Harris, Katherine
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rob ref thom on written ballots were declared spoiled?
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wapo 2020
katherine Harris was ready for her close-up.
It was two days after the 2000 election between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore broke down in Florida gridlock.
As Florida’s secretary of state and the person responsible for the votes about to be recounted, the wealthy socialite stepped up to the microphone with the world watching.
“She knew so little about the law that she answered few questions,” wrote legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in “Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election.”
With little of substance to make headlines, the focus turned to her appearance, and her heavy makeup was immediately lampooned that weekend on “Saturday Night Live.”
The night the Supreme Court settled a presidential election, declaring George W. Bush the winner
“I think the makeup was almost like armor,” said actress Laura Dern, who won a Golden Globe for playing Harris in “Recount,” an HBO movie. “But it was so extreme, as we all can reflect.”
With President Trump demanding a recount in Wisconsin and Georgia announcing Friday it will launch a recount of its results, memories of the chaotic Florida effort overseen by Harris two decades ago are flooding back.
The 2000 recount drama in Florida featured a cast of characters and power players almost unparalleled in American politics.
There was former secretary of state James Baker, Bush’s point man on the recount. (The British actor Tom Wilkinson played him in “Recount.”) There was Washington fixer Ron Klain, who was Gore’s point man. (Kevin Spacey played him.) There was Jeb Bush, George’s brother, who was also conveniently the governor of Florida.
And then there were the bit players who would later emerge on the big stage of public life.
John G. Roberts Jr., then working as a Bush attorney, became chief justice of the United States of America. Amy Coney Barrett, then just out of law school and also working for Bush, just joined the Supreme Court, right behind another Bush legal aide back then, Brett M. Kavanaugh. Ted Cruz, now a U.S. senator from Texas, was also part of the Bush legal team.
Judge Robert Rosenberg, a Broward County canvassing board member, uses a magnifying glass to examine a disputed ballot during the Florida recount in 2000. (Alan Diaz/AP)
‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami
But nobody captured the surreal nature of the recount — and, in general, the peculiarity of Florida — quite like Harris.
“Harris is as close to royalty as they come around here,” wrote Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia. “Her granddaddy, Ben Hill Griffin, was one of those prototypical Florida tycoons whose endless orange groves and cattle ranches produced one of the state’s great fortunes.”
Already rich, Harris married a succession of businessmen, worked in the local arts scene, and then successfully ran for state senator.
“Her one-term legislative career was marked principally by her effort to find a higher office to seek in 1998,” Toobin wrote.
Which was secretary of state, a position she won and then later used to travel around the world seeking business deals for Florida.
But Harris did have a plan in mind, according to Toobin’s book — leverage her international connections and close ties to Jeb Bush into an ambassadorship in a George W. Bush presidential administration, though she has denied that was her aim.
She openly supported Bush and campaigned for him with Jeb, including during the winter in New Hampshire.
“A fourth-generation Floridian, Harris neglected to wear socks and nearly got frostbite,” Toobin wrote.
On election night, Harris went to bed like much of the country thinking Bush had won the election. But in the middle of the night, as Gore rescinded his concession to Bush after the Florida vote totals unexpectedly tightened, Harris was awakened by a phone call around 4 a.m. from Bush’s campaign manager and Jeb Bush.
Harris was confused, but she quickly got dressed and raced to her office.
Like secretaries of state before her, Harris had paid little attention to the job of running elections, leaving that to career bureaucrats.
Harris, who was clearly on the side of both Bush brothers, made several key decisions in favor of the Texas governor, including certifying the election votes — in his favor. Gore sued to force a recount but later lost. After the Florida Supreme Court overturned that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to halt any recount.
Bush became president.
Harris became a celebrity.
“People gawk when she passes by,” Roig-Franzia wrote in The Post. “They lean across restaurant tables, pointing.”
Of course, some of those people pointing had voted for Gore.
“There is absolutely no middle ground with Katherine Harris,” Roig-Franzia wrote. “People love her or they hate her.”
The woman later called “the Richard Nixon of Florida politics” used her fame to win a seat in Congress. She ran for the U.S. Senate in 2005 but lost, later retiring from public life.
This year’s election, and its razor-thin margins in several states, has put her in the public eye again, with recent appearances on Florida and national TV news broadcasts.
Harris has stressed the importance of patience while awaiting results.
“When you are an elected official,” she told one Florida news station, “you take a vow to follow the law.”
Read more Retropolis:
‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami
The night the Supreme Court settled a presidential election, declaring George W. Bush the winner
An Election Day history lesson: Americans often waited days or weeks for the outcome
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dominionism?
For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these "demonic forces." This has real world consequences.
In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against "principalities and powers," which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played "ballot bowling" in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.
In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, another Dominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/4/8954/17253
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an 1 24 no lnx
The 56-year-long crisis of treasonous & illegitimate GOP presidents is happening again
Thom Hartmann
January 27, 2024
Once again, America and the world are watching with horror as a Republican candidate for president — just to win an election — manipulates world affairs in a way that will cause widespread death and destruction while damaging the interests and reputation of America.
There’s a long tradition of Republicans running for president committing what can best called treason, or at least criminal manipulation of international affairs, to advantage themselves and hurt incumbent Democratic presidents.
Yesterday, Mitch McConnell let the proverbial cat out of the bag. A bipartisan group of senators had been working on a bill to provide funding to Ukraine and Israel, with money for the southern border, and when it looked like they were going to produce something that would actually pass the House and Senate, Donald Trump inserted himself, telling the Republicans they should kill the bill.
Trump apparently wants to run on chaos at the border, and solving the problem as this legislation is intended to do would take that issue away from him. But he’s also explicitly opposed to any further US aid to Ukraine. This is a treasonous twofer, putting Trump’s election above the interests of the United States and world peace.
Trump, of course, knows that if it weren’t for Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, he never would have been president. And he desperately needs a repeat to hold onto his fortune and stay out of jail: he’s in a far greater bind now than when he first ran for president as a hustle to get GE to pay him more for his TV show.
His 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, admitted that during that election he was handing secret internal campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook, an effort that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states.
Now, Trump wants Putin’s help again for 2024. He knows that Putin can do things from overseas, including using deepfakes and posing as Americans to spread explicit lies on social media, that would send people to prison for election interference if done here in the US.
Putin’s number one goal, of course, is to seize control of Ukraine while destabilizing western democracies. So, Trump, wanting Putin’s help, is now trying to deliver Ukraine to Putin by killing US aid.
This pattern of Republican presidential candidates criminally intervening in foreign policy just to win elections started in 1968 and has been a feature — not a bug — of every Republican president who succeeded in taking the White House since: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.
It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.
Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that that fall.
But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.
Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.
The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.
Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.
In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”
But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.
An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.
Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.
Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.
Next up was Ronald Reagan.
During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President of Iran that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:
“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”
Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.
But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.
This is the story that was finally confirmed just last year with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom, including the lieutenant governor of Texas.
This was the second modern-day act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.
The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “Iran/Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.
As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.
“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.
The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.
Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran/Contra” scandal.
But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. Which is one reason Bush Jr. and Trump believed they could get away with anything.
After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.
The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.
And Walsh was now looking into actual criminal activity by Bush himself in support of the Iran/Contra October Surprise.
Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation and protect himself, which Bush did.
The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, AVERTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”
And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.
Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.
In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:
“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”
Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.
And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busily accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.
As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:
“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”
That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.
To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.
The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency.
Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election but then — when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won — she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”
As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:
“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.
“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”
George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million nationwide) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.
Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.
The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.
So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.
To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.
Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.
“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.
“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.’”
Bush lying us into that war was an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.
But it did what it was supposed to do: it got Bush re-elected in 2004.
Which brings us to this year’s election.
In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.
Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.
It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring Trump a “Russian asset.”
It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, as mentioned, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.
And now Trump is trying to exacerbate a crisis on our southern border and screw Ukraine in a way that will lead to mass causalities and disrupt the international order — all to give Putin what he wants — the same way Nixon used Vietnam, Reagan used Iran, and Bush used Iraq, just to win a damn election.
While we can’t rewrite history, at least we can try to prevent it from being repeated. Call your members of Congress — your representative and both your senators — and let them know if you agree that Ukraine aid and resolving the issue at the southern border shouldn’t be held hostage to Trump’s need for Putin’s help and approval.
The number for the congressional switchboard is: 202-224-3121.
It’s way past time that America ceased to be the dog wagged by the tail of corrupt Republicans who want to be president.
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Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential ...
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (.gov)
https://www.usccr.gov › vote2000 › report › exesum](https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm)
Addressing voting rights issues has been a core responsibility for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights since the Commission was founded in 1957. The Commission ...
How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of ...
The Nation
https://www.thenation.com › Article](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/)
Jul 28, 2015 — Before the election, Florida sent its county election supervisors a list of 58,000 alleged felons to purge from the voting rolls. Florida was ...
Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program
Salon.com
https://www.salon.com › ... › Gregory Palast's Articles](https://www.salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/)
Dec 4, 2000 — Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, ...
[### Florida Still Using an Old Katherine Harris Trick to Purge ...
Greg Palast
https://www.gregpalast.com › floridas-still-using-an-old...](https://www.gregpalast.com/floridas-still-using-an-old-kathrine-harris-trick-to-purge-black-voters/)
Aug 29, 2018 — Florida's up to its old tricks again, using dubious lists of felons and computers that come up with criminal mismatches to rob votes from ...
[### Florida's 'Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP
The Nation
https://www.thenation.com › Article](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/floridas-disappeared-voters-disfranchised-gop/)
Jan 18, 2001 — According to an April 2, 2001, MSNBC report, Florida state officials have "quietly changed" the policy that purged eligible voters from its ...
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http://www.nndb.com/org/664/000167163/
pals
http://www.nndb.com/people/067/000038950/
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Katherine Harris' Campaign Finance Scandals
He was retained in 2006 by Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) to help her deal with campaign finance scandals related to her 2006 U.S. Senate bid. [8]
ginsberg lawyer
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When Revenue Streams Collide
WorldNetDaily's news coverage of Katherine Harris won't get in the way of selling her WND-published book.
:{By Terry Krepel
:{}_Posted 10/15/2002
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WorldNetDaily doesn't make much, if any, money from its news operation -- as a general rule, news operations by themselves aren't revenue generators. Indeed, CEO Joseph Farah has said that the vast majority of WND's revenue comes from the sale of books and videos through the site.
Thus, WND has taken the monetarily logical next step: publishing its own books in a joint venture with religious book firm Thomas Nelson Publishers. Its first title is a book by former Florida secretary of state and current Florida congressional candidate Katherine Harris, "Center of the Storm."
Released last month for sale on the WND web site and last week in general nationwide release, WND has been plugging the heck out of it -- teasing the book's release (including the spectacle of Farah blathering that "This book is certain to be a collector's item for many reasons"), bombarding the members of its mailing list with solicitations, running book excerpts, detailing Harris' media appearances plugging the book. WND has even touted the book's performance on Amazon.com's sales chart, but unlike a certain other conservative news site, WND can point to media appearances by Harris that boosted Amazon sales and notes that its own store sells the book cheaper.
All of these articles are set up to look like WND news stories and appeared on WND's news pages. As one might expect, they are pure PR -- lots of fawning over Harris and her achievements, nothing critical anywhere.
In the midst of this PR campaign, WND has also been reporting a little actual news on Harris' congressional race. And, also as one might expect, they look a lot like the PR pieces -- lots of fawning, nothing remotely critical. The news and PR are so indistingushable from each other, in fact, that WND might want to double-check those election laws on corporate support for federal candidates.
For instance, an Aug. 30 story purports to counter the alleged "spin" given by other media outlets to certain revelations in Harris' book -- this, like all the Harris stories, is unbylined -- but reads like a editorial defending its investment. It concludes: "Democrats maintain that Gore would have triumphed in a statewide recount. Perhaps the reality – evidenced by Gore's attempt to block the steps necessary to get a statewide recount by stalling the certification – is quite the opposite."
A Sept. 18 story touts Harris' primary victory but also glosses over one major controversy surrounding her candidacy -- whether she should even legally be on the ballot in the first place. WND dismisses it in two paragraphs, noting only in passing that her challenger in the Republican primary filed suit, contending "that Harris had failed to properly qualify as a congressional candidate by not resigning on time as Florida's secretary of state ..." Other news organizations, however, covered this issue and its Torricelli-esque implications much more thoroughly. Other WND stories tout comments about Harris' predicted victory and try to smear her Democratic opponent, Jan Schneider, for the horrible act of accepting money from Hillary Clinton's PAC without bothering to detail the sources of Harris' campaign cash.
Why bother pointing all this out? Because WorldNetDaily has tried to cultivate a reputation of being somehow "better" than other media outlets -- "fiercely independent" and all that. This may come as a surprise to Joseph Farah, but "fiercely independent" news sites don't slant supposedly objective news coverage to sell books in the manner WND has with its Harris coverage.
Then again, we've come to expect this kind of behavior from WND. Jesse Lee Peterson, for instance, gets similarly fawning coverage; he also works for WND's speakers bureau. And WND ignores allegations of distortions and misstatements in books by Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity as it sells autographed copies of said books.
On the other hand, it kinda sorta attempted some balance in another issue it has a financial interest in. It ran columnist/Fox News Channel talking head Bill O'Reilly's defense of how he handled a heavily monitored visit between Pat Roush and the daughters her ex-husband fled with to Saudi Arabia 16 years ago. O'Reilly's now-syndicated column began at WND -- which is also preparing to pubish a book by Roush on her crusade to hold someone accountable for what happened, to which WND has devoted several articles as well as creating a "support group" for people "who would like to keep up with the latest in Roush's battle, or to send her a message of encouragement, or to offer help in some way." Roush got to write her own version of the O'Reilly event that is highly critical of him, and WND linked to outside writings that were similarily critical, such as one at National Review Online.
It looks, however, like potential future revenue may be trumping past loyalty. Farah spends his Oct. 14 column denouncing O'Reilly for supporting adoption by homosexuals.
So WND has some of that old fighting spirit around after all. Just don't count on them to use it to provide any sort of balanced coverage of Katherine Harris' campaign (like her refusal to debate her opponent). It might cut into book sales. Can't have that.
The "mainstream" media has learned painful lessons about mixing advertising with news, most recently in the Los Angeles Times-Staples Center controversy. If WorldNetDaily is really so "fiercely independent" and cares about journalism as much as it says it does, it should be worried about its reputation as a news outlet if it continues to use of its news pages to aggressively push people and issues it has a financial interest in.
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2002/wndharris.html
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vanity fair
At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker.“Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, thatwas cool.”
Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.
As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.
By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”
Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:
“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”
“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.
Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him. “Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”
Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.
Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections) [who changed her registration to Republican after the 2000 election, and was defeated in her last re-election bid] in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch.
Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole,however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.}:
Klain and Baldick soon learned of other irregularities. In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?
:{None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles–based lawyer in private practice.
Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.}:
By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, another ex–secretary of state, dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”
Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.
While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.
:{According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call[[1]](http://makethemaccountable.com/articles/The_Path_To_Florida.htm#_ftn1),
Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”}:
In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.
In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. Stipanovich appealed to Harris’s grandiosity. (Her e-mails replying to Bush supporters later revealed that she had begun identifying with Queen Esther, who, in the Old Testament, saved the Jews from genocide. “My sister and I prayed for full armour this morning,” she wrote. “Queen Esther has been a wonderful role model.”) He told her that nothing less than the course of history rested on her shoulders. “You have to bring this election in for a landing,” he repeated again and again.
Later, Stipanovich, in an interview with documentary-film maker Fred Silverman, would proudly describe his routine, which began two days after the election and continued throughout the aftermath. “I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators,” he said, “and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.”
On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent.
At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?
In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.
Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.
At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.
That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)
:{Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, then 48, a widely respected jurist who in his leisure time played pickup basketball and wrote legal thrillers, rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount.
Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27.}:
James Baker, the Bush team’s consigliere,issued a public threat after the Florida Supreme Court’s maddening decision. If necessary, he implied, Florida’s leading Republican legislator, incoming House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November 21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush—no matter what. Since both the state House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could pass a bill to do that.
In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”
On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Postwould note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers.
Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do with the protest, only with the realization that the job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline of November 26. Yet the board had seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred within hours of the protest.
For all the tumult in Miami-Dade, both sides had realized that the presidency might well be determined not by hanging chads or overvotes but by absentee ballots. Republicans seethed with rumors of ballots by the bagful coming in from Israel—all, presumably, from Jewish Democrats. Democrats envisioned thousands of ballots coming in from military bases abroad—all, presumably, from Bush fans in uniform.
Katherine Harris sowed confusion by issuing her own modification of the Florida law that specified absentee ballots could be accepted up to 10 days after a general election—in this case November 17—as long as they were sent from abroad and postmarked by Election Day. “They are not required,” Harris declared, “to be postmarked on or prior” to Election Day. Apparently, Stipanovich had decided there were more Bush votes than Gore votes to be harvested among the absentees, especially in the military.