Thoroughly Corrupt in the Citrus State

On what grounds does the Gore campaign get to demand manual recounts in only four Democratic bastions? (If you say, "The Bush campaign could have asked to recount the other counties," I'll reply that elections should not be contests between two teams of lawyers doing battle over which votes should count more. If you say, "Florida election law," I'll reply, "Case closed.") Spokesmen like Doug Hattaway and Gore's lawyer David Boies claim that they're seeking a "full and fair" accounting of Florida's votes. It may be "fair," by their lights?i.e., it may produce a Gore presidency?but there's no way it can be construed as "full." It's as if a major-league baseball team were to play a game under protest and be granted the opportunity to replay just the top of the third (when it struck out in order) and the bottom of the seventh (when it gave up nine unearned runs).

My second impression was that the country had somehow stumbled back into one of the Clinton scandals. When things go badly for the Democrats (like losing an election) and especially when they get caught doing something underhanded (like trying to rig a vote), they raise a deafening din of public-relations counterassault, until the original offense is submerged. If you have a rotten tree, build an imaginary forest around it. Remember the Asian money scandals? As soon as John Huang, Johnny Chung, Maria Hsia, Pauline Kanchanalak, Mochtar Riady and literally dozens of others were found to be running an elaborate operation, Democrats charged that, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour had once raised money from one guy in Hong Kong. And thereafter press coverage of campaign-finance sleaze took on a pox-on-both-their-houses tone.

That seems to be what the early "butterfly ballot" concerns in Palm Beach were intended to accomplish?and did accomplish. Although Democrats' attempts to peel a few more votes out of West Palm ultimately failed, they have provided a bipartisan story line to discussion of "election irregularities" that is every bit as strong as it was when I left town just after the election. I think I know how the Goremen are thinking on this one. All successful politicians are to some extent master diagnosticians of American stupidity; where Clinton has stood out is in his brilliant diagnosis of American frivolity. We just don't think constitutionally anymore. Gore's aides think the guy who won the popular vote is the legitimate president, period, and any means that achieves that legitimate end is ipso facto legitimate. (Although I wonder if Gore's popular majority would stand up if the votes of felons and undocumented aliens nationwide were scrutinized with the same attention to legalism with which Florida's canvassing boards rejected 41 percent of votes, many of them military, coming from abroad.)

The most mysterious episode last week?the decision of (presumably pro-Gore) election officials in Miami-Dade to stop prematurely their (presumably pro-Gore) recount?was much discussed, and little understood. To understand it, we have to look at the fishiest episode of last week, which went almost unremarked. That concerned Wednesday's Broward County recount, which included?astonishingly?105 ballots with re-taped chads. Broward officials threw out 10 of them, and of the 95 that remained, Gore won 88 and Bush 7. In other words, Gore won 93 percent of the taped-chad ballots.

This makes absolutely no sense. First of all, the problems that make necessary a manual recount shouldn't affect taped ballots. The ballot-reading machine sees one hole open and one hole closed, whether there's tape over the closed hole or not. Second, it's true that Broward was Gore's best Florida county, but he still managed only 67 percent of the vote there. If the tapers were a random selection of Broward voters, who just happen to have punched the wrong hole at random, we should have expected a result somewhere between 60-35 Gore and 75-20 Gore, but certainly not a net pickup of 81. The more commonly given explanation?that these were people who punched Bush or Nader and, before mailing their ballots, switched to Gore?makes even less sense. That would mean that the tapers were genuine swing voters, and that a result around 50-50 would be the most probable. And if they were swing voters, then how does it come that swing voters are voting for Gore at a higher rate than even blacks did? If they were swing voters, then a result of 93 percent pro-Gore would be about as likely as a result of 93 percent pro-Bush. Which is to say, not likely at all.

Were these chads taped in during the recount? Or is this just how an ordinary election proceeds in Broward County? Someone is going to take a second look at those ballots, and that's the most likely reason Miami-Dade stopped its recount.

Usually a party has to have total dominance to rule by corruption. Not here. This is America's greatest haven of two-party featherbedding outside of New Jersey, with Cubans lined up on one side and African-Americans (aided by Haitian immigrants) lined up on the other. (Although it's funny we hear less from the newspapers about the noxious ethics of Miami politics than we did during the Elian Gonzalez case.) No metropolitan area in the country is more inured to bureaucratic coups d'etat, and to having elections decided by judges. In 1999 the Miami City Commission rigged a charter reform that would have ended mayor Joe Carollo's term nearly two years early. (That attempted coup was overturned by state courts.) Carollo himself had come to power in 1997 when he finished second in a mayoral race against Xavier Suarez. A state appeals court found Suarez had committed vote fraud. Did it order the election rerun? No! It just installed Carollo. And the Miami electorate just sucked it up. That's probably because voters had absolutely no faith, even after the exclusion of Suarez, that the democratic process could result in a non-fraudulent result.

Even more astonishing, though, is that Suarez's political machine didn't raise a peep in protest. That's probably because they reckoned they had less to lose from a single election setback than by having their shenanigans exposed to the public at large. The same calculations were in play when, during its abortive recount, the Miami-Dade canvassing board, braving calumny, decided to bar all media from observing the procedure.

As for the major mini-scandal of this whole episode?the successful attempt by Democratic election boards to get hundreds of presumably Republican military votes disqualified for lack of postmarks?it had "Clinton scandal" written all over it. After an early page-one feature citing Joe Lieberman on the military ballot issue, The New York Times relegated its rare accounts of the incident to the same place (in the national edition, at least) where it has covered the president's most spectacular ethical missteps over the last eight years: page A28.

What was the Times running on A1? The great front-page Times moment of last week came with its Thanksgiving Day article by Ford Fessenden and Christopher Drew, headlined "For Texas and Other States, A Bump Is Sometimes a Vote." The implication was that counting dimpled chads?without which Gore cannot win?was common practice in parts of the country less endemically corrupt than Florida. But the reader was inclined to ask: What other states was the article referring to? California and Ohio count hanging chads?that is, squares that have been punched out but still cling to the ballot by one or two corners. Massachusetts, Illinois and Washington have more theoretical statutes saying that voter intent is paramount. But Texas, as the Washington Post's excellent John Mintz gleefully pointed out the following day, is the only state in the country that has ever counted dimpled ballots under any circumstances.

The great echo of the Clinton scandals, though, was that Joe Lieberman was trying to play the same role in the election dispute that he played during the Lewinsky affair: taking "firm moral stands" that were wholly verbal, and belied by every single one of his concrete actions. On Face the Nation, Lieberman acted as the Man of Conscience: "Al Gore and I would never countenance, would never tolerate, any specific policy by anybody representing us that was aimed at singling out votes from our military abroad," he intoned. "That is just wrong."

It took Tim Russert to flush Lieberman out, in one of the great moments of hypocrisy-exposition this decade:

Russert: Will you today, as a representative of the Gore campaign, ask every county to relook at those ballots that came from armed services people??

Lieberman: I don't know that I have that authority?

Russert: So Democratic lawyers should drop any objections to overseas ballots from armed services personnel?

Lieberman: I think the problem here?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?

Russert: My sense is if Joe Lieberman said this morning, "Count those military votes; don't use technicalities to knock them out," they may listen to you.

Lieberman: well, maybe I'm not accustomed to the newfound influence you think I have.

Just how high the stakes were became clear when Americans woke up on Thanksgiving morning to find out that Dick Cheney had suffered his fourth heart attack. Although it was a mild one, it was a disturbing reminder that, should he win, George W. Bush will be only a heartbeat away from running the country.