RICHARD L. BERKE
July 16, 2001
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Several leading Democrats said today that the Bush campaign acted improperly in pressing for counting overseas absentee ballots in Florida after last year's presidential election. And some said they would probably call upon Congressional investigators to open an inquiry into efforts by Republicans to involve the Pentagon to help them contact military personnel.
The Democrats' comments were in response to articles published today in The New York Times that detailed how Republicans mounted a legal and public relations drive to persuade canvassing boards in Bush strongholds to waive Florida election laws when counting overseas absentee ballots.
"This story confirms our worst fears about the Bush team's campaign to manipulate the Florida vote," said Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "It proves that President Bush was determined to win by any means necessary, including violating the spirit if not the actual letter of the law. The story raises many disturbing questions about the conduct of President Bush in this campaign. He owes the American people an explanation of his actions."
Mr. McAuliffe and other Democrats said they were particularly distressed that Representative Steve Buyer, Republican of Indiana, had sent an urgent request to the Pentagon asking for telephone numbers or e-mail addresses of sailors, including some whose absentee ballots had been disqualified. The Democrats said lawmakers should open an investigation into whether it was illegal for Mr. Buyer to use government resources to get a list of potential voters and deliver it to the Bush campaign.
"I don't think it's proper for the Pentagon to hand out peoples' private e-mail addresses to the political parties — to either party," said Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House Democratic leader. "I don't get the sense from the story that there was fraud or illegality. But you've got to ask some questions. There were questionable moves made to pull in some of those votes. I don't know the facts of what went on with the Pentagon, but it's troubling."
Representative Peter Deutsch, Democrat of Florida, said he would probably call for a Congressional ethics inquiry. He said of Mr. Buyer's actions : "It's shocking. It's scary. And it's also illegal and a violation of his trust as an elected official. When you think it can't get any more shocking, it gets more shocking."
In a recent interview, Mr. Buyer had insisted that his outreach was appropriate. Acting as chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on personnel, Mr. Buyer said he was angry that lawyers for the Gore campaign had urged county canvassing boards to reject absentee ballots without postmarks.
Stanley M. Brand, a Democratic lawyer and a former counsel to the House, said the Armed Services Committee's cooperation with Republican officials appeared to be an ethical violation. "There is a general principle under the ethics rules in both the House and the Senate that you're not supposed to cross the wires between official oversight action and political action," Mr. Brand said.
But William B. Canfield, a Republican lawyer and a former counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, said if Mr. Buyer initiated the outreach as part of his oversight duties, it would probably not constitute a violation. "There is not any way humanly possible for a member of Congress to disassociate themselves entirely from politics," Mr. Canfield said.
Beyond the concerns about Mr. Buyer, other Democrats said they might call for an investigation into why aides to Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, said work done on computers during the Florida stalemate had been erased, a potential violation of state public records laws.
"We have to look at trying to see if criminal action needs to be taken against Katherine Harris," Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, said in an interview, "particularly for the destruction of public records. It's very clear that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, for that matter, never took off their campaign hats during the whole postelection process — and they always claimed that they did."
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Mr. Gore's running mate, defended himself in the face of assertions that he undermined the Democrats' cause when he appeared on national television and said election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters.
"We were fighting in Florida not just for a victory but for a principle that every vote that was cast should be counted," Mr. Lieberman said today on CNN's "Late Edition." "And you can't fight for that benefit of the doubt, for senior citizens and African-Americans and Haitian-Americans and South Florida counties where Democrats tend to do better, and not fight for that same right for, of all people, men and women in uniform overseas, there to protect our national security, who are voting by absentee ballot."
Mr. Lieberman added: "My immediate take on it is that the Republicans were not consistent and were prepared to do just about anything — I hope within the law — to win that election in Florida. And that was not our point of view."
Fundamentally corrupt
MSNBC
ERIC ALTERMAN
July 15, 2001
In the tense weeks after Election Day, lawyers for each candidate argued over how to count votes, as GOP Attorney Fred Bartlit did over military ballots. Evidence is mounting that GOP operatives used aggressive pressure tactics--in court and out--to boost the Bush vote and depress the Gore vote.
Evidence mounts that GOP used every trick in the book
Following an exhaustive, six-month investigation featuring 24 reporters interviewing more than 300 voters in 43 countries and examining thousands of pages of documents, the New York Times has discovered mounds of evidence of unequal treatment of overseas ballots in Florida on behalf of the Republican candidate George Bush. Its report provides additional evidence to demonstrate what almost all of us know but precious few are willing to admit : the process that determined the outcome of the 2000 election was fundamentally corrupt. Republicans dominated the public relations battle, the behind-the-scenes political struggle, and ultimately the fateful Supreme Court decision that handed them their tarnished victory.
ASKED TO COMMENT on the Times’ revelations, Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer shot back, “This election was decided by the voters of Florida a long time ago. And the nation, the president and all but the most partisan Americans have moved on.” No wonder. The Times has uncovered yet another example of the Bush team’s efforts to undermine the integrity of the Florida count, as they fought, successfully in many instances to include illegal military ballots for their man on the one hand and to exclude fully legal Gore ballots on the other, making precisely contradictory accusations in each case.
BOURGEOIS RIOT
Sunday morning pundits like ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts have already been quick to pooh-pooh the Times report, although both implied that they had not even read it in its entirety. They invited the conservative Republican partisan Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal — the man who cheered on the Republicans “bourgeois riot” that successfully shut down the count in Palm Beach county — to mock his competitor for devoting so much attention to a report that, by itself, failed to prove that Gore would have won the election with a proper vote count. (It is a measure of the conservative bias of the punditocracy, by the way, that ABC paired off the extremist Gigot with Claire Shipman, a down-the-line, straightforward reporter for ABC news.)
But the fact that the Times failed to prove that overseas ballots alone might not have tipped the balance is secondary when placed in the larger context of the rest of what we know about the election. That Al Gore won national vote by a considerable margin — more than either Kennedy in 1960 or Nixon in 1968 — is undisputable. That he won the votes of Floridians using the “voter’s intent” standard outlined in that state’s election laws is also indisputable. (Republican lawyers fought against the use of this standard in most cases, except in those that would have disqualified overseas military ballots in favor of their candidate, in which case they fought just as vociferously to employ it.) Illegally excluded “overvotes” also would likely have given Gore a substantial margin of victory.
Now throw in the fact that Katherine Harris chose to arbitrarily exclude 215 votes from Palm Beach County because they arrived two hours late. Add to these factors the deliberate theft of many of his legitimate overseas votes and the illegal inclusion of hundreds of Republican votes and, once again, it becomes harder and harder to conclude that the right man is sitting in the Oval Office, no matter what standard one chooses.
FOG OF RHETORIC
The great victory of the Republicans was to mask the fact that they were seeking to undermine the election behind the scenes and to convince a supine media to play along.
The great victory of the Republicans during this entire process was to mask the fact that they were seeking to undermine it behind the scenes and to convince a supine media to play along. Over and over we heard that “the votes had been counted and recounted” and Bush had won every time. Few reporters were interested or able to penetrate into this fog of misleading rhetoric to determine just how this “counting and recounting” was taking place.
For instance, the Times discovered :
LOSERS, ALL
Given Gore’s pathetic performance in the election campaign itself, the party would have to be run by masochists to even consider nominating either one of these incompetents ever again.
The truth is that because election officials in Florida were so unprepared for so close a vote, we will never know who would have won the fair and legally mandated recount that the conservative Republican majority on the Supreme Court stepped in to prevent, lest their man end up on the losing end. But we do know, because of the Times reporting and previous evidence that augments it, that the Bush forces were unwilling to allow an honest accounting to take place. They outmaneuvered the inept Gore lawyers and strategists at virtually every step in the process, and even managed to convince Sunday talk show hosts to confuse Joe Lieberman sufficiently to the point where he ended up endorsing the Republican strategy at a crucial moment in the public relations battle. Given Gore’s pathetic performance in the election campaign itself, the party would have to be run by masochists to even consider nominating either one of these incompetents ever again.
Ari Flescher, George W. Bush, the insider media and probably most Americans may not want to hear it, but the Times has done a journalistic service in forcing us, once again, to face up to an ugly, but increasingly incontrovertible fact: The 2000 election was stolen; not from the hapless Gore and Lieberman ticket, but from the democratic process itself. We are all the poorer for it.
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to MSNBC.>
GEOFF DOUGHERTY
August 1, 2001
Five months ago elections officials in Palm Beach County, Fla., turned their attention from last year's controversial presidential balloting to the spring election for dozens of municipal offices.
As they prepared for the new election, they wiped out computer files showing how each ballot was punched in the presidential election, removing that information from the public domain even as scholars and journalists continue to analyze the results of Florida's presidential voting. The data is especially important because Palm Beach was one of the key counties in the five-week recount process that ultimately sent President Bush to the White House.
The files were the only computerized record of the way the county's tabulating machines registered each ballot last November. The punch card ballots themselves were not destroyed but cannot be accurately recounted because they have been extensively handled and possibly damaged since Election Day.
The erasure is an unexpected blow to advocates of election reform because of the data's historical value. By wiping out the records, the elections staff also may have violated Florida's strict rules against destroying public records.
"Whether or not it's in violation of the law is sort of irrelevant," said Alison Steele, a St. Petersburg, Fla., lawyer who specializes in media issues. "This is terribly foolhardy. This was certainly the closest election in modern history. It's important for historians to study it, and for us to study it and find out what went wrong."
The missing files came to light when the Tribune filed a request for copies of them.
Media organizations and academics have used the files to examine voter behavior, including the impact of the so-called butterfly ballot that may have led some voters to mistakenly select Pat Buchanan instead of Democratic nominee Al Gore. Palm Beach County also had an unusually high rate of spoiled ballots in the election.
Gore won the county by 116,000 votes. Democrats had hoped the recount there and in a few other Democratic counties with widespread voting problems would have turned up enough votes for Gore to give him the state and the presidency.
Although the files were copied and distributed to some media organizations before they were deleted, it's not clear whether they will be made available to the public.
Jeff Darter, information technology manager in Election Supervisor Theresa LePore's office, said the files were deleted so they wouldn't be confused with files from the March municipal election.
`They're just not there'
"We have no problem giving them to you," he said Tuesday. "They're just not there. If we had realized someone might have wanted to have them, we would have backed them up. Hindsight is 20/20."
LePore said the files had never been requested for review until the 2000 election. They could only be read by using a new computer program written after the election.
In the past, the files were "not something that we could retrieve and be able to read," said LePore. "We never thought of saving them."
Last month, The New York Times reported that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris may have violated the public-records law in a similar fashion. The newspaper said Harris had allowed two top Republican strategists to use state computers while writing a statement about her policy on accepting absentee ballots from overseas.
Democrats believed Harris, a Republican, had authorized a lenient policy that would favor Bush, the Times said. Harris refused to provide copies of all the documents on those computers, and said some of them may have been erased.
Since then she has hired a data specialist to see if the files can be recovered, and agreed to allow an expert retained by a group of newspapers to inspect the computer.
Florida law bars government officials from destroying public records and specifies criminal punishment for those who do so intentionally.
Steele said evaluating LePore's actions would involve determining whether the deleted files are covered by the law. In routine usage, computers generate dozens of files that cannot be read by most software and are of little or no value. Those are not considered public record. The same goes for inconsequential phone messages and Post-it notes.
But another 1st Amendment lawyer, Sam Terilli of Miami, said the issue was not complicated.
"The bottom line is that Palm Beach County created an electronic record of the punch card," he said. "That record included valuable public information which is not available from another source. And Palm Beach County destroyed that record. The law does not allow agencies to destroy public records. It's that simple."
Even though officials meant to delete the records, Terilli said, it's unlikely the criminal provisions of the law would apply.
"I doubt any prosecutor would take on this case," he said. "But that doesn't excuse what they did and it doesn't make it right."
Few people even knew about the files until last November, and the state election supervisors' group never has discussed policies on archiving them. But some officials said it was clear to them that they had to save the files.
"I can't imagine deleting them," said Pam Iorio, the election supervisor in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located.
"We try to hold on to records for as long as possible. Anything having to do with this election, I will not get rid of."
Loss likely to grow
Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said the magnitude of the loss is likely to grow in coming years.
"Those files will always be of interest because of the close election and because the media recounts have differed in their results," she said. "There's always someone who will want to go back and look at the data."
That the missing files were from Palm Beach County, site of some of the most significant voting problems, was not lost on MacManus.
"Maybe," she joked, "they were trying to erase a bad memory."
MICKEY KAUS
July 17, 2001
Series-Skipper™ is a service from kausfiles that lets readers avoid long, worthy newspaper series. (For more on the rationale for Series-Skipper™, click here.) Last Sunday's New York Times investigative report on Florida overseas ballots wasn't a series, but at 397 inches in length (counting graphics), with three sidebars and input from 24 reporters, it could have been! In response to overwhelming demand from civic-minded consumers who do not want to actually read this important story, kausfiles has extended the reach of its proprietary Series-Skipper™ technology.
Story : "How Bush Took Florida : Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote," David Barstow and Don Van Natta Jr., New York Times, July 15, 2001.
What did the reporters do? Looked at all 3,704 overseas absentee ballot envelopes that came in after Election Day. About two-thirds of the votes they contained were eventually counted.
What the reporters couldn't do : Figure out which candidate got the votes in which envelopes (because the ballots were separated from the envelopes they came in).
Initial, startling pro-Gore fact : If those late-arriving overseas ballots hadn't been counted--and the election had been determined only by the votes received on Election Day -- Gore would have won by 202 votes, according to Florida's official Katherine-Harris-approved returns. The late ballots (which under Florida law could be counted if they arrived by Nov. 17, as long as they were filled out on or before Election Day) changed the outcome when they went for Bush by a margin of 739 votes.
"Billboard" summary of article: "Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws. ... The flawed votes included ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States and even ballots from voters who voted twice."
Background the Times doesn't give you: Salon writer Jake Tapper's Florida book, Down & Dirty, reported a conference call in which Bush "operatives" discussed committing voter fraud by getting soldiers to actually vote after Election Day. Tapper's anecdote was thinly documented -- it came from an unidentified "knowledgeable Republican operative." Only one participant in the call was named, and the participant who uttered the key incriminating remark was not identified. Nor was it clear that the call actually resulted in any action being taken. But Tapper's account prompted a great deal of speculation regarding late overseas ballots : Had the Bush forces won Florida by illegally drumming up votes after the election was over?
Given this background, what should arguably be the real "billboard" paragraph? "A six-month investigation by The New York Times ... found no evidence of vote fraud by either party. In particular, while some voters admitted ... that they had cast illegal ballots after Election Day, the investigation found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes."
Even without organized voting fraud, did the "flawed" overseas ballots by themselves decide the election? Almost certainly not. Bush's official winning margin was 537 votes. There were only 680 "flawed" late ballots actually counted. Bush would have had to carry those ballots by a margin of 609 to 71 -- or almost 90 percent to 10 percent--for them to have changed the outcome. (Bush won the late overseas absentees, overall, by a 65 percent to 35 percent margin.) The Times cites a Harvard "expert on voting patterns and statistical models" who estimates that discarding the "flawed" ballots would have reduced Bush's margin to 245 votes. Still, this partial reduction in Bush's margin could have made the difference in combination with other potential troves of votes that arguably should have counted for Gore, such as the 176 votes from Palm Beach that were not included in the official tally, or the various batches of Gore "overvotes" found in media recounts.
Problem with thinking that the flawed ballots made even that much difference : Many of the flaws in the 680 questionable ballots were technicalities -- such as the failure of a voter to include an address along with his signature. Gore generally argued that Florida should "count every vote" regardless of technical defects -- an argument in which he was backed up, as the Times notes, by the Florida Supreme Court. Many of the "flawed" overseas ballots represented legitimate, clear expressions of voter intent and probably should have been counted.
Does the NYT attempt to distinguish the ballots that clearly shouldn't have been counted? No, but it does give totals for each type of flaw. Two types of ballots that clearly shouldn't have been counted are voters who voted twice (there were 19 of them) and voters who mailed in their ballots late (the Times identified 30 that were mailed in after the election, but only four of them were actually counted). Those are not big numbers.
Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #1: The Times suggests the Bush forces were hypocrites for being strict and technical with regular votes but permissive when it came to overseas votes. Indeed, one easy reading of the Times saga is that Bush won because he was a more fearless hypocrite. When the Gore camp was confronted with the hypocrisy of its position -- why block overseas ballots on technicalities if you want to "count every vote"? -- Gore running mate Joseph Lieberman caved on national television, saying election officials should "go back" and "give the benefit of the doubt" to late military ballots. But this point has been obvious for months. (The importance of Lieberman's concession was a key conclusion of the Washington Post's big Florida series, published last February.)
Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #2 : It's not just that the Bushies were better hypocrites. Bush's sophisticated legal team had an "adaptable, tactical approach" that was inherently more hypocritical, the Times implies, in that even within the overseas vote category "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."
Problem with Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #2 : According to the Times, the Bushies were quite explicit in claiming "that civilian ballots were not entitled to the same leeway as military ballots," turning what would be hypocrisy into a principle. A weak principle, perhaps -- the Times spends some time trying to knock it down, claiming that a military/civilian distinction is not "found in either Florida election law or in the federal law that governs overseas voting."
Key NYT assertion : It wasn't true that military ballots from overseas received domestic postmarks, which would technically disqualify them. The domestic military postal centers "are not even equipped with postmarking machines," the Times reports. But even the Times admits that due to "inadequate training and supervision" in the Pentagon's voting program, military ballots often arrive with no postmarks, or without "witnesses, or even signatures." There's at least a colorable argument that similar glitches didn't affect civilians, who have more freedom than soldiers in choosing the time, place, and manner of voting.
Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #3 : The Times claims Bush's camp was hypocritical along yet another, geographic, dimension, "employing one set of arguments in counties where Mr. Gore was strong and another in counties carried by Mr. Bush." Perhaps because of the weakness in the other anti-Bush angles, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne latches on to this one.
Problem with Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #3 : Despite many inches devoted to the subject, the NYT piece doesn't offer much evidence of Bush lawyers making contradictory arguments in different counties, as opposed to simply defending military ballots (but not civilian ballots) in all counties. In Broward County, for example, the Times reports that "Bush lawyers questioned scores of ballots, almost always from civilian Democrats but occasionally from members of the military." [Emphasis added.] Hmm.
How often is occasionally? Bush lawyers used a technical protest form in "at least six cases," though it's not clear how many of these six were military ballots. They also used a technicality to challenge "119 federal write-in" ballots in Broward, though again it's not clear how many were military ballots. In three big pro-Gore counties they were silent while authorities threw out 362 overseas ballots, including "many" military ballots. How "many"?
The Times puts a lot of emphasis on elaborate charts showing that pro-Bush counties consistently accepted a higher percentage of overseas ballots (50 percent were counted) than Gore counties (18 percent). But is this evidence of effective geographic hypocrisy on the part of Bush's lawyers? Or is it simply evidence that the election boards in pro-Gore counties were more likely to be Democratic, and receptive to Gore's arguments against counting technically flawed overseas ballots? The Times doesn't even address this obvious objection.
Interestingly, Tapper's book contains evidence that Gore's forces engaged in double hypocrisy (geographic, and anti-military) as well. It recounts what happens in Broward when three Gore attorneys come in "under the impression that their orders are to be stringent when it comes to military overseas absentee ballots but not to overseas ballots in general." What happens is that a more experienced local Gore attorney takes them aside and convinces them that in this heavily Democratic county, it won't profit Gore to lodge too many technical objections against any ballots.
Fallback Anti-Bush Angle #4 : For whatever reason, overseas ballots "were judged by markedly different standards, depending on where they were counted," which (the Times says) contradicted the constitutional "equal protection" arguments that the Bush campaign successfully pressed in the U.S. Supreme Court. The NYT amply documents this charge, although it's no surprise that a system which gives county officials discretion will sacrifice strict equal treatment -- which is why Bush's constitutional equal protection argument seemed so far-fetched. Surprisingly, the Times' follow-up editorial righteously denounces this unequal treatment -- "Overseas ballots were judged by vastly different standards," etc., etc. -- in effect embracing Bush's far-fetched argument. Hey, they had to righteously denounce something! (Jeffrey Rosen takes the more sensible tack of claiming that the varying treatment of overseas ballots shows that the unequal treatment of domestic ballots was a non-outrage as well.)
Overhyped Anti-Bush Angle: The Times declares there was a "'war room' within the offices of [Katherine] Harris," where "veteran Republican political consultants helped shape" Harris' post-election rulings. A "war room" sounds like "an outpost for the Bush campaign," which is what Dionne calls it. But when you read the "jump" carefully it turns out there were no Bush campaign operatives in Harris' "war room" -- just the director of the state Division of Elections, plus Harris' longtime adviser Adam Goodman, and J.M Stipanovich, a lawyer and veteran Florida GOP cadre.
Stipanovich's shadowy role as a possible conduit of pro-Bush influence is not news; it has been extensively discussed elsewhere, including in the Washington Post and Tapper's book. The Times also makes a big deal of Harris' ambiguous pronouncement on overseas ballots, which was seemingly helpful to Bush (it fudged the issue of whether the ballots had to be signed and dated). But the same Harris statement, the NYT eventually notes, was also potentially harmful to Bush since "it said explicitly that postmarks were required."
Good detail #1 indicating that Gore was outlawyered : "Not a single Gore official bothered to attend" the Pasco County canvassing board meeting at which the board reconsidered previously-rejected military overseas ballots, adding 19 votes. The Pasco County Democratic chair explains that it was an "hour's drive from his home to the county building on a Sunday." More than a dozen Bush representatives showed up.
Good detail #2 indicating that Gore was outlawyered: The Bush lawyers shamelessly turned on a dime, from a position favoring strict enforcement of postmark requirements to the opposite position, when they realized that many overseas military ballots didn't have postmarks.
Final Anti-Bush Angle : Rep. Steve Buyer, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, got the Pentagon to provide him with the e-mail addresses of 17 sailors whose ballots had been disqualified. The e-mail list was forwarded to a Republican campaign aide who was gathering the testimony of disenfranchised sailors for PR purposes. It's not clear if the Bush aide actually contacted any of the 17 sailors -- the Times says that simply by getting names off some rejected ballot envelopes he had "already contacted enough sailors to provide anecdotes." The Times describes this incident as a violation of the "cornerstone of American military tradition that the armed services remain apolitical."
Hello! Editor! Sidebar vs. Story : Among the "flawed" ballots the NYT suggests should not have been counted are 183 that were "Received After Nov. 7 With Domestic Postmark," rather than an overseas postmark. But a side article by Michael Cooper notes that some ballots with late domestic postmarks "actually were sent from overseas. Embassies sent ballots back in the diplomatic pouch that were not postmarked until they were mailed in the United States." Shouldn't they have been counted?
Things the story leaves out :
1) Figures on the total number of military ballots rejected despite Bush's lawyering (788, according to Robert Zelnick in the Wall Street Journal).
2) Any mention of Tapper's original allegation.
Things cunningly buried deep in the text : Mention of a U.S. District Court decision that, Zelnick claims, would have required even more overseas ballots to be counted. The Times' excuse? It "came too late to affect the final results." Sure. But was it right? This whole NYT investigation comes "too late to affect the final results"!
Estimated time saved by reading Series-Skipper™ instead of the actual article : Not a hell of a lot, it turns out.
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT
July 16, 2001
"No more tears now; I will think upon revenge."
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots
You wanted it, George. You wanted it so badly that you campaigned for months as a moderate, a 'compassionate conservative' who wished only to return dignity and honor to the White House while performing the bidding of the people.
Any fool with eyes and a functioning mind can see today the depths of your campaign lies.
You are no moderate, and nothing about your agenda is compassionate. The honor you swore to uphold does not exist within your shriveled corporate soul. There will be a reckoning.
Oh, how badly you wanted it. Abraham Lincoln once observed that once the "presidential grub" starts gnawing at a person, it becomes impossible to ignore. You know all about that, because you wanted it so badly. While campaigning, you said you didn't much care whether you won or not. That was merely one lie among the astounding galaxy of lies you have told. You wanted it, George.
You wanted it so badly you allowed it to be stolen for you.
You wanted it so badly that you allowed a new breed of Brownshirt thug to be unleashed upon our American soil, Republican operatives who stormed vote-counting centers and intimidated people seeking only to follow the law into abandoning a process that almost certainly would have cost you the election. This does not carry the whiff of Fascism, George. It fairly reeks of it. We know the names of those Brownshirts, George. There will be a reckoning.
You wanted it so badly that you allowed James Baker III to lie, and lie and lie again before the American people. You allowed him to take advantage of the sorry fact that television journalism does not investigate news, but merely broadcasts what it hears, like an echo chamber stretching from coast to coast. You did not rein him in, George; you did not stop his lies, because you wanted it so badly. There will be a reckoning.
You wanted it so badly that you have made no public comment about ChoicePoint and the thousands of African Americans who were torn from the voting rolls in Florida because they were mistakenly labeled as felons. The margin in Florida was 537 votes, George, because thousands of Black voters who went 9–1 against you nationally were denied their voice yet again. Election reform would be a great and necessary service to American democracy, and would repair the terrible damage done to the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in November. You do not speak to that, George, because it does not suit your purposes. You need those people to be disenfranchised in order to keep your party in power. There will be a reckoning.
You wanted it so badly, George, that you placed your hand upon a Bible on January 20 and swore an oath to the foulest lie ever put forth by a court in this land. You took the office, George, knowing that the Supreme Court decision that granted you power was a farce. Do you know that, technically, there are no more legal counties in America anymore, or states, or state officials? That is what the 'Equal Protection' decision in Bush v. Gore means : a decision the majority on that court was too cowardly even to sign their names to. Not even your friends can show their faces and defend that decision. There will be a reckoning.
You wanted it, George. You wanted it so very badly that you did all these things, and allowed all these things to transpire in your name.
You wanted it, and now you have it.
How does it taste?
To be sure, the chair behind your ill-gotten desk is comfortable despite all the Kevlar padding in the back. You are surrounded by history in that House you have taken. Are you haunted by the ghosts that dwell there? Are you stalked down the halls and in your bed by the shades of men and women whose greatness so completely demonstrates the poverty of your spirit?
Pick up a phone and you can have a sandwich in three minutes. That must be nice. But you are a child of vast wealth, George, so having footmen is nothing new for you. Air Force One must be the best perk of all. The engines roar and you are lifted off this tired earth into the heavens, away from the protesters that shadow your every move. Not even Clinton was hounded as you are. The press does not report on this phenomenon, but we know they are there. So do you. Do you wish Nixon were still alive, so you could ask him for advice about this?
You wanted it, George. Is it everything you expected? Are you bothered by the fact that a vast majority of Americans see you as a figurehead, jerked to and fro by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? Are you hurt by the fact that most Americans consider you to be a sub-par intellect? Do you pray at night for Cheney's heart? Do your hands tremble at the thought of having to do the job all by yourself?
The job is yours now, George. You must face your dwindling poll numbers. You must choke upon the opposition. You must struggle to enact your ruinous policies in the face of men like Tom Daschle, women like Diane Feinstein, and even from House members of your own party. You must accept defeat after defeat after defeat. You must reap the whirlwind after the passage of your tax cut. It is your economy now, George. You can no longer blame Clinton, the last duly elected President of the United States. You have destroyed Social Security and Medicare, George. There will be a reckoning.
How are your daughters, George? Are they enjoying the spotlight? It must gall you to see them caricatured and pilloried in the public prints, to hear of the pictures of them on the internet that show them naked and splayed in the lewdest of positions. Can you, for one second, imagine what it was like to be Clinton now? His wife was called a thief and a murderer, and his daughter was called a whore. There was even a call by a writer for National Review that Chelsea be killed because her last name is Clinton. I am sure a part of you rejoiced at these attacks. Now that the knives are turned upon you and your family, do you have any regrets?
The country does not want your faith-based help, George, nor does it want the discriminatory baggage it carries. The country does not want your tax cut. The country does not want your missile defense plan. The country does not want your energy plan. The country does not want you, George. The country gave the majority of the votes to the other guy, a majority that is swelling even now as reports of ill-functioning voting machines in poor districts come out into the open.
You are not wanted, George, but you might have been able to squeak by. The pundits said you were going to have to display remarkable leadership to overcome the disputed election. America is a forgiving nation, George. Nobody hurled rocks and threw firebombs here when you were raised on high. We like the peaceful prosperity Clinton left us, and were not ready to tear it all apart. America sat back and waited to see what you would do.
You have failed. You are not a leader.
The honor you purport to espouse and represent is yet another of your lies. You have awakened a slumbering beast, George. We rose up once and tore down Johnson. We rose up and tore down Nixon. We changed the face of this country with our righteous rage. For many years we slumbered, unsettled but still. Your coming has birthed us again.
We come for you, George. You wanted it so badly that you took it, and now you must face us. We are legion. There shall be a reckoning, George. Woe unto you because of it. As God is my witness, there shall be a reckoning.
DAVID BARSTOW
August 8, 2001
An engineer retrieved information last week from a computer in the Florida secretary of state's office.
An independent examination of four computers used by Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state, and her aides during last fall's presidential recount has found evidence that the machines were used more extensively than either Ms. Harris or her spokesman had acknowledged.
The examination, paid for by a group of news organizations including The New York Times, also found that some information had probably been permanently erased earlier this year after new operating systems were installed on three of the four computers, experts from Ontrack Data International Inc., a firm based in Minneapolis, said yesterday.
While finding "bits and pieces" of hundreds of partly deleted files, they said there was no way to know the full extent of the destruction. But they also said they had found no evidence that records had been systematically purged as part of an intentional effort to destroy election documents.
"If somebody did that, then it was a pretty poor attempt to cover their tracks," said Mike Rands, manager of operations for DataTrail, a division of Ontrack Data that specializes in data recovery and forensic computer examinations.
Indeed, the company's examination unearthed dozens of election- related documents that had never been released by Ms. Harris's office. Among other things, the examination showed that Ms. Harris's lawyers and aides used the machines to send and retrieve e-mail messages, conduct legal research via the Internet, prepare Ms. Harris for potential questions from reporters and even to hunt for snappy quotations for her speeches.
For months, Ms. Harris's lawyers have insisted that the computers had been used solely to write news releases.
Yesterday's findings contradicted several other statements issued by Ms. Harris's office about the computers, which were installed in a conference room just off her Tallahassee office. Her aides christened the conference room the "war room," and it served as the primary gathering spot where Ms. Harris and her senior advisers spent several tense weeks formulating decisions that helped shape the outcome of one of the closest presidential elections.
In response to requests by The Times to inspect the computers in March, Ms. Harris's aides initially said that any records related to the election had been "erased" when the machines were "reformatted" early this year. Weeks later, they produced about a dozen election documents from the computers, saying those were all that could be found after an extensive search by their own computer technicians. Ms. Harris's lawyers then denied subsequent requests to inspect the hard drives.
Ms. Harris reversed this position last month after The Times published the results of a six-month investigation into how the state handled overseas absentee ballots.
In its investigation, The Times found that two veteran Republican political consultants used the war room computers to write many of Ms. Harris's pronouncements during last fall's recounts. One of those statements appeared to liberalize the rules for counting overseas absentee ballots, a change that many Democrats viewed as a partisan gift to George W. Bush, who beat Vice President Al Gore by two to one among Florida's overseas voters.
The Times's investigation found that local canvassing boards counted 680 overseas ballots that failed to comply with state election laws, overwhelmingly in counties carried by Mr. Bush.
Ms. Harris, who served as a state co-chairwoman of Mr. Bush's campaign, has denied any effort to undermine Florida's rules on absentee ballots, saying all of her actions were "fair, consistent and evenhanded."
The records recovered from the war room hard drives by Ontrack Data shed no new light on the drafting of Ms. Harris's statement about overseas absentee ballots, but they do reflect the care with which her aides drafted and redrafted her public statements. And they show that far more records about the election remained in the hard drives than had been released by Ms. Harris's office.
Ms. Harris retained a computer expert, William Morgan, to examine the war room computers. That examination was conducted before Ontrack examined the hard drives, but Mr. Morgan's findings have not yet been released.
In a statement released last night, Ms. Harris said that the Ontrack findings proved that no records were destroyed and that "no partisan political activity transpired in my office during the recount."
Joe Klock, a Tallahassee lawyer whose firm has represented Ms. Harris's office since last fall, said that if any records were gone for good, it was probably the fault of human error, not any conspiracy.
"Frankly, how many people know that changing an operating system destroys records?" Mr. Klock said.
Several of the newly available documents, while not specifically related to the recounts, underscore Ms. Harris's political loyalties. One document, dated March 14, 2000, lists talking points for her to use while campaigning for Mr. Bush. Among them was "Your Quote : George W. Bush has proven in Texas that he can manage like an executive, govern across party lines, and lead with inclusiveness."
During the recounts, partisan praise reached Ms. Harris's top advisers in the war room. On Nov. 21, for example, Mr. Klock used one of the four computers to check his e- mail messages. Waiting for him was this compliment from William J. Flannery of Austin, Tex. : "I was gratified to see that Governor Bush's and Katherine Harris's interests were so well advanced in the Supreme Court of Florida."
Another person, whose identity could not be determined, accessed e- mail from the war room using an America Online account. The AOL sign-on , "GOPSPINNER," suggested a less than neutral outlook. The subject line for one message in GOPSPINNER's mailbox on Nov. 17 was "Harris Speech."
Kevin Bluml, a senior computer engineer for Ontrack, said Windows 98 was installed in one of the four computers on Jan. 8. Windows 95 was installed in a second war room computer on Jan. 18. That same day, Mr. Bluml said, Windows 98 was installed in a third computer.
It is not known what operating systems were replaced or why alterations were made to these computers at that particular time. No changes were made to the fourth computer.
The possibility that election records might have been destroyed is a particularly serious matter in Florida, a state with one of the country's toughest laws on public records. Public records there are defined broadly, encompassing everything from the briefest of e-mail messages to telephone message slips. Public officials who deliberately withhold or destroy such records can be prosecuted and fined.
When a new operating system is installed, Ontrack officials said, the computer in effect writes over portions of the hard drive, erasing data in the process. In the months since, as Ms. Harris's employees have created hundreds of new files on the new operating systems, still more old records have probably been written over, they said.
"Since they've been used for quite a while, there's a lot of potential for things to have gone away," Mr. Bluml said.
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