11/29/00 9:30 a.m.
The Disinformation Campaign
‘Penny-loafer protesters’ didn’t cow Miami-Dade officials.

By William P. Kucewicz, editor of GeoInvestor.com and a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board

eam Gore is waging a disinformation campaign worthy of the KGB. During the Cold War, Soviet intelligence regularly planted erroneous information about the United States in communist propaganda organs around the globe. The aim was literally to create a story — to manufacture news that had little or no basis in fact — in order to taint America in the eyes of the world. Now, Americans (and the world) are being treated to an equally fraudulent disinformation campaign by the Gore-Lieberman do-whatever-it-takes, plow-through-to-victory team.

The Gore camp would have us — and presumably Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls — believe, in the words of the vice president himself, that election officials in Miami-Dade County "brought the [ballot] count to a premature end in the face of organized intimidation," resulting in an "inaccurate and incomplete count" of the presidential election results in Florida. Joseph Lieberman called it "the rule of the mob," and Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) decried a "Republican riot" that "shook the foundations of democracy."

Each was referring to last Wednesday's demonstration by up-in-arms protesters inside the Miami-Dade County Hall chanting sixties' style slogans and pounding on a rattling set of double metal doors behind which the county canvassing board was trying to count ballots.

Canvasser: 'I Was Not Intimidated'
The Gore complaint contesting the Florida election, filed Monday with the circuit court in Leon County, contends:

28. Beginning November 22, Republican and other supporters of George Bush launched a campaign of personal attacks upon Canvassing Board members and election personnel. The November 24, 2000 New York Times reported:

"Upstairs in the Clark Center (where votes were being counted), several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff's deputies restores [sic] order. When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off (sic) the hand counting.''

29. Some news reports described the protests as a "near riot.'' The New York Times also reported on November 24, 2000: "One nonpartisan member of the Board, David Leahy, the supervisor of elections, said after the vote that the protests were one factor that he had weighed in his decision.''

30. Following a lunch break on November 23, and without notice of the intention to consider the issue, the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board announced it would cease all manual counts. The reason for the decision was that it was not possible to complete a full manual count of all ballots by the 5 p.m., Sunday, November 26, 2000 deadline for amending certifications. . . .

35. If the uncounted ballots of Miami-Dade County are counted, it will show that a person other than the candidate certified by the Elections Canvassing Commission as the winner of Florida's presidential election was duly elected.

Funny thing is, Elections Supervisor Leahy has told anyone who has cared to listen that "I was not intimidated" by the demonstrators inside the Miami-Dade County Hall. He also has emphatically and repeatedly denied the New York Times account that quoted him as saying the protests had influenced his vote to call off the recount.

Yet famed lead counsel David Boies and the rest of Gore's high-priced lawyers somehow missed Leahy's denials of the New York Times story. What else other than an amazing oversight could explain the omission of Leahy's record-correcting comments from the Gore complaint before the circuit court?

Meanwhile, Team Gore continues to foist the notion of Republican intimidation of Florida election officials on a nation already numbed by this year's post-election mess. The question remains, however: What really happened in the Miami-Dade County Hall last week?

Counting Behind Closed Doors
According to news reports, the Miami-Dade canvassing board realized early on that it would be a Herculean task to hand count the county's more than 635,000 ballots by the 5 p.m. Sunday deadline set by the Florida supreme court. It then hit on the idea of divvying up the ballots. The board decided to let the counters on the 18th floor handle the vast majority, while its three members retired to a smaller room on the floor above to review in private some 10,700 ballots that hadn't registered any votes for president when counted by machine.

The no-vote ballots (which are now a primary focus of Gore's request for judicial relief) were lugged upstairs and the board set to work — that is until the media and outside observers in the building got wind of the canvassing board's decision. Then the wheels came off.

The board's action quickly became a cause célèbre within County Hall. The first complaints were lodged by the news media, which wanted their cameras and reporters in the room. These protests were followed by the outbursts of a couple dozen outraged observers who congregated outside the hitherto secret board meeting on the 19th floor. Even the New York Times acknowledged that the demonstrations broke out "after the canvassers had decided to close the recount to the public."

Viewers of Fox News' live coverage from Miami knew from the start that the mostly middle-age, well-attired demonstrators were chanting "Let us in. Let us in." The protesters were demanding the canvassing board open its count to the public, as required by state law. Section 102.166 (6) of Florida's election statutes specifically says, "Any manual recount shall be open to the public." The demonstrators therefore were well within their rights to demand access.

Mayco Villafana, the county's communications director, eventually asked the board to move back to the 18th floor. "Faced with an angry mob of two dozen Republicans and protests from reporters," the Miami Herald reported, "the board agreed to move back to a public conference room on the 18th floor at County Hall where people could watch as votes were tallied."

Leahy said the protest outside his Elections Department office had influenced the board's decision to return to the 18th floor but not his vote to scrap the county recount altogether. "I was concerned that what we were doing was not being perceived as a fair and open process," Leahy told reporters. The board also was more than likely jittery about the legality of its action.

The 'Ralph Lauren Rebellion'
Far from being a threatening mob, as the Gore camp would have us believe, most of the demonstrators on the 19th floor turned out to be lawyers and accountants serving as official Republican observers to the recount. One of them later told Fox News that his fellow, well-heeled demonstrators came to describe their boisterous expression of "our First Amendment rights" as the "penny-loafer protest" and the "Ralph Lauren rebellion."

As for the allegations of violence, Republican attorney Miguel DeGrandy challenged the Washington Post: "The whole world had cameras here. Find me a tape where someone was kicked or beaten." Indeed, no one was ever arrested during the recount, save for a reportedly Democratic protester outside the building. Republican observers did see a Democratic official pocket what was thought to be a ballot and had him questioned by police, according to Fox News' Miami correspondent, Orlando Salinas. The ballot turned out to be only a sample.

Most important, the demonstrators in County Hall didn't influence the canvassing board's unanimous decision to nix the Miami-Dade recount — a decision that spelled disaster for Gore's hope of mining enough votes for a Florida victory. "The protest was not a factor in my decision" to abandon the recount, Leahy told reporters afterward. "We simply could not get it done by the deadline" set by the Florida Supreme Court.

Leahy's candid and undisputed explanation for the board's recount decision nevertheless didn't stop Reps. Carrie Meek (D., Fl.) and Peter Deutsch (D., Fl.) from asking the Justice Department to investigate "what appears to be a shocking case of undermining the right to vote through intimidation and threats of violence." Neither has it deterred Al Gore and his ministers from peddling the fiction that the Miami-Dade canvassing board had been "intimidated" into abandoning its countywide recount.

One wonders what Judge Sauls will make of it all.