Down & Dirty Read Free Page A

most restrictive
     ballot-access requirements in the country, Florida now had one of the loosest. LePore had no fewer than ten presidential candidates,
     and ten vice presidential candidates, to put on her ballot.
    In September, LePore went to voting systems manager Tony Enos, thirty-six, and asked for help. Enos was, like her, an experienced
     elections board employee—he’d been there for eighteen years, since he was eighteen. He soon gave her three ballot options.
    One of them was a one-pager, as they’d always done in the past. But the twenty names meant that the type was really small.
     This troubled LePore. She remembered the 1988 Senate race, when Republican Connie Mack defeated Democratic representative
     Buddy MacKay by just 33,000 votes. During the recount, Democrats complained that 54,000 ballots didn’t register a vote for
     Senate—a full 17 percent. A closer inspection of these undervotes, as they were called, brought blame on the ballot design.
     Since the Senate race had been on the same page as the presidential race—a lot of names on one page—the race, written in small
     letters at the bottom of the first page of the ballot, had apparently escaped some voters’ notice. Winchester and her equals
     in Hillsborough, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties came under some heavy criticism for the 170,000 total undervotes in their
     four counties.
    That experience, combined with her work for a federal task force dedicated to making it easier for the blind, disabled, and
     sight-impaired to vote, made LePore sensitive to the needs of voters who didn’t have the best vision. There had been numerous
     complaints from older voters after all the referenda and initiatives appeared on the 1998 ballot in 10-point type. This time,
     the names, she decided, would be better spread out over two pages. Like a butterfly. They called it a “facing-page ballot.”
    Enos had two designs with that option. One listed five candidate tickets on the left page, all huddled near the top of the
     page, with the other five pairs on the right page, near the bottom. But LePore didn’t like this design. She wanted the list
     of candidates in essentially the same location on each page, with the holes to punch staggered between pages.
    So it came down to Enos’s third option. Bush and Cheney listed first on the left page, with their hole first in the middle;
     Reform ticket Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster first on the right page, their hole second in the middle; Gore and Lieberman listed
     second on the left page, with their hole third in the middle, and so on.
    In Miami-Dade County, the voting machines are being set up at two of the most Democratic precincts in the county, two places
     where Gore’s gonna win big.
    Precinct 255, Lillie C. Evans Elementary School, is located at 1895 NW 75th Street. Its voters are 89.8 percent Democratic,
     95 percent African-American.
    Precinct 535, Dunbar Elementary School, is at 505 NW 20th Street. Its registered voters are 88.48 percent Democratic, 93.25
     percent black.
    Before the voting machines leave the elections warehouse, they’re tested to make sure that they’re functioning properly. The
     ten machines at Dunbar and the ten at Evans had both been deemed to be working fine. But at Evans Elementary on Tuesday morning,
     poll worker Larry Williams does a test ballot, and a punch he attempts for Gore doesn’t register at all. Seven of the ten
     machines at Evans miss punches when tested. No one ever tells precinct clerk Donna Rogers. When Rogers is asked about the
     problems her precinct experiences today, she’ll say that no voter complained to her, no poll worker told her about anything
     wrong, how was she to know. She’ll say that the
Miami Herald
and I are the only ones—including the elections commission—to tell her that there were undervotes in her precinct, so as
     far as she’s concerned, it’s all hearsay.
    But it’s true. By the end of the day, 113 out of the 868 ballots cast