Long Night, Agonizing Decision in Palm Beach

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —  They huddled all afternoon, through the night and into the wee hours Sunday at long conference tables, squinting at partially punched paper ballots and squabbling over murky election rules and the fate of the nation.

One ballot puzzled them all: The top layer of a “chad”--the confetti-sized square of paper that a voter is supposed to poke out to mark a choice--was removed, but an ultra-thin layer of paper remained.

“How did they do this?” wondered Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor who designed the now-infamous butterfly ballot that helped throw America’s presidential election into disarray. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Neither has the rest of an utterly confused nation.

But one of the strangest elections in U.S. political history may come down to this: as goes Palm Beach County, so could go the White House.

Volusia County began its own hand count Sunday and Broward County is set to start today. Dade-Miami County will decide Tuesday whether to hand count theirs. If Palm Beach County is any guide, even more confusion lies ahead.

Sharing frayed nerves, gallows humor and a clear sense that history was watching, the three members of the Palm Beach County canvassing board and a gaggle of Republican and Democratic party lawyers finally completed their agonizing hand count of 4,695 ballots at 11:15 p.m. EST Saturday.

“Shall we break out the champagne?” asked board member Carol Roberts. But it was far too soon to party.

They argued and gulped coffee for another three hours, and didn’t emerge, blinking and exhausted into glaring TV spotlights, until 2 a.m.--more than 12 hours after they had begun. Then they engaged in an acrimonious public debate over whether to hand count all 462,657 ballots cast in the county. The task would be monumental.

In the end, the deciding vote fell to LePore, who was so weak from the ordeal that her lawyer had to help hold her up. “Yes,” she whispered.

Palm Beach ballots are being examined by three county officials who repeatedly changed the rules as they conducted the first hand count of Florida’s cliffhanger election.

The sprawling Atlantic coastal county is one of the largest east of the Mississippi. Famed for the old-money mansions and carrier-sized yachts on swanky Palm Beach island, it also is home to grinding poverty in Haitian and other immigrant communities.

The three county canvassing board members at the center of the storm are stoutly middle-class, fairly representing the vast majority of the county’s 1 million residents. But Republicans launched a blistering attack on their integrity, saying the three are not impartial because all are registered Democrats.

LePore, 45, has worked at the elections office since she was 16. The soft-spoken daughter of a former West Palm Beach commissioner, she rose through the ranks to become chief deputy elections supervisor in 1978 and was elected supervisor in 1996. Highly popular here, she was reelected Tuesday without opposition.

Roberts, 64, a former mayor of West Palm Beach and a successful businesswoman, has a feisty, take-no-prisoners style. She was first elected to the county commission in 1986 and was commission chairman several times. In 1988, she served on the canvassing board that spent 21 hours manually recounting disputed ballots that ultimately gave Republican Connie Mack a U.S. Senate seat over Buddy MacKay. She knows how fickle elections can be: In 1978, she lost a City Council race by one vote.

The board chairman is Florida state Judge Charles Burton, 41, a genial man with thick dark hair and a fondness for furtive smokes. Although a Democrat, he was appointed to the county Criminal Court in May by Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. Burton previously had a successful private practice and did two stints as a deputy state prosecutor.

At 1:45 p.m. Saturday, the three gather in a large L-shaped room off the lobby of the massive white Palm Beach County government center. The goal: to examine and tabulate ballots from four precincts. Because Democrats requested the hand count, arguing that polling machines failed to count many votes for Democrat Al Gore, they got to choose sample precincts to represent 1% of the total county vote.

Gore was the leader in Palm Beach County’s results on election night, while Bush was narrowly ahead in the unofficial vote statewide in Florida.

The judge immediately laid down the law, according to pool reports filed by journalists who were granted 30-minute visits into the room one at a time. Lawyers representing the political parties can take notes but may not touch a ballot or talk to counters. No cell phones or pagers. Raise hands for any questions. No touching the tables. “We’ve got the hand slappers here,” Burton warns, noting sheriff’s deputies clustered round.

Six counting teams are quickly organized, each with two or three members of LePore’s county election staff. All are women, all wearing casual slacks or jeans. Republican and Democratic observers--two per counting team, mostly men, mostly in suits--are assigned to watch. They sit on hard folding chairs.

Moments later, deputies carry in the first three sealed, silver metal, suitcase-like containers of ballots and gingerly place them on three tables. The plan: sort the vanilla-yellow ballots into stacks for the 10 presidential candidates. Once divided into piles marked by yellow sticky notes--Bush’s pile is No. 3 while Gore’s ballots go to pile No. 5--they are counted.

Other questionable ballots, including those improperly punched or not punched at all, were pulled aside for later review. And by night’s end about 480 are in question. The party observers object to almost every one, sparking torrid arguments and icy glares.

One participant later calls the marathon “painful, uncertain and bizarre.” But the bone-weariness and an intense pressure also leads to an odd camaraderie.

No state law strictly says how the canvassing board must divine a voter’s choice if a ballot is only partially punched, or even worse, simply indented. Instead, board members hold ballots up to the light, as observers lean forward, to check for one-corner “hanging doors,” two-corner “swinging doors,” three-corner “tri-corners,” or the indented “pregnant” or “dimpled” chads.

Above all, LePore warns at the outset, “never touch the chad.”

Problems erupt almost immediately. A forest of hands shoots up as the political party observers challenge the board members’ rulings on one disputed ballot after another.

“Do you want to start all over?” Burton demands in frustration. “We can’t keep stopping when you all raise your hands. This will never work.”

It is to no avail. A Democratic observer objects to eight straight ballots with dubious dimples either discarded or awarded to Bush. “I have heard 44 objections in like 30 seconds,” Burton complains.

A cell phone jangles. “Who has a phone?” Roberts demands. “Out!” Later, she turns and glares at chief Republican observer Mark Wallace, who wears a baby blue tag marked “Rep,” and the senior Democrat, Ben Kuehne, who sports a lime green tag marked “Dem.”

“Excuse me, quiet,” she barks. “Quiet, both of you!”

“Are they getting out of control?” Burton asks as he returns from a brief break. “Are they behaving?”

Burton reprimands Wallace later, as the Republican leans so close that his knee jostles Burton’s chair and his chin touches the judge’s shoulder. “Please just sit quietly,” Burton pleads.

Outside, rowdy reporters, photographers and TV crews and onlookers are anything but quiet. They knock on the windows and press faces up against the glass, hoping to draw a reaction for a possible picture. “Ever felt like a fish?” a Republican observer mutters to a deputy.

But the objections keep coming--and Burton’s strict rules on talking are increasingly ignored.

As one ballot is held up to overhead florescent lights, Kuehne suggests: “Turn the card over.” Sometimes light comes through, he explains, if the ballot is viewed from a different angle.

Wallace is outraged. The canvassing board appears to accept Kuehne’s suggestions and has ignored his, he complains angrily. “You’re injecting a partisan flavor to the process. That’s not right.”

Burton tries to restore calm. “We’re seeing light,” he says. “That’s all we’re trying to determine, if light is coming through.”

Soon, Wallace complains again that his concerns are ignored. “You’re punishing me for objecting,” he declares. He warns the board to be careful not to bend the ballots and thus affect the outcome. Burton audibly sighs.

Hours tick by. Sometimes only a few seconds are needed to guess a voter’s choice. Other times, wrangling drags on far longer. At one point, it takes 20 minutes to go through 35 ballots.

As darkness falls, the group realizes that it is using a looser standard than when it began and that a ballot with less visible light is now considered a valid vote.

They decide to re-recount some of the early ballots.

“That is completely not fair,” Wallace claims angrily. “It’s another recount.” Burton and Roberts stick to their guns. “We’re here to make sure everyone gets a fair chance,” she says.

About 6 p.m., disaster strikes.

Burton had left the room. Now he returns with a copy of county election guidelines, passed on Nov. 6, 1990, on how to deal with “ballot chads not completely removed.” Reading it aloud, the judge decides that a chad fully attached--even if light shows through--cannot be counted as a valid vote.

They agree to start yet again.

This time, Kuehne, the Democrat, is furious. Not only light, but “soft punches that did not perforate” should be counted, he insists. “Changing the rules halfway through is not fair to the public,” he says. But he loses the fight.

They fall into a rhythm. LePore picks a ballot, studies it and hands it to Burton. He turns it around, holds it up to the light and squints. He then passes it to Roberts, who takes her turn. Sometimes a ballot goes around more than once before they say yea or nay. The near-constant objections from one observer or the other are noted, but board members rarely reverse themselves.

And so it goes through the long night. They break for a brief dinner, and for another few minutes so Burton and Roberts can smoke. Then back to the battle.

One ballot is passed repeatedly among Burton, LePore and Roberts. They detect what appears to be a subtle indentation. They call it a vote for Gore. Wallace objects. The next one goes to Bush. Kuehne objects.

“It is not the right of the canvassing board to deny that vote,” the Democrat says. Wallace quickly retorts: “What party are you representing, Ben? The Free the Chad party?”

Kuehne fires back: “The people of Florida.”

Roberts’ cell phone rings, startling her and sparking laughter. “Call the sheriff,” Wallace jokes. Later he moans about the number of dimpled GOP ballots. “All these Republicans with weak fingers. I’m feeling personally conflicted.”

The humor helps, but the group grows punchy and tired. The observers talk Florida State football. Burton finds a ballot with two pregnant chads. “Better than being a little bit pregnant,” he jokes.

But the Republican soon grows quiet. “His whole personality changed,” Roberts tells the others. “I think we need to feed him.”

Outside, the media are getting restless. A camera clangs into the glass.

They finally emerge just before 2 a.m. LePore appears gaunt, her cheeks shallow, her eyes bloodshot and seemingly propped up by black circles after being at work for 19 hours straight. Her makeup wore off hours earlier.

She has been so distraught since election night that she can’t sleep or eat and is fighting a sinus infection. All she wanted, she insists, was to help elderly voters by providing a ballot with oversized print so it would be easy to read.

Indeed, it was so large that the names spilled onto two pages with the punch holes between them: Thus the butterfly ballot was born.

Many Democrats angrily claimed after the election, however, that the ballot was so confusing that they mistakenly voted for archconservative Pat Buchanan and that Gore thus lost Florida.

“Somebody get her a chair,” Roberts, a doctor’s wife and mother of six, tells a group of lawyers as LePore leans weakly against the wall. Someone does.

About 200 reporters and scores of cameras press in. Roberts quickly proposes the board call for a full hand count of the county votes, saying the 1% sampled so far suggests Gore ultimately may win thousands more votes and thus could win the state and the White House.

Burton resists, appealing to LePore to think carefully before backing so radical a move. He suggests they seek an opinion from the Florida elections office. “Quite honestly, I think this is a system that is new to all of us,” he pleads.

Roberts nearly shakes with anger--or exhaustion. “The law is very clear,” she insists.

Finally LePore stands and starts to wobble. Her lawyer, Leon St. John, steadies her with a hand at her back. The room falls silent as she speaks in a low, hoarse whisper.

“Under normal circumstances, I would reject the idea,” she says. “But due to the importance of this to the national election, it is something we should consider and something we should do.”

And with that, the woman who some say inadvertently took the election and the presidency away from Gore took a crucial step that may give it back. She voted yes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Five Faces of Chad

A week ago, Chad was just a masculine name, a country in Africa and a term known only by election officials. But now the 2000 presidential election may hang on Florida’s chads, the confetti-like scraps of paper that fall out of punch-card ballots.

Counted votes (Underside of ballot)

Hanging door: One corner is attached

Swinging door: Two corners are attached

Tri-corner: Three corners are attached

Not counted (Underside of ballot)

Pregnant: Bulge, but all corners attached

Dimpled: Indentation, but all corners attached

*

Source: Palm Beach County (Fla.) Canvassing Board