Down & Dirty Read Free

Tennessee and
     Arkansas. Bush finished up his campaigning Monday night with an airport rally in Austin, and then it would be bedtime. Bush
     likes sleep. He hits the sack by 9:30 P.M . He carried a down pillow—nicknamed “pilly”—with him on the campaign trail.
    “Well, it’s almost 5:30 A.M . Texas time, and George W. Bush is STILL asleep and I’m still speaking to people HERE IN FLORIDA!!” Gore says. The crowd
     again goes wild.
    Soon enough, Gore and Lieberman leave the Tampa rally, head to the airport, and fly to Tennessee to watch the returns. Now
     it’s in the hands of the people.
    People like Theresa LePore.

    LePore, elections supervisor for Palm Beach County, has been awake for three full hours. At 2:30 A.M . she eased herself out of bed. She was at work by 3:45 A.M . Voters start calling her to make sure they know the proper place to vote at around 4:30 A.M . or so. LePore feels like crap; she has a sinus infection; she didn’t get home the previous night until around 10 p.m.; she
     hasn’t really slept. But she’s jazzed.
    LePore loves elections. Lives for them. Says elections are in her blood. At the age of eight, she helped her Republican dad
     lick envelopes for his favorite candidates. In the summer of 1971, at the age of sixteen—when most girls in her school had
     their sights set on less lofty pursuits—LePore walked into the Palm Beach County elections office and took a job as a part-time
     typist, making $1.75 an hour, under good ol’ boy elections supervisor Horace Beasley, aka Mr. B. She wasn’t even old enough
     to vote.
    LePore’s now worked at the elections office for twenty-eight years. Originally she had registered to vote as a Republican,
     like her dad, a disabled Korean War veteran who never told her just how he injured his left arm. But he never really was about
     partisan politics, and in 1979 LePore reregistered as an independent. When a third-party formally registered as “Independent,”
     she changed her registration to “no party.”
    LePore earned her associate degree from Palm Beach Junior College and even attended Florida Atlantic University for a spell.
     But she never got her bachelor’s. She really wasn’t all that interested in pursuing an education; she’s not even a political
     junkie. She’d found what she wanted to do. And she’d found a mentor in Jackie Winchester, the Palm Beach County supervisor
     of elections, appointed to the position after Mr. B died in office in 1973. Winchester was first elected to the post in 1974,
     and not long afterward, Winchester handpicked LePore to be her chief deputy.
    When Winchester announced her retirement in January 1996, it was only natural that LePore would take her place. Soon after
     Winchester told her of her plans, in the fall of 1995, LePore registered as a Democrat and ran. LePore won by 25,000 votes,
     and in 2000 she has the best kind of reelection match: she’s running unopposed. So she’s not even on the ballot.
    But LePore’s job this time was a little tougher than it had been in the past. Historically, Florida had been a tough place
     for third-party candidates. To get on a ballot, third-party candidates had to secure the signatures of 3 percent of all voters
     in the district on a petition. Democratic and Republican candidates had a much easier time, enjoying the option of either
     securing the signatures of 3 percent of just local members of their party or paying a qualifying fee. But in 1998, Libertarians
     launched a campaign to level the playing field, proposing Amendment 11 to the state constitution, “grant(ing) equal ballot
     access for independent and minor parties” by allowing members of those parties to pay the ballot-access fee instead of getting
     signatures. On that Election Day—the same day that Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota as a ReformParty candidate—Amendment 11 passed overwhelmingly, with 64 percent of the vote. As a result, instead of the