Low-Level Election Officials Are Under a Microscope, on a Treadmill

The only other time in her 32 years as Broward County election supervisor that Jane C. Carroll faced a hand recount was over a 1996 tie in a mayoral race in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, population 3,800. She wrapped that one up in a few days. The incumbent won by a single vote.

But Carroll didn’t have dueling former U.S. secretaries of State insisting the weight of the Republic rested on her shoulders. Or Tom Brokaw announcing on national television that she had lost ballots from nine precincts. (She hadn’t.)

She didn’t have hard-boiled Democratic operatives--Washington types who look albino-pale and awkward without their neckties in this vacation mecca--trashing her as if she were some sleazy influence-peddler trying to buy the next president.

After all, they whispered, how could Carroll, a lifelong Republican, be objective? She had donated $800 to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and she had given $50 to the state’s top Republican election official, Katherine Harris. “A whole $50,” Carroll said with a smirk. “Imagine that.” None of the 200 elections she has overseen “has ever been this bad.”

The 2000 presidential election could ultimately turn on the actions of a few Florida canvassing boards stocked with veterans like Carroll: low-level supervisors, county commissioners and judges, people who are used to spending their days mediating fights in family court, scolding drunken driving defendants and examining property setbacks.

Suddenly, they have been entrusted with some of the toughest decisions that have ever confronted elected officials anywhere, high or low. It is the stuff of American democracy--messy, unclear and petty--but in this case, the nation’s leadership hangs on it, and just about everyone is in their faces.

Do they understand Florida law? Are they articulate enough to explain in public what had been explained to them in private (endlessly, by advocates of Democratic nominee Al Gore or his GOP rival, George W. Bush)? Can they tell a chad from a dimple?

And as they face pressure that is sometimes brutal and sometimes nuanced, do they have the stamina to stick to their guns?

Walk into a cinder-block warehouse in Fort Lauderdale, and in separate corners, national Republican and Democratic operatives have set up camp. Republicans have appropriated a coffee machine, Democrats have a lock on the folding chairs.

Snaking their way between them, jostled by a pack of reporters, are the members of the Broward County canvassing board, two older women and a young male judge, weighted down by election books and briefcases, being tugged reluctantly into the pages of American electoral history.

It was Tuesday night, a week after the election, and the board’s three members were about to vote on whether to conduct hand recounts of three sample precincts--a minor chore that would produce major headaches. Everyone in the room wanted to offer his or her own opinion, whether the three board members wanted to hear them or not.

“This is really a war,” said Jim Scott, a former Fort Lauderdale Republican state senator. “We have to make sure the Democrats don’t try to steal this election.” He and his law partner, the local GOP leader, protested that Suzanne Gunzburger, one of the Democratic board members, had her own partisan lawyer sitting right next to her during the canvassing board’s meetings.

Why couldn’t Carroll have her own Republican attorney on hand? Scott protested.

“Look!” he said, pointing. “Gunzburger has her lawyer whispering to her the whole time!”

They are trying to be impartial, South Florida’s besieged election officials say, but instead of winning the nation’s thanks, they have spent the last week hanging up on death threats, taking legal papers from predawn process servers and listening to whispered threats that old allies may exact retribution if they don’t hew to the party line.

Broward County Democratic Judge Robert W. Lee, who turned on his party and voted against a manual recount and then reversed course two days later, came home to find he had threats on his answering machine.

Day after day in Palm Beach County, protesters have marched outside poor Theresa LePore’s office window, decrying the Democratic election official’s design of the infamous “butterfly ballot” that confused hundreds of elderly voters. “Jeb & LePore = Corruption,” one sign read, linking her with GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican presidential nominee.

“We’re acting like a lynch mob here,” said Anita Mitchell, a Republican lobbyist and LePore’s friend. “It’s barbaric.”

Two hours after Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts called for a recount of the county’s entire 460,000 votes, she came home to a dark house and 30 messages on her answering machine. “I hope you like your job,” one disembodied voice said, “because you won’t be around to like it much longer.”

Roberts, a loyal Democrat who said she was prepared to go to jail to uphold the right to conduct hand recounts, said of the pressure: “Having six kids is good preparation.”

Charles E. Burton, a Democrat on the Palm Beach board, said he has gone about his job with an eye on his role in history. Even though some Democrats accuse him of not backing the hand recount quickly enough because he was appointed by Jeb Bush, he can live with the whispers.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a judge,” Burton said, “but I just think that before you make a decision you have to have all the facts. It’s a little dangerous to step out and start proceeding in uncharted territory.”

In their own worlds, these South Florida election officials are people whose words are taken seriously. But this week, as Burton and fellow board members delivered their historic votes, they found themselves lectured to by national campaign operatives accustomed to having local officials do their bidding.

In the Fort Lauderdale warehouse where the election board met, a young Democratic lawyer from Washington talked into two cell phones simultaneously while several Boston operatives read documents over her shoulder. Nearby, Peter Ragone, a national party spokesman who has worked for Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo and New York Sen.-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton, said he was just in town to visit his parents--as he always does after an election.

But this election was not quite over. So Ragone was spending his waking hours spinning representatives of every major news organization in the country--not about some major candidate but endorsing the positions of a Broward County election official he had never met before.

In a neon-green corner of the warehouse, Republicans had set up a makeshift war room. Bush campaign spokesman Scott McClellan was working with pros from Ohio, New York, Texas and Washington. Nearby, Chris McNulty, a GOP political director from Ohio, sorted through his briefcase, which contained a Broward County map showing the location of every post office where overseas absentee ballots might be sent before being forwarded by Friday to Carroll’s office.

They were all there to keep tabs on the results and to ensure that the locals on their side had the resources they needed to do battle--and that none of them strayed from the reservation. But the locals themselves were not political naifs.

No one had to tell Myriam Lehr, an independent judge and member of the Miami-Dade County canvassing board, that the politically influential Cuban American community there is aligned behind candidate Bush. She also didn’t need to be reminded that she would need their support in her next election.

Still, politics was not part of her calculations, she insisted.

“I’m a judge, that’s how I think, and I don’t think the Democrats [met] their burden,” she said the day after turning down a Democratic request in Miami for a full manual vote recount.

An appointment as an election judge in Florida is no more prestigious than it is anywhere else in the country--a sort of booby prize of the political world. Lehr said she accepted her appointment only as a favor to her chief judge. She never expected it to land her in this caldron.

Burton was similarly caught off guard. He recalled the day in May when the senior judge told him he’d been appointed chairman of the Palm Beach canvassing board. It normally requires a long night once a year.

“It’s no big deal. Nothing ever happens,” the judge assured him.

Instead, for a solid week, he has had no time for his day job or his family. But even as he has skated through all the pressure, he still recognizes the weight of history.

*

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this story.