All nonsense, insisted Penelas last week. Yes, he acknowledged, Gore called him, but “at no time did he pressure me to influence the members of the board.” The mayor’s cell-phone records, obtained by NEWSWEEK, show calls to both Demo- cratic and Republican operatives on the day in question. But his aides say that Penelas made no attempt to sway the election supervisors. The Gore-ites “may have had expectations,” says Ric Katz, a political adviser to the mayor. But Penelas “made no promises.”
What really happened in Miami-Dade? The election could turn on the answer. There are other potential legal land mines for George W. Bush, particularly a challenge to thousands of Bush votes in Seminole County, but Miami-Dade is likely to be center stage this week. The Florida courts must determine if the Miami-Dade election canvassers abused their discretion by first agreeing to manually recount the vote, then changing their minds. A recount of the 10,000 or so “undercounted” ballots in Miami-Dade might deliver enough votes to put Gore over the top and win Florida’s 25 electoral votes. So far most attention has focused on the GOP’s coordinated effort to organize demonstrators to lean on the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board on the morning of Nov. 22. The local election officials have steadfastly denied that they were intimidated by the Republicans’ alleged “rent-a-mob.” But the real pressure may have been more subtle: the fear of alienating Miami’s volatile and highly political Cuban-American community.
The canvassing-board members have cited time pressures for their decision to shut down the manual recount. The Florida Supreme Court allowed only six days for three Florida counties to finish the job. But Broward County was able to make the deadline, and Palm Beach came within two hours, despite taking Thanksgiving off. So the true motivations of the three Miami-Dade canvassers have been called into question. The county elections supervisor, David Leahy, consistently opposed a manual recount. Leahy talked several times to Mayor Penelas, but both men denied any pressure one way or another. Canvassing-board chair Judge Lawrence King, a Democrat, steadily favored a manual recount until he, too, decided that time was running too short. The swing vote was Judge Myriam Lehr, who flip-flopped several times between the election and Nov. 22. Was she influenced by her husband, a member of the county GOP executive committee? No, insisted Bruce Lehr to NEWSWEEK: “I’m a trial lawyer. I don’t discuss my cases, and she doesn’t discuss her duties. My wife and I don’t share a favorite color. We don’t share a favorite food. We don’t share a party affiliation. There is no influence here.” Lehr described his wife as “an absolute angel in the middle of this crap… she wasn’t contacted by anyone. She didn’t speak to anyone.”
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Lehr. Still, she did not need a road map to know what was good for her political career. In her re-election bid this year, Lehr, a former family mediator who became a county judge in 1996, spent $7,500 to hire a conservative Cuban-American political consultant, Armando Gutierrez, even though she was unopposed. Gutierrez is well known in Miami as an “insurance policy”: hire him and opponents melt away. Not only Lehr but her colleague on the canvassing board Judge King, who also ran unopposed, hired Gutierrez in the last election. (Gutierrez told NEWSWEEK that he had spoken to neither official in recent weeks. He was in Canada last week with his son, improbably named Chad.)
Miami’s Cuban-Americans, 35 percent of the county’s population, are predominantly Republican and highly vocal. They memorably took to the streets when the Feds decided to return Elian Gonzalez to Cuba last spring, and they never forgave the Clinton-Gore administration for the Elian grab, even though the veep awkwardly pandered by suggesting that the boy be allowed to stay in the United States. (Gutierrez was chief spokesman for Elian’s Miami family.) Many Cuban-American activists were furious about the manual recount in the Bush-Gore race. On Nov. 22, local Cuban-American politicians and radio announcers were railing that the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board was recounting the heavily Democratic precincts in north Dade before the Cuban–and strongly GOP–precincts in south Dade. It would have been obvious to Lehr or to any local politician–including Mayor Penelas–that a decision to allow the recount to continue was going to antagonize Miami’s politically potent Little Havana.
Local Democrats were convinced that political pressure determined Lehr’s vote. “She’s a very timid person who’s scared of her shadow, and there’s a pretty good Cuban-American political machine who will make damn sure someone will run against [incumbents] if they do the wrong thing,” says a local Democratic pol. “She doesn’t make a lot of waves, and she found herself in a situation she never imagined herself to be in.” (Lehr has declined all interview requests.)
Personal politics may also be at work in another Florida voting case, a wild-card lawsuit in Seminole County that, theoretically at least, could cost George W. Bush the presidency. The case arises out of a GOP goof-up–and, allegedly, a case of election fraud to erase the mistake. Seeking to boost voter turnout, Gov. Jeb Bush sent out a flier encouraging registered Republicans to vote “from the comfort and convenience of your own home.” The mass mailing from Governor Bush included postcard applications for absentee ballots. But the postcards did not include voter-ID numbers. When GOP officials discovered the mistake in Seminole County, they scrambled to fix it. Republican officials were allowed to camp out for weeks in the offices of local election officials, writing in the missing ID numbers. When the local Democratic Party chairman objected, he says he was told by a local election official to “go fly a kite.”
Alleging fraud, a colorful local trial lawyer and Democratic activist, Harry Jacobs, is suing to get more than 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County thrown out. If he succeeds, Gore would post a net gain of 4,700 votes and, potentially, the presidency. Jacobs is getting a lot of help from pro-Democratic union lawyers. “We’re the Seventh Cavalry,” jokes Rick Siwica, a lawyer for the Florida AFL-CIO. Bush’s lawyers are contesting the suit, arguing that the decision to allow Republican officials to write in the voter IDs was a mere technicality, not fraud. Officially, the Gore campaign is staying out of the case–on instructions from the veep himself. Gore told his aides he couldn’t very well argue that “every vote be counted” while at the same time trying to block votes from being counted in Seminole County. That does not mean, however, that the Gore campaign is not quietly rooting for Jacobs to win his case.
The Democrats’ hopes lie heavily with the judge who is hearing the case. Judge Nikki Ann Clark, a tough-minded African-American from Detroit, was chief cabinet aide to former Florida governor Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, before she was put on the bench seven years ago. Earlier this year she made a bid to move up to the state court of appeals–but was blocked by Gov. Jeb Bush. Among her mentors is Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, the co-chairman of the Gore campaign in Florida. Now Clark seems determined to cut through the delaying tactics of the Republicans and move the case to a quickie one-day trial on Wednesday. Can she be impartial? Her defenders say so. “I think she’s going to bend over backwards to be fair,” says Steve Uhlfelder, a Tallahassee lawyer who is close to the judge. Even if Clark throws out the Seminole County votes, such a drastic move would have to be upheld by the state Supreme Court. “I just don’t see it at the end of the day,” says Uhlfelder. There will surely be some long days in the Florida courtrooms as the Democrats try to rush to justice and the Republicans seek to delay it. The outcome will turn on the law–but, inevitably, on politics and personalities as well.
