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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In an excerpt from his new book, Jake Tapper uncovers the down and dirty partisan scuffle to win the Florida recount battle -- and the presidency.
Mar 5, 2001 | In the heat of last fall's historic post-election presidential campaign, when advocates for Al Gore and George W. Bush were navigating the swampy world of Florida election law, some of the ugliest wrangling -- and some of the most legally debatable maneuvering on both sides -- centered on the counting of overseas absentee ballots.
According to a knowledgeable Republican operative, the Bush camp even discussed a strategy that, if implemented, would have broken the law: organizing a post-election get-out-the-vote drive among overseas military personnel who had registered to vote but had not cast ballots by Election Day.
Bush officials did not return calls seeking comment on the report. But according to the knowledgeable GOP source, on Saturday, Nov. 11, Bush's political team held a 60- to 90-minute conference call for campaign operatives scattered throughout Florida. In the course of the discussion, they discussed having political operatives near overseas military bases encourage soldiers who had registered to vote -- but never did -- to fill out their ballots and send them in, more than four days after the voting deadline.
Was this plan, a blatant act of voter fraud, ever carried out? There's no concrete proof that it was, as of today -- and if it was, whoever was involved isn't talking. (Neither South Carolina-based strategist Warren Tompkins, who ran Bush's absentee ballot monitoring operation, nor Bush political director Ken Mehlman returned calls for comment.) What's not in doubt is the crucial role the overseas military ballots -- and the vicious, behind-the-scenes battle over whether to count them -- played in the outcome of the Florida vote and, ultimately, the election.
Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency
By Jake Tapper
Little Brown & Company
352 pages
Before the election, 23,246 overseas ballots were mailed out from the state of Florida, and more than half of them -- 14,415 -- had come in by Election Day. As of Nov. 13, Monday, Florida's 67 counties had received 446 military overseas ballots since Nov. 8.
By Nov. 16, Thursday afternoon, that number had swelled to 2,575.
By the next day, it was 3,733.
There was certainly plenty of wrangling and duplicity on both sides when it came to the issue of overseas absentee ballots. At a time when the Gore team's mantra was "Count every vote," for instance, its attorneys were trying to disqualify any ballot cast by overseas military personnel that was even remotely questionable. And the Bush team -- worried about whether it would be hurt by the overseas absentee ballots, thanks to the high numbers of voters in Israel who might be energized by Joe Lieberman's presence on the ticket -- at first focused on trying to scope out and prevent possible voter fraud by the absentees. Gore-Lieberman garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote Nov. 7, and estimates held that about 4,000 Florida Jews might be expected to cast absentee ballots from the land of milk and honey.
It was clear to strategists on both sides, within days after Nov. 7, that they needed to supplement their focus on hand recounts with a side strategy on the overseas absentee ballots, which were due Friday, Nov. 17. The Bush team turned to Warren Tompkins -- who had helmed Bush's nasty South Carolina primary campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain -- to coordinate its strategy. Days after the election, he put together a spreadsheet on the overseas absentee ballots, what had come in already, what had been counted, how many had been requested, how many were still expected in and so on. The overseas absentee ballots were likely to go their way, Tompkins told his colleagues, but he anticipated that the Democrats wouldn't make it easy for them to be accepted, and would challenge as many as possible.
"You're kidding me," spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said. "They can't protest."
"We think they're going to," Tompkins responded.
Tucker wanted to let the press know about this at once, but she was overruled. Let's wait, she was told.
It was on Nov. 11 that the Bush political team organized a conference call to discuss its absentee ballot strategy. In those first crazy days of the post-election battle, anywhere from a dozen to 60 or so people could have been on the call.
Many matters were attended to. The group talked about finding volunteers to be observers in counties doing recounts. They talked about drumming up protesters. They talked about assigning operatives to different clerks' offices to wait for the overseas absentee ballots, and to report anything Democrats did to challenge them. And, according to a knowledgeable Republican source, in the course of this conversation the Bush team discussed having political operatives abroad encourage certain soldiers who had registered to vote -- but never did - to do so after the voting deadline.
The group discussed how to target Republicans in the drive. Voter registration files made it possible to identify which soldiers, sailors and airmen were Democrats and which were Republicans, which were black and which were white. Let's target the likely Bush supporters, one of the operatives said, according to the GOP source -- we'll get them to send their ballots in and then argue about the postmarks later. We're gonna raise a stink and force them to count these ballots. We don't know how they're gonna come in, but we need every vote we can get.
Indeed they did. Whether or not Bush supporters actually carried out the suggestion of getting military personnel to vote illegally, their focus on those ballots paid off. Bush attorney Fred Bartlit, who argued for more lenient assessments of the overseas absentee ballots on behalf of the Bush campaign, told me that he knew nothing about any attempt to obtain post-election votes. In fact, the Republican operative with information about the Nov. 11 conference call was quick to point out that not one member of the Bush legal team was on the call -- just some of the political movers.
That said, the Bush team's public strategy to deal with the overseas ballots certainly yielded results. Bartlit told me that his side's legal maneuvering -- they took 15 Florida counties to court to try to "shake out" more votes -- resulted in anywhere from 300 to 400 new overseas ballots being counted by the time Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified the election results on Nov. 26. Less anecdotally, Bush attorney Jason Unger says that 176 new net Bush votes were counted for Bush after the Bushies took the 15 counties to court.
A new 176 votes "shaken out" in this process might not sound like much until you put the number next to the lead Bush had before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to put an end to all the counting on Saturday, Dec. 9. That number: 154. That makes those 176 votes seem slightly more significant.
