The Nine [79]
The vote count in Florida was fantastically, almost surrealistically, close. (In time, during their coverage on election night, the networks rescinded their projection of the state for Gore, then awarded it to Bush, and finally labeled the state too close to call.) On Wednesday, November 8, the first complete election figures in Florida showed Bush ahead of Gore by 2,909,135 to 2,907,351, or a margin of 1,784 votes. Under Florida law, a result this close required all the counties in the state to do an immediate automatic recount. That process, which essentially meant running all the ballots through the counting machines a second time, took a day. The new results, announced on Thursday, November 9, cut Bush’s margin to 327 votes—or .00000056 percent.
Events in the first few days after the election had a hallucinogenic quality. Partisans on both sides had no experience with a controversy like this one. While there were a great many people who were familiar with politics, almost none of them knew anything about how votes were actually cast and counted. And the subject of recounts was even more obscure, familiar only to a tiny band of part-time experts on both sides. (There have never been enough recounts to support even one person’s entire career.) No one, of course, had any idea how long the controversy would last, so each side worked with a frantic, sleepless intensity.
The immediate focus of controversy was Palm Beach County, Florida’s biggest by area and most Democratic by inclination. Because the local election administrator, Theresa LePore, wanted to make voting easier for the county’s many elderly voters, she used 12-point type—rather than the customary 10-point—to lay out the ballot. But with ten candidates, the bigger type meant that there was not enough room to list them all on one page; instead, she spread the names across two pages, with the holes to be punched in the middle, the famous “butterfly ballot.” The arrangement left Patrick Buchanan, the rabidly conservative independent candidate, in the second punch-hole position and Gore in the third place. (In Florida, like most other states, the parties are usually listed in order of finish in the most recent governor’s race.) As a result, Buchanan received 3,704 votes in Palm Beach—nearly 2,700 more than he’d won in any other county. As Buchanan himself acknowledged, most of the votes were intended not for him but rather for Gore. What, if anything, could be done about these errors after Election Day? It wasn’t clear. Still, protesters and news cameras descended on the government center in West Palm Beach.
Scrambling to keep their hopes alive, the members of the Gore team made their first move on November 9, two days after the election. Pursuant to Florida law, they asked four out of the state’s sixty-seven counties to conduct manual recounts—ballot-by-ballot reviews to make sure that the votes were correctly recorded. Not coincidentally, Gore asked for recounts in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia, the four most Democratic-leaning counties in the state. The butterfly ballot controversy applied only in Palm Beach, but the main issue in the other counties concerned the number of so-called undervotes—that is, ballots where the counting machines registered no preference in the presidential race. The Gore team thought a recount was necessary to identify whether any of these undervote ballots had actually been marked with a preference for president. In each county, a little-known entity called the Canvassing Board, made up of three local officials, would vote to determine whether a recount should take place. Gore had not filed a lawsuit, instead asking for manual recounts, which was known under Florida law as filing a protest.
But before any of the boards could even determine whether to conduct a manual recount, the Bush forces