A Tempest to the End for Battered Palm Beach

With the clock ticking toward a 5 p.m. deadline, the slow but orderly ballot count of the Palm Beach County canvassing board suddenly became, in its final hour, a mad dash to the finish.

With the presidency of the United States hanging in the balance, county firefighters and public works employees were pressed into service. The fate of the election was in the hands of men with “Fire Rescue” patches emblazoned on their shoulders. Attorneys scrambled about, trying to observe a rule against loud talking by signaling to each other with snapping fingers.

“Let’s not argue,” Commissioner Carol Roberts said testily as lawyers maneuvered around her. “I want to get this done.”

It was a fitting end to an often chaotic week of hand recounts of ballots in three South Florida counties, a week that had seen “mobs” beating doors and the serenity of courtrooms shattered by the raised voices of outraged party lawyers.

After more than 100 million votes cast in 50 states, from small prairie towns to big-city precincts, the election to pick the first president of the new millennium had come down to this: the final 1,000 or so votes, lined up neatly inside a pair of gray metal boxes in the emergency operations center here, waiting to be tallied.

In the final analysis, they were not counted. Or rather, they were not counted in a time and fashion that satisfied Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The board asked Harris for extra time to count the ballots, but she replied that she could not alter the 5 p.m. EST deadline imposed by the Florida Supreme Court.

The three members of the canvassing board could tell time was slipping away, and 90 minutes before the deadline, they huddled privately with Republican and Democratic attorneys in a corner of the counting room. This prompted Rep. Peter Deutsch (D-Fla.) and several reporters to shout, “That’s illegal! This is a public meeting!”

The corner meeting broke up after a few moments without explanation. But later, it became clear that the board had decided that it would be impossible to count all the ballots and that it would have to submit partial returns.

About an hour later, at 4:26 p.m., the counting stopped so that the paperwork could be prepared and faxed to Tallahassee.

“The secretary of state has apparently decided to shut us down,” county Judge Charles Burton told reporters.

Thus ended a day that was centered, appropriately, in a concrete bunker built by Palm Beach County to withstand hurricanes. This time, the swirling currents were political, although they came with a gale force all their own.

There were lawyers everywhere--many, many lawyers--huddling in small groups, deigning interviews, discussing strategy, making secret tallies of the vote that they shared with friendly reporters.

“We’ve got Gore up by 180,” one of the attorneys said just outside the counting room. At just that moment, two rooms away, two members of the canvassing board were standing over a fax machine sending an incomplete tally to Tallahassee.

Politicians milled about everywhere, at least a score of them, ranging from state legislators to U.S. senators. Like moths drawn to a light, they gravitated toward the clusters of media microphones assembled outside. A few even took their own turns at the counting table, squinting at pregnant chads.

“Time after time, when there were dimpled chads, they [the board] were rejecting them,” said Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of the elected officials who spent time at the counting table. “There are hundreds of votes not being counted.”

In the final hour, the serene, gray figure of Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) could be seen in the counting room too, sitting two rows up in the amphitheater-like setting.

Outside, New York Gov. George Pataki crossed paths with his occasional nemesis, the firebrand Rev. Al Sharpton.

“Keep the Sabbath holy and count all the votes,” Sharpton called out to the governor, who responded with a perfunctory wave back.

Nearby, about 400 protesters amassed, an overwhelmingly GOP crowd that included many families with small children.

The demonstrations here Sunday provided further evidence of one of the more surprising developments here in the 19 days following the election: the Republicans’ victory in the battle for the streets.

Lobbyists have been the shock troops of the GOP activist army here, people such as Andy Anderson, director of an Oregon farm lobbying group. At first, the party summoned him to South Florida to be a Republican monitor of the recount in Broward County. When his work was done there, he spent the better part of a week drifting from one South Florida demonstration to the next.

“It’s kind of an anxious time,” Anderson said outside the Palm Beach County operation center, under a blistering sun, his complexion turning even pinker than it was already. “While you were here, you felt you were having an impact, making a difference. Now it’s up to the lawyers.”

Earlier in the controversy, it was the Democrats who controlled the streets. Not far from the site of Sunday’s recount, in downtown West Palm Beach, Gore supporters had struck the first public blow. On the morning after the election, hundreds of demonstrators, including Holocaust survivors with concentration camp tattoos, said they were furious because they had mistakenly voted for conservative Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.

By Sunday, the Holocaust survivors had been replaced by military veterans, such as David Taylor, a former Marine Corps pilot and Bush supporter, furious because absentee ballots from military personnel had been tossed out for irregularities.

Angry though he was, Taylor didn’t plan on staying long. “This is for crazy people,” he said as a group of dogs barked nearby--a Palm Beach County sheriff’s K-9 unit.

The police kept everything under control, and the dogs were not needed. Things didn’t go so smoothly inside, especially with the very last act of the county’s official recount: the fax transmission of the numbers to Tallahassee.

They were sent to the state Capitol the same way they were presented to reporters--as a mixed-up, hard-to-decipher spreadsheet that combined finished and unfinished precincts. When state officials faxed back a confirmation letter, the county’s fax machine jammed.

The recounts had thrust a half-dozen low-level officials and judges into an international spotlight, people such as Judge Robert Rosenberg, who, with his canvassing board colleagues, wrapped up counting neighboring Broward County shortly before midnight Saturday.

“I can’t see. I’m tired,” he told reporters afterward. “I’d like to go back to being anonymous.”

Another man in the media spotlight was Burton, a suntanned man with a Boston accent who had spent most of the week counting ballots with the patient nonchalance of a Vegas poker dealer.

By Sunday, he wasn’t looking so calm after working through the night--with just 90 minutes of sleep--in the fruitless attempt to finish the last batch of 8,000 disputed ballots.

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Heavy Hitters

Democratic and Republican officials and activists from across the country have descended on Florida to observe recounts, speak with the media or advise the campaigns. Here is a partial list:

REPUBLICANS

Governors

* John Engler of Michigan

* James S. Gilmore of Virginia

* William Janklow of South Dakota

* Frank Keating of Oklahoma

* George Pataki of New York

* Marc Racicot of Montana

* Christine Todd Whitman

of New Jersey

Senators

* Bob Dole (former senator

from Kansas)

* Bill Frist of Tennessee

* Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas

* Richard G. Lugar of Indiana

Congressmen

* Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas

* Jack Kingston of Georgia

* Rob Portman of Ohio

* Christopher Shays of Connecticut

DEMOCRATS

Activists

* Rev. Jesse Jackson

* Rev. Al Sharpton

Members of Congress

* Peter Deutsch of Florida

* Eleanor Holmes Norton of

the District of Columbia

* Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts

* Carrie P. Meek of Florida

* Robert Menendez of New Jersey

* Jerrold Nadler of New York