Center of the storm: history, lunacy.

It was very important for the editorial page to keep up with the news side

How was the Great Butterfly Ballot Controversy different from your average story?

Perhaps it was the interview I gave to a broadcast crew from Singapore -- several days after I gave one to the Washington correspondent for the South Korean newspaper and about the same time I gave one to the reporter from the paper in Frankfurt.

Perhaps it was coming to work one Monday morning and hearing that we had received nearly 1,000 e-mail letters to the editor since Friday.

Or perhaps it was walking back into my office about 8 p.m. on November 15, a night when the lead editorial went through seven rewrites, answering the blinking voice-mail light and hearing this:

"Hi, Randy. It's Vice President Al Gore."

My first thought was, "REAL good impression." I went to college in Tennessee, and several alleged friends who are in politics there are capable of puffing a prank like that. A minute later, however, someone from the Gore/Lieberman campaign phoned, and Mr. Gore followed with his call about 10 minutes after that. We used his comments in two news stories and the much-revised editorial.

What was it like?

One morning, the election is something abstract. You're working on three editorials -- Bush Wins, Gore Wins, We Don't Know Who Wins -- for the Wednesday paper and wondering what the story is going to be.

The next morning, your community is the story. You turn on CNN and see people you've known for years on a first-name basis acting as something called the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.

Gee, what are Theresa (LePore), Chuck (Burton) and Carol (Roberts) up to? Ah, right. Deciding the next leader of the free world.

With the news side producing as many as 10 to 12 pages of live coverage a day, it was important for the editorial page to keep up.

We ran our first editorial November 9, headlined "Could ballot error elect President Asterisk?" We wrote 40 editorials from that day until December 14, the day after Gore conceded. Twenty-seven of those ran in the lead position.

The one on December 14 ran on the front page, at the bottom with a Don Wright cartoon, and stressed the need for election reform.

Normally, we run letters only from people within our circulation area -- Boca Raton to Vero Beach and west to the areas around Lake Okeechobee -- or from people or groups we have written about.

We junked that rule early. Letters editor Chris Felker got the idea of expanding the space and breaking the letters into those from Florida and those from elsewhere, which turned out to be, among other places, London, Australia, and India.

For all the volume of comment, most of the letters had themes that fell into two deep ruts: the voters in Palm Beach County (and Florida in general) are stupid; it's an outrage, and why can't the paper do something about it.

It isn't hard to guess which group backed which candidate. So while we expanded the space on certain days, we were selective because it became harder and harder to find well-written letters that had a new angle.

Fortunately, there were so many stories within the story -- usually court decisions, usually late at night -- that the readers and online readers got new fuel.

Technology, of course, extended the reach of our coverage. Even as recently as 1992, we wouldn't have had the same breadth of response. I was exchanging regular e-mails with people all across the country. Some of their comments made it into the ombudsman's column, which C.B. Hanif writes. It was easy to spot the occasional bursts of form letters, most of which came from Republicans.

Editorially, we supported Al Gore. Our postelection position was that the state should include as many legal ballots as possible. We praised the Florida Supreme Court for trying to do so, including the rulings that did not throw out absentee votes in Martin and Seminole counties.

We criticized the Democrats for trying to disqualify overseas absentees as they were arguing to count all votes.

We didn't like the ending. For one thing, it happened not long before deadline -- although we had our editorial in by first edition. More important, courts aren't supposed to decide elections.

To steal from Dickens: It was history, it was lunacy.

The emergency operations center where we usually get news about hurricanes became something that looked like Media Day at the Super Bowl. We won't forget that for a while, especially since, for us, the story goes on.

We will watch as news organizations examine the disputed ballots. We will watch the Republican-dominated legislature seek revenge next spring against the Florida Supreme Court. We will watch governor Jeb Bush during the second two years of his term. We will watch to see if our elections change.

Nothing about it will be your average story.

NCEW member Randy Schultz is editorial page editor of The Palm Beach Post.