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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (9738)	7/21/2001 12:44:05 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote (cont.) From The New York Times July 14, 2001 Revising a Complex Approach to Challenging Ballots Thanks to a network of local lawyers who had advised his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, on judicial appointments, Mr. Bush had a ready source of politically connected legal talent to argue on his behalf before the 67 county canvassing boards. The campaign's preparations were meticulous. Six days before county officials were to begin examining the overseas ballots, Bush advisers were sending out detailed instructions on the legal intricacies of overseas voting. There were daily conference calls, spreadsheets to track ballots in each county, a phone number for emergency advice. One group of Bush lawyers christened itself the Overseas Absentee Ballot Task Force and even had its own letterhead. Mr. Gore's top aides, preoccupied by recounts in South Florida, were poorly prepared by comparison. The Gore team, for instance, wanted its representatives in each county to estimate how many overseas ballots had flaws open to challenge. By the night before the counting, they had estimates from 10 of 67 counties. Having assumed that Mr. Bush would win easily among overseas voters, the Gore strategy was predicated on knocking out overseas votes and fighting for the strictest readings of state law. Never mind Mr. Gore's repeated pledge to count every vote; his strategists calculated simply that the fewer overseas ballots counted the better. It was left to Mark Herron, a Tallahassee election law specialist, to teach the Gore legal recruits the basics of overseas ballots, and on Wednesday, Nov. 15, Mr. Herron circulated a five-page memorandum that listed legal grounds for protesting overseas ballots when the canvassing boards reviewed them just two days later. Within a day, however, the Herron memorandum had fallen into the hands of the Bush lawyers, who instantly recognized its political value and later used it to discredit the Democrats' strategy on overseas ballots as an effort to disenfranchise voters. ``We were losing the public relations battle until we got the break with that stupid memo,'' said Mr. Tompkins, the senior Bush strategist. But the Bush lawyers had a strategy memorandum of their own, recently obtained by The Times, that also set out detailed instructions for challenging overseas ballots. The 52-page document included all the information Bush lawyers might need to make their case before the canvassing boards, including a copy of Ms. Harris's Nov. 13 statement. Unlike the single-minded approach of the Gore memorandum, the Bush instructions set forth a more adaptable, tactical approach aimed at achieving the largest possible net gain from overseas voters. Specifically, the Bush lawyers were told how to challenge ``illegal'' civilian votes that they assumed would be for Mr. Gore and also how to defend equally defective military ballots, the document shows. The clearest illustration of the differing strategies was in the pre-printed protest forms that each campaign prepared for use with the canvassing boards as they scrutinized each ballot envelope for legal defects. The Gore instructions included one all- purpose protest form; the Bush instructions included two. The first Bush form protested defective ballots just as the Gore form did and listed many of the same potential flaws -- missing witnesses, late postmarks, domestic postmarks. In an accompanying ``letter of instruction'' the Bush lawyers were told that it was essential to check for defects and that there was to be no flexibility on the question of missing postmarks. To be valid, the letter said, ballots ``must have'' a military or foreign postmark. The second form, which was used to protest the exclusion of military ballots, demanded that canvassing boards count military ballots that arrived without postmarks, or with illegible postmarks, or even in some cases with United States postmarks. nytimes.com