A coup is seldom successful without the use of force, plenty of which prevailed in Miami, the scene of riots after Elian Gonzales was taken away from ill-intentioned relatives. This is not a coincidence: many of the same people behind those violent events reappeared in November. The Miami-Dade county canvassing board, already among the most timid in South Florida, first decided to follow Broward and recount all votes. On November 22, they fretted on the limited time available and voted 2-1 to count only those ballots that machines saw no marks on. Republican “protesters” sensed blood and stormed the building, and tried to break down the door to the room of the planned recount. They even ruffled with police officers and beat up at least one Democratic official because what turned out to be a sample ballot protruded from his pocket. Then Hispanic radio stations urged 1000 listeners to march on the to join the riot. Justifiably fearing for themselves, the canvassing board abruptly altered the decision it made only hours earlier. It again voted 2-1, this time stopping all counting for good. Sympathizers of the protesters denied that anyone was threatened, even though the election supervisor said immediately after the second reversal: “If what I’d envisioned worked out and there were no objections, we’d be up there now counting.”

You may wonder why you have not heard about these events. Actually, a few reputable organizations including MSNBC and Time magazine offered coverage on the unruly crowds, curiously though only on the web. The rest of the media practically ignored them. Only when Joseph Lieberman called the demonstrations a “disservice to our democracy” and called on protesters to stop their bullying did these “reporters” perk up and pay lip service. But the damage was already done. Miami-Dade never resumed the count. The ultraconservative Wall Street Journal relished the “bourgeoisie riot,” a term coined by Paul Gigot, a weekly commentator on the NewsHour on PBS who also enthusiastically praised the riot as “spontaneous” among middle-class Americans. Welcome to conservative democracy.

Even the description of the protests as spontaneous was wrong. Journalists were initially perplexed by the tiny number who agreed to disclose their names despite the large number who wanted to be interviewed. ABC News confirmed that it was organized by 75 party supporters working from a motor home headquarters in Miami. GOP spokespeople admitted that over 750 activists had been sent to Florida. The “protesters” were aides and staff to such high-ranking officials as Trent Lott and Tom Delay. To see the physical intimidation for yourself, watch the ABC video.

The Bush camp, seeing rising number of votes for Gore, had begun to demean election workers. Despite the previously well-accepted method of manual recounts that accept dimples and chads, they claimed that not only were the counting standards dubious and arbitrary, but the vote-counters conspired to “invent votes.” Yet they provided no evidence of that besides the claim of arbitrariness. New York congressman John Sweeney led the riot crowd to cries of “Shut it down!” before election boards, but they refused to admit that they do not want to count votes.

Republicans ignored their own support for such counting in the past. In 1997, then-governor Bush signed into Texas law a provision that allowed candidates in close elections to challenge the results, and to receive a hand recount if so desired. But three years later, facing an unfriendly vote count, he did an about-face and promptly smeared his opponent. Ironically, while Bush and Baker became ever angrier at the count in Florida, officials in Tyler, Texas, held up ballots to light to discern voter intent in a dispute raised by a Republican candidate.

Republican operatives riot in front of Miami-Dade election board, forcing it to reverse its decision just hours before to re-count the votes.

Republicans also failed to mention their support for hand counts in other states. In New Mexico, where Gore’s lead of 10,000 votes on Election night was trimmed to as few as 4 at one point, the local Republican Party challenged the results, eerily citing “undervotes” in Roosevelt County and elsewhere. Hand recounts of 5566 ballots there revealed 533 that bore obvious voter intent. After meeting the challenges, the state decided on Nov. 30 to certify the results, claiming a Gore victory of 368 out of nearly 600,000. This incident knocks down Bush’s hypocrisy on not only hand recounts, but also on the need for quick resolution. If Gore should not challenge the results in Florida, why did he do so in New Mexico, where the results were not known for weeks, just as in Florida? If time is of essence, there was no reason to continue Oregon’s counting of mail-in ballots and the recount mandated by law. And he should have quickly conceded Iowa and Wisconsin, where he was behind by larger margins. In fact, back on Election night in 1960, Nixon was thought to have captured Hawaii, but subsequent recounts that lasted till December 28 finally revealed Kennedy to be the true winner. There is simply no basis for the argument for immediate resolution except to thwart the will of the people.

Conservatives further ignored the testimony of voting machines manufacturers, as well as the inventor of the now infamous Votomatic, all of whom favor manual counting as the most accurate. If this were not so, most American localities would not have chosen the former method as the basis in contested elections.

The debates in the aftermath of the election elicited other deeply contradictory rhetoric from the Bush camp. Besides appointing themselves the victor and leaking supposed discussions of cabinet preparations, Bush tried to discourage any contests to the dubious results. Yet he rushed to the courts a mere four days later to stop machine recounts. Even if election workers were biased, are the machines partisan as well? He sent in dozens of lawyers after amassing millions of new dollars from his rich and powerful friends. By the end of the month, the Bush team had filed twice as many lawsuits as Gore’s, not to mention raising twice as much money. Still, they were not satisfied, and launched a smear campaign, spearheaded by a former Secretary of State, James Baker. Like his counterpart in the state of Florida, Baker used his lawyers while charging Gore of muddling the issue and hiding behind the courts.

Even after the final U.S. Supreme Court decision, Bush led by just 537 votes. This could have been overturned if the law were respected: Broward’s recount, combined with Miami-Dade’s aborted efforts, uncovered a total of 398 votes for Gore. This would have reduced the deficit to 135.

The Republicans charged Democrats of excluding ballots from overseas military personnel, who sided with Bush more than Gore. Senators and governors appeared in the media with the likes of General Schwartzkopf with unsubstantiated claims. If anything, massive fraud lied behind the 115 disqualified votes. Overseas mail to Florida simply had no chance of bearing postmarks from the likes of California, along with overseas marks. Ballots were faxed in, dates and signatures were missing, and some were postmarked after Nov. 7. In any previous election, or elections elsewhere, they would have been thrown out. But in the year 2000, GOP operatives found the will to reinstate patently fraudulent ballots. In essence, Republican ballots that were at best incorrectly submitted should be counted, but those by Democrats must be thrown out. Faced with a barrage of claims and a media that curiously lacked investigative zeal, the Democrats gave up the fight. Had those fraudulent votes been thrown out, Gore would have led and won by 9 votes. That is not much, but it would have completely changed the landscape.

For Bush cried day and night for Gore to concede. When Gore phoned Bush to retract an earlier concession, the latter was incredulous and reminded the vice-president that his brother had told him of a victory in the Sunshine State. The supposedly liberal media were of no help. The New York Times published one article after another on supposed fractures in the Democratic rank-and-file, only to editorialize on the merits of Gore’s arguments later. Yet Bush never faced the pressure. He was not expected to give up the fight. In fact there was no discussion of such a scenario on prime time television or front pages of papers. Baker and others filed one appeal after another in the 11th Appeals Court and in Florida courts when faced with unfavorable rulings, even while attacking Gore for dragging out the affair, as if they allowed it to end.

Bush was prepared to employ all means necessary to secure a bedroom in the White House. Newspapers soon revealed his strategy in case Gore won the electoral vote while Bush won the popularity contest, as many people expected (others decided Gore would lose both counts). As the New York Times and others soon reported, Bush’s helpers, including Karl Rove, decided to launch massive protests (aka. a coup) on the charge that Gore was violating the will of the people. Leaving aside the fact that the rule has been followed for more than two centuries, neither Republicans nor Democrats ever challenged the practice during the campaign. Yet once Cheney and Baker learned that they had lost the popular vote, but led in the electoral count through the help of the Florida’s Secretary of State, they had no qualms about seizing the mantle of the presidency.

More fraud surfaced when Seminole County board supervisor, a Republican, admitted under oath that she allowed GOP workers to enter and use the board’s preparation facility to “correct” thousands of ballot applications that the GOP misprinted. Despite her refusal to do the same for Democrats, she allowed those workers to operate unmonitored in a room with computers and other vote applications, though she claimed the cabinets were locked and computers secured. The Republicans thought of such actions as a “hyper-technicality,” which when used by President Clinton drew much disgust.

Al Gore Takes the oath of office in 1992.

However, Seminole’s neighbor, Martin County, reigned on top of the corruption Ferris wheel. The supervisor there, again a Republican, allowed campaign workers to “correct” absentee ballot applications that were wrongly or not entirely filled out by potential voters. Republicans again defended the illegal favoritism, underlining their unspoken rule: when Democratic voters go to vote, the results will not count even if wrongly designed ballots confused election workers and voters alike, and even if the voting machines do not work. But when Republicans stay home and make mistakes, others will help them out.

A total of more than ten thousand absentee ballots were cast in the two counties, among which at least a thousand were altered. So the lead that Bush sustained was moot. Unfortunately, even the Florida Supreme Court dared not disqualify the illegal votes. The media had raised the dubious point that disqualification of these or the “military” votes would have undermined the Democratic argument that all votes should count. This reasoning is childish, because nobody ever implied that votes cast illegally, and probably in forgery, should count.

Conservatives delighted at a Miami Herald report that hundreds of ballots were cast by people it identified as felons. Democrats cannot be trusted, they imply, and will break the law. Unfortunately, they forgot their own argument for ending the election quickly: mistakes do happen. They ignored the thousands of lawful voters who had their eligibility revoked because of a shady company. Indeed, ChoicePoint, a company with strong Republican ties, supplied counties in Florida with 173,000 names of supposed felons who have no right to vote (whether it is fair to disenfranchise millions of Americans for sometimes minor crimes is another question). Its record is stupefying. Earlier last year, the state of Florida received 8,000 names, but found that every one of those had committed only misdemeanors. Not a single person on that list had committed any crime. So it reinstated those people.

Painfully, many counties accepted the lists they receive at face value. Many did not even notify the people who were affected. And some feared the Florida law that required counties to purge voter registries with state-supplied lists. The seeming lack of protests is not proof of the lack of a problem. Most people probably assumed that when election workers tell them their history disqualifies them, there is no recourse. The few who remained unsatisfied can hardly band together since they did not hear about black lists, and almost no one ever sues for one vote. In fact, as many as 15% of the lists turn out to be wrong when the counties do check the correctness, and some names are 20 years old.

Surely enough, ChoicePoint blamed none other than the state of Texas for the completely wrong list it submitted to Florida, and it was Ms Harris who approved the contract with ChoicePoint, a $4 million dollar deal that looks like a big bargain at hindsight.

Many a conservative cried foul over the calling of Florida for Gore on Election Night, before many polls in the West had closed. They point to extremely close races in the likes of Iowa, Michigan, and Washington to argue that the dampening effect on Republican voters there probably handed some congressional seats to Democrats, besides allowing Gore to win more states than he otherwise could. But if potential votes in those states qualify for grievances, then so should the 27,000 disqualified ballots in Duval County, where the actual ballot differed from published samples. That amounted to 9% of votes cast, and shows outrageous disrespect for voters. Among those, 12,000 originated from less than a third of the counties, which Gore happen to carry by large margins due to the African-American community. In Palm Beach County, almost ten times as many votes were cast for Buchanan than the number of registered Reform Party members, mostly from ethnic groups that Buchanan despises. 19,000 were invalidated as undervotes, and 10,000 more as overvotes.

And astonishingly, Nassau county election board threw out nearly 51 votes recovered by a machine recount after the initial count. Its sole rationale was that the initial vote count was more accurate. No evidence was presented.

Looming in the background was the Supreme Court. Rhenquist was an anti-civil-rights lawyer in the late 50’s to early 60’s He, with Scalia and Thomas, voted in the last few years that people cannot sue state governments in federal courts for age discrimination (how’s “equal protection” for those?) They decided that women cannot sue their attackers in gender crimes for civil right abuse even though virtually all states had no objections. They decided that neither age nor sex discrimination is a basis for suing in federal courts, but when a state court tried to ensure that votes are counted, this same majority had the gall to write that “a desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees.” They claimed that there is no time for recounts, yet they blocked time and again any recounts that were being conducted. Of course there was no time now, they blocked it again and again, never letting it take place! Scalia wrote that the legitimacy of the presidency would be undermined by a recount. How is that possible, unless he assumes the younger Bush is already the commander-in-chief? Legitimacy can be undermined only if the results of the election shows that Bush received less votes in Florida than Gore, but if that is the case, then Bush should not occupy the White House in the first case! Instead of finding out a legitimate mandate, the majority in the Supreme Court, consisting of the likes of Scalia and O’Connor who are known to be delaying their retirement in the hope of having a conservative successor, made their best prejudiced guess. No wonder Christie Whitman proposed to ban access to the ballots for ten years. Once stolen, illegitimacy must be hidden.

Democracy has weaker roots in the United States than most people think. Joseph Klock, attorney for Katherine Harris, explained to the Supreme Court that “the legislature has allowed the people to make that choice [of voting for a slate of electors],” and thus it can eliminate the right by selecting its own slate of electors. Can a true democrat believe that whether a citizen has the right to vote and have the vote counted can be denied by a partisan and ideological interpretation of the Constitution? According to Klock and the Republican party in Florida, U.S. citizens in the 21st century still speak through state legislatures. Even before the Supreme Court issued any final rulings, Gov. Jeb Bush opened a special session of the Florida legislature, in a move that is opposed by all but two Democratic members. They sought to select their own slate of electors in the name of preventing the disenfranchisement of millions of voters there. Yet how are Gore supporters protected under such a plan? If this overt oppression of the popular will took place in another country, with the brother of a candidate opening a special session to secure votes for that candidate, it will be known as a coup d’etat. But it seems necessary when residency is decided in Florida. 

The media certainly wounded Gore more than any of his opponents. While releasing poll after poll that showed wide swings in support for a clear resolution, journalists injected unprecedented bias by focusing only on dubious numbers that supposedly showed that Americans wanted the affair to end, even though most of them also claim to be patient in waiting. Reporters ignored the simple fact that almost no one wants to have a prolonged election for obvious reasons, but that does not mean the lack of patience. A “crisis” was declared by pundits, so much so that some reporters decided to do stories on whether the word was being overused.

On Nov. 9, Salon.com reported that several overseas residents working in military bases reported that their Republican colleagues received two ballots that look nothing different. Supposedly, one is a sample, but the recipients saw no difference. To be safe (or worse), they sent in both. Democrats were not so fortunate.
Bush joked during the closing statements of a presidential debate, no doubt to waste time. In the last televised encounter before the election, Bush said, “If you support my opponent, please don’t vote twice.” Five Supreme Court justices apparently did not pay attention.

Or maybe they didn’t get the joke. They, too, got a second ballot.