With its 25 electoral votes, Florida always figured to be a decisive state in the election–but not like this. The Sunshine State is a remarkable kaleidoscope of the rest of the country, with transplants from every region and a diversity of political views to match. Republicans hoped Gov. Jeb Bush would carry the state for his big brother; Joe Lieberman spent enough time with local retirees to qualify for a time share. But now, like some tropical banana republic, Florida stands accused of bungling the closest election of the century. As all America looked on, there were scattered charges of stolen and forged ballots, racial discrimination and bullying clerks–and that was nothing next to the mayhem in Palm Beach. Of course, this kind of thing happens, unnoticed, all the time, but that was little solace for proud Floridians. When Fidel Castro offered to send advisers across the strait to help sort things out, the humiliation was complete.
Despite the angry protests of some voters, who insisted they were brushed aside by poll workers, there didn’t appear to be fraud or malice involved in Palm Beach. Yet that county has already entered the annals of notorious politics, right next to Chicago in 1960. The Democratic Party circulated a flier warning voters about the now notorious “butterfly ballot,” but thousands of voters apparently punched the hole for Buchanan, whose name followed Bush’s on the ballot, or punched both his and Gore’s names. Buchanan received 3,400 votes in the county, far more than anywhere else in the state, and more than 19,000 people voted for two candidates by accident. Not all of them were old or infirm, either. “This was anything but crystal clear,” said 48-year-old Ken Weitz, who punched the wrong hole. He designs and builds million-dollar homes.
Suddenly, with the White House at stake, Palm Beach was sucked into a hurricane of spin. The Bush campaign claimed that registration for Buchanan’s Reform Party and two “affiliated” parties had jumped 110 percent since 1996, which explained his support. That was, to be charitable, disingenuous; the two smaller parties are actually anti-Buchanan, and there are only 337 Reform members in the county. Republicans also said the double punches were comparable to the 1996 total, but their numbers didn’t add up. Democrats, meanwhile, scoured the county for people willing to claim they had accidentally misvoted. The roughly 1,100 affidavits collected from diehard Gore supporters will likely be brandished by the campaign when it goes to court, but it’s hard to know how many of those voters really know they punched the wrong hole.
Florida had other problems. Gore aides said some 6,700 ballots in sympathetic Broward County had no presidential vote at all. In Volusia County, a computer glitch temporarily awarded 10,000 votes to the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party. By the end of the week, it was chaos in normally placid Tallahassee; two former secretaries of State were parrying at a local bed-and-breakfast, and TV crews were camped out on the capitol courtyard. Three counties had agreed to do limited hand counts of their ballots, and a fourth was set to decide this week, but the Bush campaign filed to stop that in court. Democrats were ready to file suit this week, hoping for an unprecedented re-vote in Palm Beach. That suit–like eight others brought by citizens–will hinge on whether the state’s Supreme Court thinks “the will of the people” was thwarted. At this point, of course, the people are divided clean in half. As usual, Florida looks just like the rest of us.
