It's probably the understatement of the campaign to say Theresa LePore is not enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. The notorious designer of the infamous butterfly ballot has been the personification of pitiful this week. Every time the canvassing commission members have taken their now-regular places in front of the television cameras, LePore looks simply catatonic. By the time Tuesday rolled around, she sat nearly comatose in her chair, lifeless behind a pair of dark sunglasses, hardly saying a word, seeming drugged.

And though she clearly would like to crawl under a rock and hibernate for a few hundred years, she is forced in front of the cameras, day after day.

If Carol Roberts is the board member most hated by Republicans, LePore may be the most hated Democrat in all of South Florida by members of her own party. It was LePore, of course, who approved the notorious butterfly ballot, which led to mass confusion on Election Day. More than 19,000 ballots had votes cast for more than one presidential candidate, and thousands of other voters claim the ballot led them to mistakenly vote for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.

On a human level, you cannot help but feel sorry for the woman. After all, she thought the ballot's larger type would help the county's senior citizens see the ballot more clearly. "So they wouldn't have to squint," she was quoted as saying soon after the election. She is the character in this melodrama who makes you cringe instinctively when you see her, the one who inspires the thought, "Thank God that's not me."

LePore, a lifelong Democrat, has been at this her entire life. She began working in the Palm Beach elections office in 1971 at the age of 16. Election work is in her blood. She is the daughter of a former West Palm Beach commissioner.

Brill's Content reporter Seth Mnookin, who covered LePore when he was a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, paints a picture of the now-famous canvassing board member as a dedicated, deliberate public servant who was brought down by her desire to do the right thing. "If she had been someone who wasn't worried so much about getting it right, and wasn't worried about doing right by the people she represents, none of this would have happened. It's just one of those situations where you make things worse by trying to overthink a problem," he says.

"If there was a problem, she was always someone who was both judicious and even-tempered about it, which is a rarity in that county," adds Mnookin. "She was someone who, if I had a question about something that was going on, I could call her up at home at 11 at night and she was incredibly gracious and helpful."

That description of LePore was echoed by West Palm Beach attorney Richard Lubin. "She is such a sweet lady, so down to earth," Lubin says in a tone normally reserved for condolence calls. "She took her job so seriously. She's the last person you would wish it on, and it's so sad because to me, there's no question that the ballot did cost Gore the election."

Mnookin is hardly surprised at the crazed environment swirling in Palm Beach County, he's only surprised to find LePore in the eye of the hurricane. "One of the effects of having a county that's very old and very highly educated is that everyone feels that they're right and have a right to be heard, and they can often be difficult to deal with. The tragedy of this is that she was doing what she always tries to do, and that's cater to the needs of her constituency. And they are a very needy constituency."

Unlike LaPore, board member and county commissioner Carol Roberts seems to come to life whenever the cameras are trained on her.

Roberts has emerged as the Democratic Lucianne Goldberg of Palm Beach County. Thrust suddenly into the public eye in the heart of a political crisis, Roberts is a partisan lightning rod in this struggle, unwittingly serving as a Democratic foil to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. But like Goldberg, Roberts has sucked up the publicity like a vacuum cleaner, showing off another characteristic she shares with Linda Tripp's former literary agent -- a penchant to give great quote.

Certainly, Roberts' flair for the melodramatic has been cultivated with the eyes of the world fixed upon her. Tuesday night, when the board took one of its many votes on whether or not to resume a manual count, the canvassing board's legal counsel pointed out there was a decision from the secretary of state prohibiting them from doing so. Roberts wanted to start the count despite Harris' order. "What happens, do we go to jail? Because I'm willing to go to jail."

While Roberts delivered her prime-time sound bite to scores of cheering fans in attendance Tuesday, by the following morning, her Republican enemies had mobilized against her. A letter to the canvassing board submitted by the county and state Republican Parties demanded Roberts' removal from the commission, accusing her of criminal vote fraud, and trying to tip the election for Gore.

"Roberts was observed picking up numerous ballots from the questionable ballot pile and the Gore ballot pile and then interspersing the ballots between piles," the complaint says. "On approximately 30 separate occasions, Roberts touched the chads on the ballots further contributing to the degradation of ballots."

Bush campaign spokesman Tucker Eskew joined the call for Roberts' resignation Wednesday calling her desire to recount ballots "insane and in some cases mischievous." Indeed, Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino related in an anecdote that indicated the chain-smoking Roberts has been known to skirt the rules before.

In 1993, Cerabino said, Roberts refused to abide by the new no-smoking ordinance in the building. "She would go ahead and smoke in her office. It became an incident because people complained about it."

"What bothers me is that it's an invasion of a lot of people's rights," Roberts told a Fort Lauderdale paper in 1993. "We're talking about my office, where I put my pictures, where I spend eight hours a day, which is like my home. I don't like to irritate people, but I don't like to be irritated either."

When asked if she would abide by the new law, Roberts told the paper, "I'm not going to tell you because you'd print it."

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