Did Bush camp encourage military personnel to vote after Election Day?

It was a P.R. jackpot -- it played into an already existing perception that the Democratic Party cared less about the military than the Republicans do. Plus there was the hypocrisy of the Gore campaign's count-every-vote rallying cry. Count every vote ... except for American soldiers?

From then on, the GOP operatives would refer only to "military ballots," not "overseas absentee ballots."

Duval County, Clay County, Escambia County, Okaloosa County -- places with the highest concentration of military voters seemed to be where the Democrats' fervor was the most heated. Gore operatives were after ballots for not having a postmark, or for having a U.S. postmark, though the military would later explain that several batches of these overseas ballots were postmarked in the U.S. after arriving from various port cities.

They were also after federal write-in ballots, which are for individuals abroad who claim that they requested an absentee ballot but never received one. Voters who used federal write-in ballots had to swear in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that they requested absentee ballots and didn't receive any, and provide all needed identification.

The Gore campaign made election supervisors check the names of these voters against their records to see if, in fact, they did request absentee ballots.

Meanwhile, a Florida GOP official, Al Austin, called up his good friend Norman Schwarzkopf to see if he knew about the Herron memo. When Schwarzkopf learned of it, the Persian Gulf War commander blew his top. But Schwarzkopf was sick with the flu, so he couldn't appear at any press event. Nevertheless, on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 18, Schwarzkopf called Tucker and dictated a statement.

"These armed forces ballots should be allowed to be tallied," Schwarzkopf said. "It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis. That because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States who will be their commander in chief."

On TV Saturday, and in print on Sunday, the story erupted.

Ron Klain, head of the Gore legal team, tried to point out that the rules the Herron memo detailed were just the same rules that Jim Smith spelled out on Sunday, when the Republicans were fearful of sacks of absentee ballots coming S.W.A.K. from Tel Aviv. Klain ran over to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, distributing copies of the transcript of Smith's press conference. But not one of these media outlets mentioned Sunday's press conference by Jim Smith, and how the Bushies had shamelessly pulled a 180 on the overseas ballot issue, once it became clear that rigorous application of the law would clearly affect armed servicemen and women far more than Jews abroad in Israel.

Instead, the media's focus was on Gore's mad rush to disenfranchise American soldiers. Of the 3,733 overseas absentee ballots that had come in since Election Day, 1,527 of them had been scrapped for various irregularities.

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