The Gore Coup

As we go to press, state circuit court judge Terry P. Lewis has decided that Florida and the nation need not sit still while the Democratic party attempts to manufacture an Al Gore presidency from after-the-fact “recounts” of ambiguous or altogether invalid Election Day ballots. But the state supreme court has enjoined Lewis’s ruling pending an appeal scheduled for Monday, November 20.

We’re sure of this much: Should Judge Lewis eventually be upheld, all who cherish the integrity of American law will be entitled to celebrate. And yet, even then . . . how close we will have come to having the central processes of our democracy upended by the fanatic ambition of a single demagogue. And what glaring weaknesses in our politics will have been revealed by the astonishing extent of the Gore assault. So, yes, celebrate if things end honorably. But also remember this:

Al Gore’s attempted coup has exactly tracked the trajectory of the Monica Lewinsky episode, his mentor’s own triumph over ancient taboos of American public life. And an all-too-familiar scandal narcosis has already set in across the country, for Gore has pursued his goal with a speed and cynical genius that Bill Clinton never dreamed of. Once again, the overarching grossness of the thing has been obscured in a succession of televised “developments,” each dominated by the guilty party’s super-litigator front-men, who insist that ultimate justice must turn on microscopic obscurities of the statute books. What constitutes an “error in the vote tabulation” under Title IX, Chapter 102.166(5) of the Florida code? May a “county canvassing board” consider a “pregnant chad” on an “undercounted ballot” the binding expression of a “voter’s intent”? And if such questions are properly answered, does it not become obvious that our boy is defending the Constitution?

With hardly a peep of disunity, the regular army of Democratic brahmins and activists and “intellectuals” has once again heard this bell and begun barking whatever daily dishonesties are approved by the central office. Which has once again guaranteed that only Republicans will be left to mumble back the countervailing truth. Which has once again persuaded the mainstream media to cover the spectacle as they would any other essentially “partisan” dispute: with only passing attention to its genuine origins, and an idiot’s agnosticism about what conclusion is to be preferred. Which agnosticism has now been broadcast everywhere, so that you can practically feel it in the air. What not long ago would have been completely unthinkable — the outcome of a presidential election formally reversed to conform to the losing side’s conception of “popular will” — is beginning to seem already thunk.

As indeed in some sense it has already been thunk. Two years ago, a sitting American president decided he would “just have to win,” despite the fact that all signs pointed to his complicity in an impressive series of felonies. He did wind up winning, of course. It is really no surprise, then, the precedent for such ugly triumph firmly established, that Bill Clinton’s understudy would conclude that he himself can and should “do anything to win” the White House. The only surprise is that we would find Gore still reaching for “anything to win” even after it is clear he’s lost — and that he would make the grab without suffering universal condemnation.

By mid-afternoon on Election Day, word had reached Nashville of exit polls showing an extraordinarily close race, nationwide and particularly in Florida. Nashville had also become aware of anecdotal reports that a handful of voters in Palm Beach were complaining about the design of their local punch-card ballot. Gore’s men knew nothing more than that. But it was enough. Before the polls closed in Florida, phone banks were calling registered Democrats in Palm Beach to warn that “you may have voted for the wrong candidate for president.” And twelve hours later, at 5 A.M. — only after it emerged that Florida would in fact be decisive in the Electoral College, and that the state had been lost by fewer than 1,800 votes — Al Gore authorized his senior aides to squeeze profit from the Palm Beach frenzy they had preemptively whipped up. At an emergency meeting in his campaign headquarters, senior Democratic strategists resolved that recounts of the Florida vote would be demanded — on the basis of “ballot irregularity” allegations they could not (and still can’t) substantiate.

Gore lawyers have since argued two things: first, that Palm Beach’s punch cards were “illegal,” and the county must therefore conduct its entire election over again; second, that Election Night computer tabulations in several other Florida counties might have missed some crucial number of votes — which suspicion, they claimed, was legally sufficient to justify a hand inspection of every ballot cast in those jurisdictions. Of course, Palm Beach’s punch cards were not illegal, as we explained last week. And nothing in Florida law, honestly construed, otherwise contemplates what Team Gore has generally proposed: that an apparently defeated candidate be permitted to direct an explicitly partisan, extra-innings treasure hunt through the spoiled or incomplete ballots of voters he guesses meant to support him. For bravely sticking to her guns on this point, Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris has now been systematically smeared by flunkies of the vice president. They are wrong and Harris is right, but what should that matter? As Gore’s campaign chairman, Bill Daley, has lately announced, mere “technicalities” — like the law — should no longer determine our presidential elections.

They should be determined instead, apparently, by naked thievery. Ask yourself: Why has public opinion not angrily rebelled against Gore’s transparently self-interested call for hand recounts in Florida? Because Bush’s margin of victory there — not counting absentee ballots from overseas — remained a paper-thin 300 votes late last week, and most folks think it common sense that we make sure we’ve got it nailed before such a puny number elects our president. Okay, but how is it that Bush’s popular vote advantage ever got so small in the first place, when authoritative Election Night tallies had given him a lead nearly six times as large? Well, you say, Florida’s mandatory next-day recount of its ballots — conducted impartially, by machine — corrected for various simple errors and glitches, and quickly produced more reliable figures. Which by purest chance broke 80 percent in Al Gore’s direction.

No. Virtually impossible. And it is among the most amazing aspects of this most amazing historical event that so little attention has so far been paid to the impossibility.

There are 67 counties in Florida. The mandatory recount one of them, Pinellas, suggested innocent human error on Election Night; ballot officials had mistakenly fed one set of punch cards through the computer twice, and had never processed another set at all. Amended returns from Pinellas produced a net gain of 343 votes for Gore. Mandatory recounts in 63 other Florida counties shifted things this way and that, each of them negligibly and at random, as statistical probability would have indicated. Together, these 63 counties gave Gore an additional net gain of fewer than 200 votes. And we have thus cleanly accounted for roughly a third of the lead Bush lost immediately following the election.

The other two thirds came entirely from three remaining counties. And the situation in each of them fairly stinks of impropriety or outright corruption.

A recount in Volusia County lopped nearly 100 votes off the gap between Bush and Gore. Officials there explain that they suddenly discovered 320 ballots they’d missed the first time. Which would be fine, perhaps. Except that last Thursday, state attorney general Bob Butterworth, who happens to be Gore’s Florida campaign chairman, phoned Volusia’s elections board and “requested” they perform a second recount, by hand. They agreed. And by the time they were done, 264 previously counted absentee ballots had . . . disappeared. And Al Gore, voila, had gained a new chunk of votes (not yet certified, thank heavens, by Katherine Harris). Very fishy.

Fishier still is Gadsden County, where last Wednesday the canvassing board met privately, in violation of state law, and examined more than 2,000 ballots that had been rejected by voting machines because they each were marked for more than one presidential candidate. Gadsden, one canvassing board member admits, then “reconstructed” certain of these ballots — again, in violation of state law — and accorded 170 of them to Gore.

And fishiest of all is Palm Beach County, now notorious for the standardless, on-again-off-again manual recount sought by its grotesquely partisan canvassing board. It should be notorious for something else. On Election Day, Palm Beach voters cast only about 7 percent of the state’s presidential ballots. But the putatively “neutral” machine recount Palm Beach conducted 24 hours later all by itself produced fully 45 percent of Gore’s subsequent climb toward a Florida plurality: a net shift of 682 votes. How could this be? No other county experienced results anything close to these. Much larger Broward County, for example, ran its ballots through the machines a second time and changed just a single vote — in Bush’s favor.

In our bones, we’re pretty sure what happened here. In the middle of the night on November 8, Democratic ultraloyalists like the people who run elections in Volusia, Gadsden, and Palm Beach counties watched a fevered Bill Daley announce that things were still close in Florida — and that his party’s campaign would “continue” until the rectification of unspecified “irregularities” in that state made Al Gore president. The ultraloyalists read this hint for what it was. And next, they set about, fast as lightning, before anyone was watching, doing “anything to win.”

We’re pretty sure, too, on whose instructions Daley issued his hint. Every Florida machination, after all, has been engineered by Al Gore personally. “He’s making every decision,” his aides now brag. “This is totally him.”

In our next issue, we hope to be commenting on the news that one court or another has finally called a halt to the Al Gore coup of election year 2000. The news will please us. But still we will wonder: How on earth did such a man, leading such a crowd of knaves, in such a disreputable and anti-constitutional effort, ever come within a million miles of the American presidency?

David Tell, for the Editors