Recount this weekend

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: May 23, 2008

HBO will debut Recount, its long-awaited docudrama of the 2000 election battle in Florida, this weekend.

PR for it has begun to spread like pink eye. At first, there was just a commercial here and there on CNN, and then those commercials became ubiquitous; the commercials gave way to full stories about the movie; then Laura Dern appeared on Craig Ferguson’s last night to deliver a schoolmarm-y lecture about how, when he casts his first vote for president in the fall (Ferguson is a recently naturalized American citizen), he should make sure that he DOESN’T LEAVE THE POLLING PLACE WITHOUT A LITTLE RECEIPT!

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I am a native of Manatee County, part of Florida’s vaunted I-4 corridor. I was working in politics as a campaign manager for a state representative during the 2000 election season.

Manatee County’s supervisor of elections (SOE), Bob Sweat, ran (and still runs) the tightest electoral ship in the state.

Sweat sets up a large screen in the front of the office (an area about 25 feet by six feet), where results are displayed as they come in. No butterfly ballots or touchscreen machines here: Manatee County uses optical scan machines, which require voters to use a marker to fill in an oval next to their candidate of choice. The ballots are then fed into a machine that tabulates the results. As SOE staff members check in remotely and report their precincts’ tabulations, numbers are updated at the main SOE on a scrolling basis. There are 139 precincts in Manatee County (141 if you count absentee ballots and early votes as their own “precincts”), but because of ease of use and accuracy of the optical scan system and the professionalism of Sweat’s staff, it’s unusual for any votes to still be outstanding by 10 p.m.

As such, it is tradition for local politicos and representatives of statewide campaigns to show up at the SOE’s office on Election Night around 7 p.m. (earlier if you don’t want to have to stand) and cram into the lobby to await returns. I managed three campaigns for state representatives and pitched in with a couple of local and federal races here and there, so I have been there, jockeying for position, on many occasions. I’ve been fortunate to enjoy lots of good news in that spot.

I tell you all that by way of background to say this: This having been my experience in Manatee County, I had no understanding whatsoever of what was going on in Palm Beach County.

Butterfly ballots. People voting for the wrong candidates. Chads—hanging, pregnant and otherwise. The more I heard about what was going on down there, the more I thought all the problems had their genesis in one person: Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County’s supervisor of elections.

As you can read from her brief Wiki bio, LePore had encountered problems with the butterfly ballot before: her use of the “butterfly” design had caused approximately 14,000 votes for the second candidate on the left (GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole) to be miscast in 1996, but it somehow “went unnoticed at the time.“

Nevertheless, LePore opted for the butterfly design again in 2000.

You know the rest of the story.

In fairness to LePore, she had released sample ballots, as she is statutorily required to do, in advance of the election. Conscientious citizens of Palm Beach County had time to register their concerns and complaints about the ballot’s design well in advance of Election Day, and they were not eyeballing the butterfly ballot for the first time on Election Day.

But LePore also had other controversies, including her selection of touchscreen machines that lacked a paper trail and/or mistakenly counted some votes twice, etc.

(By the way, the optical scan system is superior for one simple reason: It offers the speed and accuracy of computer tabulation without sacrificing the paper trail that can back up the results. Want proof? When was the last time you heard about a disputed recount in Manatee County?)

The SOE is an elected position in Florida. People have a choice—and local accountability—about who oversees their elections. LePore was elected in 1996 and re-elected in 2000 (after the first butterfly bang-up), losing her bid for a third term only in 2004.

This will admittedly smack of West Coast bias, but ... folks on the East Coast don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to choosing their SOEs. Remember Miriam Oliphant? She made LePore look like Sweat’s mentor. And as for LePore, keep in mind that she was elected—twice—as a Democrat by Democrats in the heavily Democratic county of Palm Beach. But that didn’t stop some of them from coming after her with death threats after she “didn’t do (her job) the way they wanted me to do it,“ LePore told the Palm Beach Post in 2001.

A final note: One of my brothers is a still photographer for the movie industry, and he worked on Recount. He is, of course, politically active, and he was full of amusing stories and anecdotes from the set as filming progressed. After seeing all these ads and hearing his behind-the-scenes dish, I’m almost sad I don’t get HBO.

I sent him an e-mail a little while ago, recounting how many times I’ve seen the ad as the PR campaign ramps up ahead of the movie’s premiere this weekend. At first I wrote that I had lost count of the number of times I’d seen the trailer, but I realized that was an unfortunate and ironic choice of words. So instead, I wrote that I stopped counting the number of times I’d seen it. And then I realized that, as far as puns are concerned, that was even worse.

Update No. 1: As I was checking out a page at Salon.com for this article, I was greeted by a pop-up mini-trailer for—guess what? Recount! Seriously!

Update No. 2: Guess what’s leading IMDB’s web page right now? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two—ahem—don’t count ...