'The Campaign Continues': Gore in Florida, step by awful step.

On the night he wasn't elected president, Al Gore made it perfectly clear he intended to keep on running for the office-and running, and running. He didn't speak the words himself. He sent out his campaign chairman Bill Daley to declare, in front of cheering Nashville partisans, before the sun rose on November 8, "Our campaign continues!"

Indeed it did. Republicans have said for a long time that Gore would say or do anything to win. They used to mean it mainly as a criticism; they should have taken it as a warning. Gore essentially lost the state of Florida-and therefore, the presidential election-four times. First he lost the initial vote count. Then he lost the machine recount. Next he lost the late-arriving absentee and overseas ballots added to the machine recount-the result Secretary of State Katherine Harris intended to certify. And finally he lost the hand recount mandated by the Florida supreme court-the result Harris did certify. This litany of defeat has become a familiar GOP talking point, but it remains a powerful description of how events in Florida unfolded. In the face of these failures, Gore remained a study in ruthless persistence. "I have an obligation to the 50 million plus voters who supported the agenda that I laid out during the campaign," he explained in a New York Times interview published after Florida's certification on November 26.

Say this much for the vice president: He understood from the get-go that he was involved in a smashmouth political fight. Just as his campaign was supposed to be winding down, he cranked up his base. By 7 a.m. the day after the election, the Democrats had lawyers loaded aboard a chartered jet bound for Florida to challenge the Bush victory. An army of attorneys-spurred on by e-mails from the American Association of Trial Lawyers-followed them south. Jesse Jackson was soon on the scene, hollering about "a replay of Selma." Union workers were summoned for recount observation, and given specific instructions not to engage in any public protests that might spark anti-Gore sentiment. It was an impressive mobilization that the Bush campaign was not able to match for several days. And there was something about it the Bush campaign never equaled: the Democrats' willful mixture of demagogic rhetoric, intimidation tactics, judge-shopping, frivolous lawsuits, and the politics of personal destruction.

Gore's initial strategy was to try to seize the high ground: He aimed to portray himself as the people's choice for president. He was able to attempt this because he received slightly more total votes across the country than Bush. This of course meant nothing, even though newspapers continued to publish daily tallies of the nationwide vote beyond Thanksgiving. If either side had thought the popular-vote totals mattered, they wouldn't have run the campaigns they did-i.e., ones designed specifically to win 270 votes in the Electoral College. As Daley carried on about "the will of the people"-a powerful if empty slogan-Bush maintained a lead over Gore at every moment in Florida, the one place that would be decisive.

In the days immediately following the election, Gore supporters acted like a pack of nasty kids poking at a turtle with sharp sticks in search of a weak spot. They desperately wanted to discover arguments that would mitigate the undeniable fact that Gore had come up short. They said almost anything that came to mind. Warren Christopher called the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County "illegal"-but it turned out they were completely consistent with Florida law, and (in fact) designed by local Democrats. Daley suggested the butterfly ballot was unfair-something he hasn't repeated since Bush strategist Karl Rove produced a similar one that is still used in Daley's native Cook County. Then the Gore camp said Reform party candidate Pat Buchanan received a suspiciously large vote in Palm Beach County, and that many Buchanan voters really intended to support Gore-yet Buchanan won only eight-tenths of 1 percent of the Palm Beach total, which was comparable to his rate of support in other counties; and he had received more than twice as many votes in Palm Beach during the 1996 presidential primary, even though he never campaigned there. Finally-perhaps because Democrats really can't stop themselves-there were charges of racism. "In disproportionately black areas, people faced dogs, guns, and were required to have three forms of ID," said campaign manager Donna Brazile. "I mean, one day before we were ahead in Florida by three points and we lost? It's like, uh-oh, somebody's doing something they shouldn't." She offered no evidence for any of this. Florida's black turnout was actually up 50 percent from 1996.

Gore's rhetorical strategy had all the precision of a shotgun blast, but his legal challenges were aimed no more carefully. His lawyers went judge-shopping. One filed a federal lawsuit in West Palm Beach to halt certification of the county vote, but pulled it the same day when the case was assigned to Kenneth Ryskamp, a Reagan appointee. An identical suit was then carried to state court, where it was put before Judge Kathleen Kroll, a liberal who indeed blocked the certification of Palm Beach County's vote totals. There were frivolous challenges, too, such as the one claiming Bush wasn't entitled to the 32 electoral votes of Texas because the Twelfth Amendment forbids electors from supporting two candidates from their home state. (Cheney recently headed a company based in Dallas, but he is a legal resident of Wyoming.) When a Florida court rejected the suit, it was filed again, just hours later, in a Texas court.

The most significant clashes, of course, were fought over the manual recounts. This was the one place where Gore appeared to have a principled position and public backing. "This is a time to respect every voter and every vote," said Gore on November 15. Polls suggested that Americans were willing to be patient and wait for an accurate count of the votes in Florida, and that the process could drag on for a few weeks without a backlash. The public also believed that hand counts, at least in theory, were fundamentally fair.

After Gore lost the automatic machine recount, which occurred throughout the whole state, the battle settled on four counties where the vice president requested hand recounts: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. Gore had prevailed in each of these places, and his team believed they would make substantial net gains if the ballots were examined one more time.

Volusia County completed a manual recount on November 14, before any of the other counties had begun their full manual recounts, and found 98 additional votes for Gore. In the other three counties, recounting proved to be an arbitrary and arduous experience, one that could be tilted to Gore's advantage. This was uniquely possible in jurisdictions using punch cards, which allow hand recounters to squint at the ballots, hold them up to lights, and stare at them through magnifying glasses to detect votes. The process is more imaginative than scientific. It depends on the chads-the little rectangular boxes voters are supposed to poke out of their ballots with their styluses. The chads are supposed to be punched through cleanly, but sometimes they cling to the ballot. There's a whole vocabulary describing the possibilities: "hanging chads," which dangle from a single corner; "swinging chads," which are half removed; "tri-chads," which are attached at three corners; and "dimpled chads," which are lightly dinged but otherwise fully in place.

Florida has no controlling legal authority for determining which chads count and which don't in a hand recount. State law is silent on the question. (Most other states say dimpled chads aren't votes.) That means local canvassing boards had the power to come up with their own standards and, essentially, to create new votes where they did not exist previously.

The first of the three counties to act was Palm Beach. It started a partial hand recount on November 11 in order to determine whether a full recount was worth the effort. But the three election-board officers, all Democrats, had trouble setting a standard. First they voted that a chad needed to have only a single corner detached in order to register as a new vote. Within hours they opted for a stricter rule, a "sunlight test" that required counters to see light passing through the punch card. Then they switched back to the single-corner criterion. The partial recount, which sampled 1 percent of the county vote, netted 19 votes for Gore. Democrats extrapolated that they would pick up 1,900 votes for the vice president in a full hand recount; at 2 a.m. on November 12, the board voted to conduct a full manual recount, which began on November 16.

Even then, Palm Beach officials had not decided how to count dimpled ballots. They eventually settled on a practice of crediting only those ballots containing multiple dimples, on the theory that certain voters had trouble punching their chads. Even this standard wasn't lax enough for Gore; his lawyers twice took Palm Beach to court over it, and they were rebuffed both times. In the end, the county failed to meet the November 26 recount deadline imposed by the Florida supreme court, and the state certified its machine-recount totals.

Immediately south of Palm Beach County is Broward County. On November 13, its three-member election board, two Democrats and one Republican, began a partial hand recount of nearly 4,000 ballots. This effort yielded only four new votes for Gore, so the board opted against a full recount. Then the Gore campaign threatened a lawsuit, and Florida's Democratic attorney general (and Gore's state chairman) Bob Butterworth stepped into the fray. He released an "advisory opinion" urging hand recounts. Butterworth's own website had featured a statement from a previous attorney general saying that "questions arising under the Florida Election Code should be directed to the Division of Elections in the Department of State" and that "opinions are not rendered on questions pending before the courts." But no longer. "It's not a legal restriction on my authority," insisted Butterworth, who declared that he could opine "on anything I want to." Judge Robert Lee, a Democratic member of the Broward County canvassing board, changed his mind about the recount. He defended his reversal by citing Butterworth's opinion.

Broward began its full hand recount on November 15, and the election board decided to count only hanging chads or swinging chads. "We didn't want to have to guess their intent," explained Lee. "We're not clairvoyant." But on November 19, they loosened their standards significantly; now, even dimpled chads would count as votes. Lee eventually described the rationale this way: "It's not objectively subjective or subjectively objective, but I think it's somewhere in the middle." On November 25, the board decided to apply this slack standard even to absentee ballots, which are different from the ones cast on Election Day because absentee voters were able to see whether they had punched out their chads. "What's being done here is this board is casting votes," said Gov. Marc Racicot, Republican of Montana, who observed the process.

Gore won the popular vote in Palm Beach and Broward Counties by big margins. Miami-Dade County was much closer, with Cuban-Americans lining up heavily for Bush and Gore taking only 53 percent of the overall vote. On November 14, the Miami-Dade canvassing board conducted a partial hand recount of three Democratic precincts. This unearthed only six new votes for Gore, so the board decided unanimously not to recount the whole lot. Three days later, it switched course and decided to conduct a full recount after all; that process began on November 20. In a matter of hours, however, the board realized it didn't have enough time to count them all. So it chose instead to focus on 10,750 "questionable" ballots. This raised new concerns-they were no longer conducting a full hand recount, but a sample of a full hand count. So, on November 22, they decided to return to their earlier decision and not recount at all. Democrats screamed at this, and tried to make it sound as if a few Republican protesters had intimidated the Miami-Dade officials into abandoning the recount. It was a silly claim, and it masked an underreported detail: Gore's victory in the county was so narrow that he was unlikely to net many votes there.

Democratic officials tainted the manual-recount process from the beginning by pressuring election-board officials. Bob Butterworth didn't simply issue his opinion; he picked up the phone to urge the canvassing board in Volusia County to conduct a hand recount. The members seemed to resent this-they complained about it to the media-but two hours later, they voted the way Butterworth wanted. Warren Christopher also worked the phones. He called Bruce Rogow, a Democratic lawyer for Palm Beach elections supervisor Theresa LePore, and asked him to do what he could to ensure a hand count. "It was an effort to have me persuade my client to vote in favor of starting the manual recount," said Rogow, according to the Associated Press. "I told [Mr. Christopher] no. I told him we'd have to wait." But the Gore campaign didn't have to wait long: Palm Beach did agree to a hand recount.

For all their meddling, Butterworth and Christopher escaped the treatment heaped on Bush backer (and statewide elected official) Katherine Harris. When she was pinpointed as a potential headache for Gore, Democrats distributed a three-page memo on her background. Gore spokesman Chris Lehane accused her of "acting in the finest tradition of a Soviet commissar." Paul Begala labeled her "Cruella De Vil coming to steal the puppies." Shortly after these comments were made, Gore called on Bush "to improve the tone of our dialogue in America" and asked both sides "to refrain from using inflammatory language." Apparently his own side wasn't listening, because the next day, MSNBC's Chip Reid reported on Gore aides who "said that if George Bush does get into office with [Harris's] help, the investigation into her role in this entire situation will make Whitewater look like a picnic."

The most disgraceful example of this scorched-earth strategy was the effort to disqualify overseas ballots, mainly cast by men and women serving in the military. These traditionally have tilted heavily toward the GOP; this year, in fact, they ran about 2-to-1 in Bush's favor. The Democrats did all they could to invalidate them. On November 15, Democratic lawyer Mark Herron sent out a five-page memo on how to disqualify military ballots. In Duval County, Gore lawyers objected to signatures that literally didn't dot i's or cross t's. Throughout the state, overseas ballots were rejected at a rate of 40 percent-almost double the rate from four years earlier, according to the Miami Herald. Some counties seemed to have a special passion for disqualifying them. In those carried by Gore, the rate of rejection was 60 percent; elsewhere, it was 29 percent. Broward County received 396 overseas ballots and invalidated 304 of them.

The controversies emanating from Florida seemed to have no end. The canvassing board in Gadsden County, controlled by Democrats, reexamined a stack of ballots behind closed doors; they found 170 extra votes for Gore. Time magazine reported that Gore gained 417 votes when election officers in Pinellas County, which went for Gore, tinkered with ballots before submitting them for a machine recount. There was old-fashioned vote fraud, too. The Miami Herald revealed that at least 39 felons-most of them Democrats-cast illegal absentee ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

Despite all this chicanery, Gore kept on losing. The vice president continued to press lawsuits after the Florida certification, in the frantic hope that some court, somewhere, would overturn the election. But even if that doesn't work, Gore may have a final strategy that will deliver him the prize he has sought his whole life: an Electoral College upset. A few Bush electors have said they've been contacted about switching their allegiance to Gore on December 18. So far, there appear to be no takers. But some Republicans worry about blackmail. Democratic activist Bob Beckel admitted he's investigating the backgrounds of Bush electors. "It is information gathering on my part, using my own network," Beckel told the Wall Street Journal. "I call on mostly Democrats, but some Republicans, too, and ask, 'Who are these electors, and what do you know about them?' I just wanted to know who these electors are." It doesn't take the brightest crayon in the box to figure out what that's supposed to mean. There's no reason to think Democratic dirt-diggers couldn't pull off a shocker. This fall, the Bush campaign nervously waited for an "October surprise" that didn't come. Then there was a November surprise-the news about Bush's drunk-driving arrest. Who's to say there couldn't be a December surprise, too-a final dirty trick being prepared for the Electoral College vote on the 18th? "I completely disavow any effort to persuade electors to switch their support from the candidate to whom they are pledged," said Gore on November 21. (Beckel, for his part, has declared he won't back off.) It may all come down to what Gore thinks the meaning of "pledge" is. What a fitting way to mark what might be the midpoint of the Clinton-Gore years.