Micah Loewinger: Rowdy protests, angry Republicans, a contested election. On this week's On the Media, we revisit another make or break moment in American democracy 24 years ago.

News clip: Everybody is starting to lose patience with this election.

News clip: The process seems doomed to work its slow and painful way through a series of courtrooms no matter what happens.

News clip: The punch hole is called a Chad. It is attached to the ballot by four threads.

News clip: Two corners of a Chad had to be pushed for a vote to be considered. Now, the standard's been relaxed to just one or even just a dimple.

[protestors chanting]

News clip: Republican demonstrators stormed the hallways and demanded access to the recount room.

News clip: It certainly leaves Florida in a legal state of limbo.

Micah Loewinger: What Bush v. Gore fiasco teaches us about partisan politics today? That's coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. It's mid-May. As we head towards November with the knowledge that at least one of the candidates is a sore loser, the fear of more post-election chaos looms large. To distract ourselves from all that, let's go back in time to another make-or-break moment for democracy. It started on the night of the presidential election, November 7th, 2000, when the national television networks called Florida for Vice President Al Gore.

News clip: An important win for Vice President Al Gore, NBC News projects that he wins the 25 electoral votes in the State of Florida.

Micah Loewinger: This was roughly an hour after polls closed in the more Democratic voting peninsula, but 10 minutes before they closed in the Republican counties of the panhandle, so a reversal.

News clip: What the networks giveth, the networks taketh away. NBC News is now taking Florida out of Vice President Gore's column and putting it back in the too-close-to-call column.

Micah Loewinger: Later, they announced that the state had gone the other way.

News clip: CNN declares that George Walker Bush has won Florida's 25 electoral votes.

Micah Loewinger: Later still.

News clip: All right. We're officially saying that Florida is too close to call because of a recall.

Micah Loewinger: In the early hours of the next day, Gore called Bush to concede, only to call him back to retract the concession when his advisors told him how close the count was in Florida. That evening's drama, put in motion a series of events that would leave the United States without a named successor to Bill Clinton until December 13th.

To tell the story of what happened in the fraught intervening weeks, we turn to Fiasco, a podcast series known for poking at the conventional wisdom of a historical moment with deep reporting and first-hand accounts. In season one, host, Leon Neyfakh, tells the story of the Florida recount. As Neyfakh explains, Florida law mandates a statewide machine recount whenever the margin between two candidates is less than one-half of 1%.

Bush's lead was just 1,784 votes out of almost 6 million cast. That's three one hundredths of 1% of the overall vote total. After the recount was completed, George Bush led Al Gore by just 327 votes. So close. Gore's team demanded a hand recount for votes that couldn't be read by a machine, the so-called undervotes where a voter's ballot didn't record who they'd voted for.

News clip: The punch hole is called a Chad. It is attached to the ballot by four threads. If it had been detached by only one thread, it would not be counted as a vote.

News clip:: Before, two corners of a Chad had to be pushed for a vote to be considered. Now, the standard's been relaxed to just one, or even just a dimple.

Micah Loewinger: The overvotes where more than one candidate received votes on the same ballot.

News clip: The butterfly ballot had candidates on the left and right side columns, but only down the middle were the punch holes. Al Gore's name was second on the ballot on the left-hand side, but to vote for him, you punched the third hole. Many voters said that it was confusing that they ended up voting for two people instead of one.

Micah Loewinger: The recount would take place in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia, four of the biggest counties in Florida with a total of 1.9 million ballots. Leon picks up the story from here.

Leon Neyfakh: In the weeks after election day, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they were closely following the Florida recount, but staying up on the latest developments could feel like cramming for an exam. The procedural debates between the two parties and the intricacies of Florida law could be a bit much.

News clip: The judge says the five o'clock deadline stands, but it's not that simple because the judge also says.

News clip: Natalie, all of what John Zarella just explained was complicated, but it did seem to be a little bit consistent.

Leon Neyfakh: There was more and it was murkier. There were just so many names and subplots to keep track of.

News clip: There are so many claims and counterclaims, so many numbers flying through the air.

News clip: Well, we hope you all have your scorecards out because this one's getting more complicated all the time.

Leon Neyfakh: No one knew how long it was going to take to resolve.

News clip: Everybody is starting to lose patience with this election.

News clip: The process seems doomed to work its slow and painful way through a series of courtrooms no matter what happens.

News clip: It certainly leaves Florida in a legal state of limbo.

Leon Neyfakh: The worst part might have been how impossible it was to talk about the recount without using all these horrible, bureaucratic phrases like "certification deadline," and "canvassing board," and "advisory opinion." This deadening jargon was not just a problem for journalists trying to make the recount story exciting or at least legible. It was also a problem for the two campaigns. Both of them needed to frame the churn of the recount on their terms and to do so in ways that had at least some emotional resonance.

Democrats found that emotional resonance early with the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach. It was easy to comprehend how terrible it might feel to know that you wasted your vote in such a close race. About 10 days after the election, the Republicans found an emotional rallying point of their own, and they found it in something exquisitely boring sounding called overseas absentee ballots.

News clip: The postmarks come from all over the world, votes usually overlooked. This year, they could determine the election.

News clip: More than 6 million Americans live overseas, which is roughly the size of the population of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

News clip: Just how many of those absentee ballots are out there still to be countered and who will get how many of them?

Leon Neyfakh: Overseas absentee ballots were used by American citizens living abroad. In recent presidential elections, the State of Florida had received between 1,500 and 3,000 of them. In a normal election, that was not a lot of votes, but in 2000, when it became clear that overseas absentee ballots could determine the outcome of the race, they were thrust into the center of a bitter confrontation between the two campaigns.

News clip: There are battles going on in county offices all over the state. We've heard reports of county officials screaming at each other as Democrats and Republicans go to the map for every overseas absentee vote.

Leon Neyfakh: The process for tabulating overseas absentee ballots in Florida followed its own special timeline, one that was intended to compensate for the fact that mail coming in from far away, takes a long time to get where it's going. Here's Mark Herron, a lawyer who became an expert on overseas absentee ballots while working with the Gore recount team.

Mark Herron: In Florida, you could continue to receive and count overseas absentee ballots until 10 days after the election if they had been postmarked prior to the close of election day.

Leon Neyfakh: The voters who used overseas absentee ballots tended to belong to one of several distinct groups: American diplomats working at foreign embassies, American Jews living in Israel, expats in general, and US military personnel stationed abroad. The Gore team expected many of the overseas ballots to come from this last group, and that they would overwhelmingly favor Bush.

Mark Herron: The military people were generally more conservative in terms of their viewpoints on the world than Democrats. The thinking would be that the military folks would vote for Bush as opposed to Gore.

Leon Neyfakh: As overseas absentee ballots poured into Florida's 67 county canvassing boards, the Gore team worried that their opponents would try to take advantage of the system.

Mark Herron: There were reports and rumors that military planes were flying into Panama City. Stuffed would oversee ballots that had not been postmarked prior to election day.

Leon Neyfakh: No evidence of such organized ballot stuffing ever emerged, but at the time, anything seemed possible. Higher-ups on the Gore recount team asked Herron to do some research and write up a detailed memo. Under what circumstances would it be appropriate according to Florida law to challenge the validity of an overseas absentee ballot? The intended audience for Herron's memo was the network of Democratic lawyers helping the Gore campaign around the state. When Florida's 67 counties started going through their overseas absentee ballots, these lawyers would be responsible for challenging, incomplete or illegal ones.

Mark Herron: They could use it when they appeared before the canvassing boards and say, "Hey, this one here can't be counted because it isn't signed. This one here can't be counted because there's no postmark that indicates that it was mailed or transmitted prior to the close of Election Day, or it has a postmark that's after Election Day, and therefore it can't be accepted.

Leon Neyfakh: In its first paragraph, Herron's Memo specifically mentioned members of the armed forces along with other citizens of the United States who are temporarily residing outside the country. The memo went out to a group of Democratic Party lawyers on November 15th with the expectation that it would stay among friends. Less than 48 hours later, a copy made its way to Bush headquarters in Tallahassee. The Republicans instantly recognized it as a major opportunity. Here was a Gore lawyer providing instructions on how to disqualify votes sent in by American soldiers. The indignant TV appearances practically booked themselves.

News clip: The vice president's lawyers have gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces.

News clip: I'm tired of hearing Democrats saying, including Al Gore, count every vote, and yet they're all over the state of Florida challenging thousands of our military votes.

Leon Neyfakh: The Bush team pushed the story to every news outlet they could and organized press conferences to publicize the issue.

News clip: We are concerned that a targeted effort by the Democratic Party sought to throw out as many as a third of the overseas absentee ballots received since Election Day. Many of them, the votes of the men and women of our United States Armed Forces who are serving the cause of freedom throughout the world.

Leon Neyfakh: The Herron Memo, as it came to be known, instantly broke through the static of recount coverage. If you're wondering how the Bush communications team turned a phrase as cumbersome as overseas absentee ballots into a hot issue, the answer is they didn't have to, because they could call them military ballots instead.

News clip: The Democrats have launched a statewide effort to throw out as many military ballots as they can.

News clip: Democratic lawyers had been given guidelines on how to challenge military ballots, and the wife of one sailor spoke out.

News clip: It was the first that he had heard that his ballot was one of the votes that did not count.

Leon Neyfakh: I don't think it's too cynical or unfair to wonder how the Gore team didn't see this coming. Herron really thought that all he was doing was summarizing this corner of Florida election law so that Gore's lawyers on the ground would know what they were dealing with. Now, the campaign is being accused of trying to disenfranchise men and women in uniform.

By using the Herron Memo as the basis for a PR onslaught against Gore, the Bush team wasn't just trying to score points on cable news, or win hearts and minds. They were generating pressure that would make the law work to their advantage.

Believe it or not, one of Al Gore's most effective advocates in 2000 was his running mate, Joe Lieberman. During the recount, while Gore strategized with his lawyers behind the scenes, Lieberman appeared on TV as something between an attack dog and a cheerleader. Day after day, he defended the Democratic line and calmly predicted that when all the votes were counted, he and Gore would be victorious.

Joe Lieberman: We think that we won. If we think if all the votes in Florida are counted, not only will we have won the popular vote in America, Al Gore and I would have won the election. Maybe our opponents think that too, and that's why they don't want those votes to be counted.

Leon Neyfakh: With Gore facing intense criticism over Mark Herron's memo, the campaign looked to Lieberman to come in and play the enforcer. On Saturday, November 18th, Lieberman was briefed on the Herron Memo over the phone. The next morning, he appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

Tim Russert: Senator Joseph Lieberman is with us. Welcome back.

Joe Lieberman: Morning, Tim.

Tim Russert: Still a senator, not vice president.

Leon Neyfakh: Russert brought up the Herron Memo almost immediately.

Tim Russert: People are very, very concerned. They point to a memo written by Mark Herron, a lawyer who assists the Gore campaign, telling Democratic lawyers, this is how you knock out ballots from military people overseas. They don't have a postmark right--

Leon Neyfakh: To the Gore operatives in Tallahassee watching Lieberman's appearance on TV, the answer was obvious. He was getting pounded.

Nick Baldick: The answer should have been, we're for counting all votes that were cast on before Election Day.

Leon Neyfakh: This is Nick Baldick, one of Gore's top lieutenants in Florida.

Nick Baldick: There are procedures to make sure that illegal votes don't come in after, and those should be upheld. That would have been roughly the response I would have given. It was not the response he gave.

Leon Neyfakh: Instead, Lieberman took a trip to Waffle City. He didn't even try to defend the campaign, or make the argument for enforcing election law in the way Herron's memo had suggested.

Joe Lieberman: Again, Al Gore and I don't want to ever be part of anything that would put an extra burden on the military personnel abroad.

Nick Baldick: My sense of what Joe Lieberman said this morning--

Leon Neyfakh: Baldick watched in disbelief as Lieberman threw Mark Herron and the Gore campaign as a whole under the bus.

Joe Lieberman: My own point of view, if I was there, I would give the benefit of the doubt to ballots coming in from military personnel generally, but particularly in light of the letter and the kind of statements you've heard about that.

Leon Neyfakh: Here's Baldick again.

Nick Baldick: I remember screaming at the television being very angry when lots of people working with me, young people, volunteers, have been across 67 counties trying to uphold the law and make sure the ballots from Maryland and ones that were sent obviously after Election Day were not counted illegally. They were screamed at and called unpatriotic and had batteries thrown at them. Senator Lieberman sold all those people out by just caving on that morning.

Leon Neyfakh: Herron, who was also watching the interview from Gore headquarters, did not take it well.

Mark Herron: It was like I'd been kicked in the stomach. I was quite sick, so to speak. At that point in time, I had to leave the building and walk around Tallahassee for a while. I just couldn't believe what he had done.

Leon Neyfakh: Lieberman told me in an interview that he still remembers meeting with Gore after his TV appearance.

Joe Lieberman: It was actually, as I recall, the only time during the whole campaign when Al seem to be disappointed in something I'd done.

Leon Neyfakh: Lieberman maintains he did the right thing, the patriotic thing, the morally defensible thing, by distancing the campaign from the Herron Memo.

Joe Lieberman: We Democrats believe in the franchise, and in fact, that other parts of Florida were fighting because we were alleging that the Republican officials prevented some people from voting.

Leon Neyfakh: Setting aside the legal merits of the Heron Memo, Lieberman says that he was concerned about how the campaign would look if he stood by it. What if Democrats ended up winning the White House and American soldiers believed that their own commander-in-chief had tried to disenfranchise them? Lieberman wanted the campaign to commit to its "count every vote" mantra, even as he saw Republicans making contradictory arguments of their own.

Joe Lieberman: Because both sides were being inconsistent. The Republicans were calling for technical adherence to the law in some parts of the state about cutting ballots, but they were saying, "Oh, you've got to go a little easy on these soldiers." We were saying, in some parts of the state, you've got to go a little easy on these voters, particularly minority voters, and not exclude them from voting. In this case, we were saying this is the letter of the law, and so these absentee ballots can't be counted.

Leon Neyfakh: After Lieberman's appearance on Meet the Press, other Democrats joined him in calling for a lenient standard on military ballots.

News clip: That's the order from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth.

Leon Neyfakh: Among them was Bob Butterworth, the Democratic Attorney General of Florida.

News clip: Saying no man or woman in military service to this nation should have his or her vote rejected solely due to the absence of a postmark.

Leon Neyfakh: It was not exactly a legal victory for Republicans, since neither Lieberman nor Butterworth had authority over any aspect of the recount, but symbolically, it was devastating.

News clip: The public relations fight over rejected overseas absentee ballots. On NBC's Meet the Press, Joe Lieberman supports giving them "the benefit of the doubt."

Leon Neyfakh: While the Gore campaign tried to play defense on overseas absentee ballots, the hand recount of regular old domestic ballots was continuing in fits and starts. The four counties where Gore had requested recounts were all at different stages of the process. Palm Beach and Broward had been added for several days. Volusia was already done. In Miami-Dade, on the other hand, things were about to get turbulent.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Republican protesters storm the offices where the recount is taking place in the now infamous Brooks Brothers Riot. This is On the Media.

This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Before the break, we heard that things were not going well for the Miami-Dade recount. Here's host, Leon Neyfakh.

Leon Neyfakh: The logistics of the recount in Miami-Dade were pretty much the same as in Palm Beach. After going through a 1% sample of the overall vote, approximately 6,000 ballots, the canvassing board debated whether or not to conduct a full manual recount. After some hesitation, they decided to proceed.

News clip: Miami-Dade County, under pressure from the Gore campaign, decided that it too will recount ballots by hand, meaning that heavily Democratic Florida counties will be recounting more than 1.7 million ballots.

Leon Neyfakh: The recount began on Monday, November 20th, two days after the big Florida-Florida State football game. At first, it looked like they might actually get it done. This was a very happy development for Al Gore. As long as ballots were being counted, it meant he still had a chance of picking up new votes and eating into Bush's lead.

News clip: Al Gore has picked up a net gain of 18 votes, but there are 614 precincts total that must be recounted.

Leon Neyfakh: The next night, just before ten o'clock, the Gore team received even more good news, this time from Tallahassee, where the Florida Supreme Court had just issued a ruling.

Craig Waters: Good evening. My name is Craig Waters. I'm the spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court. I'm now going to read to you a statement that was authorized by the entire court. The court holds that amended certifications from the county canvassing--

Leon Neyfakh: At this point, the manual recount Gore had requested are being threatened by the Florida Secretary of State who is refusing to accept what she called late vote counts. A few days earlier, the Florida Supreme Court had stepped in and blocked Katherine Harris from certifying the election results until they could weigh in. Oral arguments had been held on Monday, November 20th. The central question at hand was whether Katherine Harris had acted improperly by refusing to accept late vote totals from the three counties still conducting hand counts. Now, the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling. They were siding with Gore.

News clip: The court saying hand counts in three Florida counties must be included in the state vote totals.

News clip: This was a huge and potentially decisive victory for the Gore campaign.

Craig Waters: The court halls that amended certifications from the county canvassing boards must be accepted by the election canvassing commission.

Leon Neyfakh: As part of their ruling, the court set a new certification deadline of Sunday November 26th at 5:00 PM, thereby giving the canvassing boards in Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward five more days to count ballots. The ruling further specified that if the Secretary of State's office was not open on that Sunday, the counties could turn in their vote totals on the following Monday morning at 9:00 AM.

Craig Waters: -until 900 AM on November 27. The opinion of the court is--

Leon Neyfakh: That wasn't all. In addition to granting the deadline extension, the justices also ruled that hyper-technical adherence to voting instructions was less important than the intent of the voter. The fundamental purpose of election laws, the Court wrote in its opinion, was to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will. Gore celebrated the ruling as a major victory.

Al Gore: The Florida Supreme Court has now spoken and we will move forward now with a full fair and accurate count of the ballots in question. Our democracy is the winner tonight.

Leon Neyfakh: The Bush side was apoplectic as they saw it, the Florida Supreme Court had just retroactively changed Florida election law by pushing back the certification deadline. To the Republicans, that looked like a violation of the US Constitution, which said that election laws had to be in place before the voters went to the polls, and they were to be drafted by state legislatures, not state courts. Just before midnight on the night of the ruling, James Baker, the head of the Bush recount effort offered some pointed thoughts at a press conference in Tallahassee.

James Baker: It is not fair to change the election laws of Florida by judicial fiat after the election has been held. It is simply not fair, ladies and gentlemen, to change the rules, either in the middle of the game or after the game has been played.

Leon Neyfakh: Bush's supporters and media surrogates moved swiftly to paint the Florida Supreme Court as a biased institution run by Democrats who were trying to swing the election toward Gore. Charles Wells, the Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court at the time remembered one remark especially vividly.

Charles Wells: I had read a comment by a congressman at the time, Joe Scarborough from Pensacola. His comment was, "Tonight the Florida Supreme Court declared war on the rule of law in Florida. Seven radical Democratic lawyers have chosen to ignore the clear intent of Florida's legislature and executive branches, is a political war they want, is a political war they should get."

Leon Neyfakh: Lost amid all this heated rhetoric was that the Florida Supreme Court ruling actually came with a major silver lining for the Bush campaign. Specifically, the part about how voter intent matters more than strict adherence to technical requirements provided Republicans with a perfect weapon with which to attack the Democrats on the issue of overseas absentee ballots.

Prior to the ruling, Bush's lawyers had been having trouble persuading canvassing boards around the state to accept overseas absentee ballots that lacked signatures, proper postmarks, and so on. A total of 1,420 ballots have been thrown out as of November 17th. Now, it's impossible that hundreds of those ballots will be back on the table. The deadline extension for certifying the election results gave the Bush lawyers time to make their case.

To the Gore campaign's chagrin, there was another way the Florida Supreme Court ruling turned out to benefit Bush, one that had nothing to do with overseas absentee ballots and everything to do with the ongoing recount in Miami because while the intention of the Supreme Court had been to give the counties more time the Miami-Dad canvassing board had been banking on getting even more.

In their initial estimate, the board had figured that the work of reviewing all 650,000 ballots in the county is going to take them until December 1st. The new deadline of November 26th meant they had five fewer days than they budgeted for, and so the morning after the Florida Supreme Court ruling came down, the canvassing board held a public meeting to review their options. The Supervisor of Elections was audibly anxious about how the recount process could be sped up.

News clip: We could not given our best efforts of this board, the best efforts of the county, the best efforts of all these people sitting here, complete the manual recount the way we've been doing it, even adding more tables, adding more staff we could not--

Leon Neyfakh: After some discussion, one of the board members proposed an idea. What if instead of counting all the ballots by hand, the board did a recount of just the ambiguous ballots that the machines couldn't read? By separating out the roughly 10,000 ballots that had not officially recorded a vote for president, the so-called undervotes, the board could focus their energies and their time on ballots that required human attention.

News clip: The board voted unanimously to ditch the results of their two-day countywide recount and focus on 10,000 undervotes.

News clip: We can count the undercounted ballots, approximately 10,750.

Leon Neyfakh: It was a little before 9:00 AM when the board members decided to give the plan a roll. After explaining to everyone gathered in the counting room what they were doing, the three of them headed upstairs to a private area on the 19th floor to separate out the undervotes and start examining them. The Republican observers who have been helping with the count reacted to the board's announcement with profound suspicion.

Layna McConkey Peltier: There were slow grumblings that, "You know, wait, what? They're doing what?"

Leon Neyfakh: This is Layna McConkey Peltier. In 2000, she was a young lobbyist based in Washington, DC, and like many of her Republican colleagues in Capitol Hill, she flew down to Florida to lend a hand with the recount after the Bush campaign put out a call for volunteers.

Layna McConkey Peltier: To take it behind closed doors and say they're going to finish the count, just, it's stuck.

[music]

Leon Neyfakh: Word spread quickly that the canvassing board was throwing some kind of curveball.

News clip: -the decision eliciting an angry response by Republicans.

News clip: This is the most brazen attempt by the Gore people and the Democrat machine and the thugs in that building to hijack the American presidency.

Leon Neyfakh: Outside the Clark government center, the crowd of Bush supporters have been protesting the recount for several days. They led chants of "No More Gore, waved American flags and held up signs that said "Sore loser man."

[protesters chanting]

Overseeing the protest was a Republican operative named Brad Blakeman. He was huddled inside a parked RV in the plaza outside the Clark Center. Previously, Blakeman had worked for the Bush campaign as an advance man, basically a high-level event planner.

Brad Blakeman: Generally speaking for W's presidential campaign, I was in charge of major media events. I was in charge of the convention. I was in charge of the debates. I was in charge of major rallies.

Leon Neyfakh: Once the recount started, Blakeman knew how to make himself useful.

Brad Blakeman: We saw a three-legged stool, and we knew that this battle would be fought in the courts. We knew that this battle would be fought in the recount centers, but the leg that was missing was a public relations. Although the voting had ended the campaign had not.

Leon Neyfakh: When Blakeman caught wind of what the canvassing board was up to on the 19th floor, he got worried. The recount in Miami had already cut Bush's lead by about 150 votes. Who knew how many more Gore votes the board might find among the remaining undervotes? Blakeman decided to make a move.

Brad Blakeman: When we found out that they were going to go to an expedited system, and that we could very possibly lose the momentum and Gore would be ahead, we had to figure out what are we going to do. What are the options? One of the options I thought of was why don't we do what Democrats do? I said let's do some civil disobedience. Let's have a sit-in. Let's create a raucous.

Leon Neyfakh: When the canvassing board went up to the 19th floor, a procession of Republican protesters, mostly young men, screamed into the Clark Center and piled onto the elevators.

[protesters chanting]

News clip: Just to add a little more drama to this situation. Republican recount observers, had a little scuffle with police this morning.

Reporter: Republican demonstrators stormed the hallways and demanded access to the recount room.

Brad Blakeman: First, we had to get permission, spoke to the sheriff and the people what we're going to do, why we're going to do it, that we're not dangerous. A lot of us are lawyers. We're not going to be arrested. We're not there to be disrespectful. We feel like we're being taken advantage of, and that the system is not working, and that this is something that we need to do to send the message.

[protesters chanting]

Leon Neyfakh: Upstairs, the protesters joined McConkey Peltier and the other Republican observers in demanding to be let into the counting room.

[protesters chanting]

News clip: We're joined now by our Frank Buckley. He's on the phone with us. Frank, it sounds like you're in the middle of a prison riot. I mean, are you getting the feeling that this is out of control?

Frank Buckley: Clearly, this is a raucous crowd. It was a raucous and confined crowd on the 19th floor with people trying to get into the room where the canvassing board was going to commence operation.

[protesters chanting]

Nicholas Kulish: The people who came out to protest were wearing button-down shirts tucked into khaki pants and got probably in those days, braided belts. If we could zoom in enough on the photos. This is Nicholas Kulish. He was covering the Miami-Dade recount as a 25-year-old reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he was on the 19th floor of the Clark Center when the protestors arrived.

Nicholas Kulish: You definitely had the impression that these were the people who did not protest in college and that they didn't really necessarily know how to protest [laughs], that they're winging it for the very first time.

[protestors chanting]

Leon Neyfakh: The protestors pounded on the window leading to the tabulation room. Kulish felt the atmosphere change.

Nicholas Kulish: What I remember very vividly was they were pounding on the glass and on the other side of the glass there, were municipal workers and some deputies. People were really fired up. The rhetoric that they were using was very much of a stolen election, of democracy being undone. I couldn't judge to what extent it was sincere or cynical, but there is something that can happen where people can start to fall under the spell of their own rhetoric.

Leon Neyfakh: The demonstration reached a climax when one of the Republicans on the 19th floor accused a Democratic party official of trying to steal a ballot.

News clip: At one point, they charged a Democratic attorney. It turned out to be a sample or practice ballot.

[protestors chanting]

Leon Neyfakh: The three members of the canvassing board moved back downstairs to get away from the chaos. Eventually, the 19th floor quieted down. Later, the incident at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center was nicknamed the Brooks Brothers Riot. In its aftermath, there was a lot of debate about how volatile and dangerous it had actually been. One Bush lawyer claimed at a press conference that there had been little kids and babies in the crowd, and that there was "In some ways a holiday atmosphere." Layna McConkey Peltier didn't go quite that far when I asked her about it.

Layna McConkey Peltier: I would say that there was an element of anger but not violence. Come on. I'm standing there in the Liz Claiborne address. I'm not going to be taking anybody out.

Leon Neyfakh: Regardless, the three members of the canvassing board seemed rattled by what happened, and they halted the Undervote plan in order to regroup.

News clip: We've been listening to a hearing down in Miami-Dade Canvassing Board. There's ongoing dispute about the hand count exactly what they will count and what they will not but they have--

Leon Neyfakh: A few hours later, they reconvened for another public meeting to make an important announcement.

Miami-Dade Canvassing Board Member: I do not believe that there is time to carry out a complete full manual recount that is accurate, and that will count every vote because of the limitations put on this board in terms of time.

News clip: I do agree with Judge King and Mr. Leahy that it is not physically possible to continue with this task. We do want to--

Leon Neyfakh: The Miami-Dade recount was over. None of the new Gore votes that have been discovered would be counted in the final vote tally.

Miami-Dade Canvassing Board Member: That is unanimous decision of this canvassing board that we will not be proceeding further with a manual recount and that the certification of November 8th, 2000, be accepted by the Secretary of State for the valid cast votes of Miami-Dade County.

News clip: All right, the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board taking a vote to end the recount there, there will be no more counting votes in Miami-Dade County, the largest county that was--

Leon Neyfakh: The Gore team watched in horror as the canvassing board announced their decision on live television. The main reason they gave for stopping was that there just wasn't enough time to finish before the deadline. What was different at 1:30 PM compared to 8:00 that morning when completing the count had still seemed feasible? Common sense seemed to suggest that the protesters had intimidated the canvassing board into abandoning the recount.

Nicholas Kulish: The whole tone of things had changed, and it was certainly the biggest thing that happened between when they were counting the ballots and when they suddenly decided not to count the ballots. You are on an election board and like your job is to ensure a free, fair, and impartial election. The idea that people chanting and chasing partisans of the other side around and threatening people causes you to stop counting votes, it seems like almost as undemocratic a thing as you could imagine.

Leon Neyfakh: After the vote, one canvassing board member told reporters that the protesters concerns were a factor in the decision, that when it became clear that the board's workaround the deadline problem wasn't going to fly, they were left with no other options. "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process," the canvassing board member said, "and that weighed heavily on our minds." Once again, the Republicans appeared to have outmatched the Gore team through raw political strength. Brad Blakeman told me that he was astonished that it had been so easy.

Brad Blakeman: Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in the courts, in the recount centers, but not publicly on the streets. It was if it was a total sterile environment and that we were the only ones there who seemed to fight for what we believed in. We fully expected to be overrun, quite frankly, because we said that Democrats are going to be out in force, and they never showed up anywhere.

Leon Neyfakh: In fact, early in the recount, there were some organized protests in Gore's favor, particularly in Palm Beach where Jesse Jackson led rallies criticizing the butterfly ballot and calling attention to the alleged disenfranchisement of Haitian American voters. Al Gore worried about the spectacle coming across as unseemly, and he put out word to Jackson that he'd prefer it if he left town.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up in the final part of the story of the Florida recount, the Democrats fumble the PR war. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. We're listening to an excerpt from Fiasco: Bush v. Gore, the story of the Florida recount. Here's Host Leon Neyfakh.

Leon Neyfakh: While the battle over hand recounts raged in South Florida, the Bush campaign and their allies tried to gain an advantage in other parts of the state by continuing to hammer Gore on the issue of military ballots.

News clip: Those rejected absentee military ballots, hundreds of servicemen's ballots were initially tossed out statewide for among other things, missing or late postmarks. Ballots for Republicans have been beating the drum to have counted. Hundreds--

Leon Neyfakh: As you'll recall, the controversy around military ballots initially played out at the level of public relations. For the first few days after Mark Herron's memo got leaked, Bush's people seemed to be mostly focused on making gore look bad.

News clip: They're having people like Senator Bob Dole, military heroes speak out and--

Leon Neyfakh: They went on TV, they gave press conferences.

News clip: If they're going to count a dimple, then they need to count a vet's vote.

Leon Neyfakh: They even got retired General Norman Schwarzkopf to issue a statement.

Norman Schwarzkopf: Just not fair. It's a sad day for this country when our military people on the front lines don't get their ballot counted when the selection of the commander-in-chief.

Leon Neyfakh: Then on November 22nd, the same day as the Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami, the Bush campaign raised the stakes by bringing the issue into the legal realm.

News clip: Bush's lawyers file suits in 13 Florida counties seeking to have hundreds of rejected overseas absentee ballots counted. Many of them from sailors and soldiers serving abroad.

Leon Neyfakh: Bush filed suit against more than a dozen Florida counties were overseas absentee ballots have been disqualified because they lacked postmarks, signatures, or other elements required by law. The lawsuit accused the Gore campaign of pressuring the canvassing boards into rejecting ballots that should have been counted.

News clip: Republicans sensing the Gore is vulnerable on the issue of military ballots.

Leon Neyfakh: The lawsuit didn't end up having legs, but it didn't need to. Before a judge had even made a ruling, six of the counties named as plaintiffs in the suit, agreed of their own volition to reevaluate the overseas ballots that they had earlier rejected.

News clip: It was postcard in the United States but I see no reason not to include this.

Leon Neyfakh: Here again is Mark Herron.

Mark Herron: All these canvassing boards decide they're going to meet again and review what they had done previously. They start accepting ballots that do not have any postmarks on them. To me, those ballots, from a legal point of view, should not have been accepted, but again, this furore over the issue led some people not to show that they had backbone to follow the law.

Leon Neyfakh: It was a case of perfect synergy between legal and political warfare. By creating public pressure around the issue of military ballots, the Republicans were able to shape how the law was interpreted and applied. By the end of the week, canvassing boards around the state had agreed to accept 288 ballots that had previously been rejected as illegal.

News clip: Those absentee ballots inched upward all afternoon for Governor Bush finally handing him 108 more overseas votes at a time when, Peter, every vote mattered.

Leon Neyfakh: With that, a PR mistep by the Gore team had been converted into real gains for Bush. It didn't matter that in order to make that happen, the Republicans had been forced to stake out two mutually inconsistent positions on ballot standards. So what if they were calling for a looser approach to ballots that were likely to benefit Bush while calling for precise adherence to the law in counties that went for Gore? Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans weren't afraid of looking like hypocrites. They were afraid of losing.

News clip: Let's turn now to Palm Beach County where the canvassing board is trying to beat a deadline of 5:00 PM today for completing its hand recount. See you--

Leon Neyfakh: On Sunday, November 26th, both campaigns were bracing themselves for the arrival of the new certification deadline for vote totals. Remember, according to the Florida Supreme Court ruling, the counties had until 5:00 PM to turn in their numbers if the Secretary of State's office was open. If it wasn't, they'd have until the following morning. In Palm Beach County, the manual recount was still furiously underway. It had been going well, well enough that Charles Burton and Theresa Lepore, two of the Palm Beach Canvassing Board members, had decided it would be okay to take a break for Thanksgiving. This turned out to be a grave mistake. By Sunday at noon, the prospect of finishing the count on time no longer looked so good.

News clip: They're still counting in the Emergency Operations Center behind me, and time will tell. Indeed, the clock is ticking away here.

News clip: They have been going now since 8:00 AM yesterday morning, and they still now have about five hours to go. If you do the math--

Leon Neyfakh: The Palm Beach Canvassing Board still had about 5,400 ballots to get through. Since the Secretary of State's office was open for business, the deedline was 5:00 PM.

News clip: Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State, is inside the administrative building here, inside at work today on this Sunday afternoon. Now--

Leon Neyfakh: Around half past noon, Judge Burton organized a press conference and read a letter out loud to Katherine Harris pleading from more time.

Judge Charles Burton: It says, "Dear Secretary Harris, we have been working diligently, including the last 24-hour period to complete this critical portion of the hand count. Your consideration of our request to extend the deadline for final submission of this hand count until Monday, November 27th at 9:00 AM would be greatly appreciated. As we know, you are--

Leon Neyfakh: Harris's office informed Burton that the 5:00 PM deadline was non-negotiable. The Florida Supreme Court had said that if they were open on Sunday, then 5:00 PM was the deadline. Well, they were open, and that meant 5:00 PM was the deadline.

[protestors cahnting]

News clip: Getting confirmation out of the Secretary of State's office here in Tallahassee has told the vote counters out in Palm Beach that the extension to that deadline will not happen.

News clip: Quite a blow to Judge Charles Burton, to Commissioner Carol Roberts, and Theresa Lepore, the three members of this canvassing board here, who have been working now since eight o'clock yesterday morning with maybe just a two-hour--

Leon Neyfakh: Burton was devastated. At 4:15 PM, he held another press conference, this time to announce that after 10 grueling days, the recount in Palm Beach had failed.

Judge Charles Burton: The Secretary of State has apparently decided to shut us down with approximately two hours perhaps left to go. We believe there are approximately 800 to 1,000 ballots left to count. Unfortunately, at this time, we have no other choice but that to shut down the supervisor for elections. Hurriedly, gather all--

Leon Neyfakh: Up to that point, Palm Beach had discovered a net of around 200 new votes for Gore, but now that no longer mattered. None of those votes would be counted, and there was nothing anyone in Palm Beach could do about it.

Katherine Harris: Ladies and gentlemen-

Leon Neyfakh: Hours after the 5:00 PM deadline passed, Katherine Harris presided over a certification ceremony at the State Capitol.

Katherine Harris: -as the State Election's Canvassing Commission, we are here today to certify the results of the election that occurred November 7th, 2000. Because of the great interest in our actions, we're meeting publicly--

Leon Neyfakh: The ceremony was just that, a ceremony, because everyone knew that it wasn't actually going to end the election. Gore and his team had already indicated that they would be filing a lawsuit to contest the official results, and that meant the beginning of a whole new stage in the process. For now, the final tally stood at 2,912,253 votes for Gore, and 2,912,790 votes for Bush. Gore would be entering the so-called contest phase of the recount, trailing by just 537 votes.

I have to admit, I was pretty flabbergasted when I learned about how the hand recount in Palm Beach ended. For the record, I went into this project not knowing anything about what the Secretary of State's office really did or didn't do during the recount. I was aware of Harris's reputation, and I understood that Democrats generally believed that she made decisions to benefit Bush.

I was prepared to find out that the truth was more complicated. Then I read about this thing with Palm Beach, about how Charles Burton begged Katherine Harris for a few more hours so they could finish counting, and how she wouldn't allow it no matter what. What I saw in this story was Harris making a decision that was transparently and unambiguously motivated by a desire to stop the recount.

Yes, the canvassing board had made a truly shortsighted decision to take time off for Thanksgiving, but the Florida Supreme Court had said that having vote totals come in on Monday at 9:00 AM would've been fine. Why couldn't Harris have just given Palm Beach the extra couple hours? What possible reason could she have had, other than wanting to protect Bush's lead?

I asked Harris about this during our interview last spring, and to my bewilderment, she remembered the story completely differently. In Harris's mind, she didn't cut the Palm Beach recount short. She thinks she actually extended the time they had.

Katherine Harris: They said originally Friday, and we said we'd stay open until Sunday to give people more time.

Leon Neyfakh: No, I think they said Sunday or Monday. This was the beginning of a pretty drawn-out debate.

Katherine Harris: [crosstalk] until Sunday.

Leon Neyfakh: No, they said that the votes have to be in by Sunday at 5:00 PM if the Secretary of State's office is open, or if the Secretary of State's office is not open on Sunday, they can come in at 9:00 AM on Monday.

Katherine Harris: I remember the 9:00 AM on Monday, but I also clearly remember that because we wanted it to be finished, everybody argued, "Let's do it Friday." We said, "No, we're going to stay open." Maybe I'm not remembering that exactly. I do know about the 9:00, but I thought that we had to certify at 5:00. It said, "You shall certify."

Leon Neyfakh: If you are open?

Katherine Harris: Yes. We chose to stay open so that they would have the time. You and I disagree on that, but we can both go back and check. Clearly, in my mind, it was my understanding that we had a choice of Friday or Sunday.

Leon Neyfakh: I don't know what to make of this exactly, other than Harris really truly remembers doing everything right; right according to the law, right according to the principles of democracy, right according to the duties of her office. To be honest, that's true of pretty much all the people I interviewed for this show. Everyone remembers acting impartially, and honorably, and fairly, but that doesn't mean they remember it correctly.

Joe Lieberman: Good evening. From the beginning of this extraordinary period of time--

Leon Neyfakh: Seven minutes after Katherine Harris presided over the vote certification in Florida, Joe Lieberman was once again asked to go on television to represent the campaign. Lieberman addressed reporters at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington. It was three days after Thanksgiving, and the interior of the hotel was already decorated for Christmas. This time, the would-be VP said exactly what he was supposed to.

Joe Lieberman: This evening, the Secretary of State of Florida has decided to certify what by any reasonable standard, is an incomplete, an inaccurate count of the votes cast in the State of Florida. We have an opportunity here, and we have a responsibility to ensure that this election lifts up our democracy and respects every voter and every vote, no matter what the outcome. That is precisely what Vice President Gore and I will seek to do in the days ahead.

Leon Neyfakh: George W. Bush gave a speech that night too. He called on Gore to drop his plan to contest the election and to concede instead. He also asks President Clinton to formally open a transition office for his new administration.

George W. Bush: Good evening. The last 19 days have been extraordinary ones, but now that the votes are counted, it is time for the votes to count. I've asked Secretary Cheney to work with President Clinton's administration to open a transition office in Washington, and we look forward to a constructive working relationship throughout this transition. Together, we can make this a positive day of hope and opportunity for all of us who are blessed to be Americans. Thank you very much, and God bless America.

Leon Neyfakh: Just after Katherine Harris' certification ceremony, lawyers from the Governor's office rushed to prepare the documents that would officially seat Florida's 25 Republican electors. The Bush camp was concerned that the Democrats would try to subpoena the documents and prevent them from getting filed, so out of an abundance of caution, the lawyers transported the documents in an unmarked police car and mailed them to Washington from an out-of-the-way post office where no one would be expecting them. In the end, none of it turned out to be necessary. The Democrats didn't even try to interfere.

Micah Loewinger: After an appeal by the Bush team, it was the United States Supreme Court that finally called a halt to the Florida recount, handing the 25 electoral votes and the presidency to George W. Bush.

Al Gore: Good evening. Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. I promised him that I wouldn't call him back this time.

Micah Loewinger: The rest, as they say, is history. This hour of On the Media has been an excerpt from the excellent Fiasco: Bush v Gore. Go listen to the rest of the series on the Luminary channel of Apple Podcasts, and you can find more fiasco on Audible.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candace Wang. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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