles ahead.

Ginsburg, Bush’s consigliere, even had laughed aloud when another attorney worried about a recount over lunch in Austin, Texas, the day before the election.

“We all agreed it would never happen,” Ginsburg recalled. “It would be a lawyer’s nightmare.”

And so it was. Ginsburg and other aides began calling GOP loyalists by 4 a.m. CST on Nov. 8. The first recruits: a gaggle of Bush field lieutenants, Republican National Committee operatives and a contingent of Florida lawyers.

The first plane left Austin for South Florida at dawn. On board were political pros and press flaks--as well as Bush national field director Ken Mehlman, who would become the recount field general. A second plane left at 10:30 a.m. CST. It dropped Ginsburg and other top aides in Tallahassee, then took lawyers and field staff to Tampa, Orlando and Volusia County.

Before he got off the plane, Ginsburg helped organize the makeshift army. “Every recruit was asked to come up with their own recruits,” he said.

A Rough Start for Republicans

Mehlman sent word to New York Gov. George Pataki’s party regulars and Ohio Gov. Robert A. Taft’s Midwest troops. Other factions volunteered from Indiana and Iowa. In Washington, Maria Cino, a chain-smoking RNC veteran, raised a regiment of congressional aides.

But signals got crossed. Six Arizona lawyers waited a week before Bush officials ordered them to the fray. Tom Whatman, executive director of Ohio’s Republican Party, kept a suitcase at his side for three days before he and six other Ohioans were sent into action. Arriving in Fort Lauderdale, he was stunned.

“We thought we’d be part of a Bush infrastructure that was already on the ground,” he said. “But once we got there, we realized we were the Bush infrastructure.”

“Frankly,” he added, “we had no direction on how to set up a counting structure, where to set up organization. . . . We developed our own training, our own forms, what we were looking for on ballots, what we would be objecting to.”

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III became the voice of the Bush camp. Behind the scenes, Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s taciturn campaign director, was the general on the ground. Bush called Allbaugh his “big stick.” Aides had another name: “The Refrigerator” because, the joke goes, “he’s big, white and cold.”

The lower chain of command--and their duties--ebbed and flowed in the confusing days ahead.

“In this effort, nobody’s role was clearly defined,” said Mindy Tucker, a Bush spokeswoman. “It was uncharted territory. Everybody picked up what needed to be done at the time.” By the morning of Thursday, Nov. 9, the battle was joined.

Field coordinators for both parties fanned out across the state. Democrats were sending back “incident report forms,” citing problems in virtually every county.

But the clock was ticking. Under Florida law, campaigns had 72 hours after an election to seek hand recounts. But Friday was Veterans Day, and most county offices would be closed. So the deadline was pushed to 6 p.m. EST Thursday.

That morning, Young and Sautter sat down with Daley, Christopher and other top aides in the Tallahassee Room on the second floor at the Governor’s Inn. The goal: Choose counties for hand recounts.

Go for them all, Sautter and Young argued. Demand a full manual recount of all 6 million votes cast in Florida. A few counties might not put Gore over the top, they warned.

But Daley and the others refused. “I think they were a little spooked,” Sautter said. They didn’t want to “make it seem as if Gore was grasping for votes.”

But Klain, who had a direct line to Gore, was firm. “Ultimately,” Sandler said, “it was the vice president’s decision.”

Later that morning, the Gore team announced it would push for partial recounts in only four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. The first three agreed to start as quickly as possible. Miami-Dade put off even considering the request for another five days.

It was a hint of a disaster to come.

Indeed, by the middle of the next week--when it became clear that Gore desperately needed more votes to catch up--the vice president publicly appealed to Bush to support a statewide recount. This time, Bush refused.

Democrats Had Lead With Organization

After long debate, the Republicans had decided not to push for their own recounts to neutralize Gore’s gains. It was risky, but Bush’s team could claim a clear message. “We thought it a valid election,” Ginsburg said.

The first hand recount began Saturday, Nov. 11, in Deland, Volusia’s county seat.

The Bush team sent Joel Kaplan, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk and top aide to Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, to dog the Democrats. Kaplan was a typical first-waver, selected more for his street smarts than his familiarity with recounts.

“Getting people with recount experience was good,” Ginsburg said. “But getting real sharp people is better.”

Sharp or not, the Democrats were better organized. On Friday night, Young trained 100 Democrats in Deland. Among those listening were nearly a dozen Californians, including state party executive director Kathy Bowler and strategist Bob Mulholland.

The Californians already were steeped in recount theory and warfare from brutal postelection fights in Sacramento. “They brought a lot of experience,” said Larry Grisolano, a Los Angeles political consultant who helped run the Democratic field operations in Miami. “They knew all the problems we faced.”

Because Volusia County used optical scans to check votes, Young issued the trainees special green markers--the only pens allowed in the counting room.

The next morning, Republicans crowded into the recount room without green pens. As they rushed out to find some, Young asked the board to look out the window. There stood his team of observers, each carrying clipboards, spread sheets and the proper green pens.

The Volusia County canvassing board ultimately gave Gore 98 additional votes.

But in the far more crucial battle for Palm Beach County, Republicans crushed the Democrats.

Democrats there had collected thousands of affidavits from voters who furiously complained about the county’s confusing two-page “butterfly” ballot. Many claimed they had double-punched--and thus invalidated--their ballots, or mistakenly voted for conservative Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party.

Lieberman was obsessed with the butterfly ballot. He had campaigned doggedly in South Florida’s Jewish communities. Now he pushed passionately to challenge the ballot in court. The lawyers finally persuaded him it was a hopeless cause. Focus on the recount, they urged.

After 12 hours of reviewing ballots, the Palm Beach County board finally emerged at 2 a.m. EST Sunday. In an emotional exchange, board member Carol Roberts argued that they had found enough anomalies in three sample precincts to call a countywide recount. She and fellow board member Theresa Lapore outvoted the chairman, Judge Charles Burton, who wanted an opinion from the state election office before proceeding.

The Democrats celebrated--but not for long.

The board agreed to meet early Monday, Nov. 13. But endless delays, false starts and court challenges by Republicans meant the full recount didn’t begin until Friday, Nov. 17. It then bogged down as both sides clashed over perforated ballot punch-outs, called chads, and over how to determine a voter’s intent in an improperly marked ballot.

To make matters worse, the board took Thanksgiving Day off and then failed by two hours to meet a court-ordered Nov. 26 filing deadline. Stunned Democrats watched in shock as their hard-fought gains--192 votes in all--instantly were erased. Republicans were elated.

But Gore’s forces mauled the Bush camp in Broward County.

The Democrats were delighted when GOP lawyer William R. Scherer loudly protested nearly every vote and almost was hauled out of the room by sheriff’s deputies. And Gore’s team secretly cheered when a slew of Republican governors, senators and other high-powered politicians showed up to glare at board members.

The Democrats never put a politician at the table. Instead, a recount expert from Michigan and another from Washington calmly faced the board and studied the results like casino card-counters. Dozens of Democrats worked at the counting tables, under the careful eye of a party pit boss.

“We kept running tallies of every possible outcome, tracking every ballot,” said Sasso of Boston. He, in turn, reported to field marshal Whouley five times a day--sometimes more.

Gore Efforts Fell Apart in Miami-Dade

The Democrats not only analyzed how each each ballot was decided, they also kept detailed notes on the board members’ moods and their comments as each ballot was held to the light. They analyzed their own responses and how the board responded to them. Working in their hotel until long past midnight each night, they compared notes and planned for the next day.

The result: Gore snagged 583 additional votes in Broward, his largest gain by far.

Then came Miami-Dade, Florida’s biggest county. And it was an utter disaster for Gore.

Little happens in Miami without hints of conspiracy, murmurings of fixes and the simmering ethnic tensions that turned a shy 6-year-old Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez into an international celebrity. So it was with the Miami-Dade County canvassing board.

The recount came up as agenda item No. 3 when the board finally met a week after the election. The board quickly reviewed three precincts, found six more Gore votes and declared the job done. Disappointed Democrats immediately sought a countywide recount.

Intrigue resulted. Someone in Gore’s White House office spoke for five minutes that day with Miami’s Cuban American mayor, Alex Penelas, phone records show. Penelas also spoke in coming days with Bush partisans, as well as with David Leahy, chairman of the canvassing board.

Friends say Penelas still was furious at the Clinton administration for snatching Elian from his Miami relatives and allowing him to go back to Cuba. Democrats were furious at him, in turn, for refusing to publicly back their recount operation. They suspected far worse but had no evidence.

“Whatever he did was designed to leave no fingerprints,” charged Benedict Keuhne, one of the chief Democratic recount lawyers. “That was unexpected and unfortunate conduct on his part, since he was supposed to be helpful and loyal to the vice president.”

Could Penelas have helped? Leahy was appointed as canvassing board chairman by the county manager, who serves at the will of the mayor. But by all accounts, Leahy is a career bureaucrat, a mild-mannered man who hated the controversy caused by recounts.

And tempers were flaring in the high-rise county government center. During breaks in the partial recount, lawyers and other partisans surrounded the other board members--county Judges Myriam Lehr and Lawrence King--to pitch their cases.

“I did not personally lobby the canvassing board, but rest assured they were lobbied by citizens on both sides who contacted people who knew them,” said Korge, the Democratic fund-raiser. “To think otherwise would be disingenuous.”

Three days after the board rejected a countywide manual recount, it U-turned and agreed to review all 654,000 votes. This timeRepublicans cried foul. Three more days passed before the recount began on Nov. 20. But the state Supreme Court ruled the next day that all recounts had to be done by Nov. 26 so that the state could certify official tallies.

Miami-Dade never got there.

Early Wednesday, Nov. 22, Leahy announced it was impossible to meet the new deadline. He convinced the board to scrap the full recount and only consider 10,750 “undervotes,” so called because punch card tally machines had failed to detect those ballots’ votes for president. Gore’s team was thrilled; they hoped to harvest hundreds more votes.

Leahy advised the board to go to the 19th floor, one floor up, where voting machines could separate the ballots. Despite angry protests from Republicans and media that the room was too small for everyone, the board moved upstairs at 9:30 a.m. EST.

Soon after, several dozen Republicans--including many of the Capitol Hill aides--created the melee outside the 19th-floor offices. One demonstrator later dubbed it the “penny loafer protest.”

Chuck Campion, the Democratic recount chief in Miami, told his troops to sit tight. “We don’t want to fight with these people. It’s like hockey. Everyone gets a penalty.”

Inside, the board heard the disturbance and immediately quit counting. County lawyers talked to them in separate rooms, and even in a supply closet, to offer advice. Leahy insists nothing improper occurred. But like the 18 minutes missing from President Nixon’s Watergate tapes, the hour behind closed doors has sparked dark conspiracy theories.

“I was disturbed that it was taking so long for us to get back down there,” Leahy said. “People were wondering what we were doing.”

The board finally met again downstairs at 1:30 p.m. EST. Then, with little warning or debate, it unanimously voted to end the count.

“No one expected it,” said Fraga, Gore’s state political chief, who had just gone to the Democrats’ work space and was stunned to discover the board had reconvened. “People just about fell out of their chairs.”

Soon after, Gore phoned Korge and asked what had happened. “Where was the mayor in all this?” Gore also asked.

Korge urged Gore to call Penelas and gave him the number. Gore quickly called. In a subsequent statement, Penelas said Gore wanted to know whether the canvassing board would meet again “and if its decision to suspend the manual recount was due to a lack of county resources.” The answer was no to both.

There was one final mystery. Democrats thought they smelled a rat when Murray Greenberg, a deputy county attorney charged with monitoring the recount, was missing in action as the board ended its recount.

Where was he? “I stretched out on the floor behind my desk and fell asleep,” Greenberg explained.

Many who fought in Florida’s first round of recount wars have parachuted back into the state in case the U.S. Supreme Court allows the war to rage on. But some also ponder the collateral damage of the battle so far.

“Watching that whole process develop, well, it’s hard to describe,” mused Whatman, the Ohio Republican. “You’re standing there and you have an unreal sense of what’s happening. But, my God, this is how we’re selecting the president of the United States?”

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Drogin and Getter reported from Miami and Braun from Washington. Times staff writers Mike Clary in Miami; Michael Finnegan in Tallahassee; Geraldine Baum, Doyle McManus and Richard C. Cooper in Washington; and Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.