November 15, 2000
The Gore Hurricane
As the legal hurricane of Democratic lawyers raged across
Florida for the seventh day, the charitable view of Al Gore would run
something like this: If you had served as Bill Clinton's caddy for nearly
eight years, loyally defending whatever needed defending, and after
exhausting yourself in a long, hard run across the American landscape, and
after about a hundred million voters left you in a nose-on-the-wire,
dead-heat finish in the Florida swamps for the Presidency of the United
States, you too might try to claw and scratch your way a few feet forward
to capture the prize.
So the nation accorded Al Gore his week of life
beyond the rules that tether mere mortals to a real
world in which everyone recognizes that you have
either won the game, or you have lost it. As of
7:30 p.m. yesterday in Florida, the clear outlines of
this reality for Mr. Gore were beginning to form
themselves into a final decision. Florida Secretary
of State Katherine Harris, certifying the election
results as the law required, announced that George
W. Bush had 300 more of the state's votes than
Vice President Gore. And of course Mr. Gore's
legal hurricane promised to keep blowing in the
courts to keep the counts going.
Set aside for a second the obvious Democratic objections to the Harris
certification. The reality is that every official count taken so far has called
Mr. Bush the winner. On election night, the results counted by the
machines gave Mr. Bush a 1,764-vote margin. The entire state
subsequently ran an automatic recount by machine, which left Mr. Bush's
margin, before any manual recounts, at about 1,060 votes. We now have
the 300 vote result.
Beyond these three vote counts, we have the suggestive results from some
of the counties that the Gore camp itself insisted on recounting. Most telling
is that of Broward County, a heavily Democratic jurisdiction. On Monday,
after manually recounting 3,892 ballots in three precincts, the county's
officials decided to stop because the effort had produced a net gain for
Mr. Gore of four votes, reflecting no significant error in the original
tabulation. The vote to stop was 2 to 1, and one of the commissioners
voting to stop was county Judge Robert W. Lee, who is a Democrat.
Moreover, preliminary checks of votes in precincts around heavily
Democratic Fort Lauderdale produced few changes.
After today comes the absentee-ballot count. No serious person has
suggested anything other than that most of those votes will be for Governor
Bush. That is, on Friday Mr. Bush likely will still lead.
This strange event is well past the point of ever being able to say that any
result is definitive in a sense that would satisfy statisticians or lawyers.
What seems evident from the foregoing, however, is that Mr. Gore is not
gaining enough ground. We have voted and we have counted and
recounted, and despite enduring an extraordinary amount of extraordinary
litigation, there is no concrete evidence that the Vice President's prospects
are any better than they were the morning after the original, formal, legal
election.
Yes, it is still possible to surmise that if Florida recounts every vote in every
heavily Democratic precinct in the state, enough chads will drop to the
floor to push Al Gore's vote count past Governor Bush's and far enough
into the lead for the Gore campaign to claim it has won. Maybe. Or maybe
not. Or maybe there comes a point when everyone on the beach has to
recognize that the great whale lying on the shore, however magnificent, is in
fact dead and beginning to stink.
With every passing day that they are in public view, the Gore lawyers are
somewhat less edifying than they were the day before. We now have the
spectacle of superstar plaintiffs attorney David Boies arguing that Mr.
Gore's hand count case turns on the notion of whether the Florida
Secretary of State's decision was "arbitrary," or, in Mr. Boies's words: "I
would think that both arbitrary and discretion have both objective and
subjective qualities to them. The court obviously thought it could make an
objective determination that she had acted arbitrarily."
Elsewhere in Florida, another trial lawyer, Dexter Douglass, is litigating on
Mr. Gore's behalf. In the unlikely event the Gore campaign discloses the
contributions for the second election, we're confident it will show the trial
lawyers have essentially financed this effort. The grinding litigation style
certainly reflects it. And on Monday it emerged that lawyer Alan
Dershowitz, whose last legal circus performance was in the O.J. Simpson
trial, is representing eight aggrieved Palm Beach voters.
To a cynic, it's all merely partisan warfare without an exit strategy. That's
not quite true. It may well be that every principal involved in the Florida
recount battle is a Democrat or a Republican, but not all Floridians are
behaving like cannon fodder. Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, who
affirmed yesterday's certification deadline, is a Democratic appointee.
Charles Burton, the Palm Beach canvassing chairman who dissented from
the original decision to recount the vote there, is a Democrat, as is, we
noted above, a Broward County judge who voted to stop the vote there.
Pam Iorio, a Democrat who heads the Florida State Association of
Supervisors of Elections, admitted in public, "Hand counting is not always
the most accurate indicator of voter intent."
We suspect Ms. Iorio knows what she is talking about. We also suspect
that Mr. Gore's lawyers intend to try the lock of every door out there to
gain hand counts in venues favorable to their client. This in turn will
provoke countersuits from the Bush camp. No one would be surprised if
eventually the dispute leaped beyond the boundaries of Florida into Iowa
or Wisconsin, for further recounts. The vote ended seven days ago, and
Mr. Gore, despite all the king's horses and all the king's men, has not
regained the lead in a week's time. With every passing day, whatever Mr.
Gore hopes to achieve, diminishes. |
