Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: You can't predict these things. You have to make your
Speaker 2: decision on the best available knowledge. You know, once you
Speaker 2: get into retroactive clairvoyance, is nobody left of anything.
Speaker 3: You had all of these different people calling from Florida
Speaker 3: and leaving messages saying do something. Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1: Hello, Fiasco listeners, it's Leon Vok. This is the fourth
Speaker 1: in a series of bonus episodes we're dropping in this feed.
Speaker 1: The goal is to showcase some of the best interviews
Speaker 1: we did for Bush v. Gore, in which we covered
Speaker 1: the ins and outs of the two thousand Florida recount.
Speaker 1: In today's episode, we're looking at the two thousand campaign
Speaker 1: as in the campaign itself, the thing that happened in
Speaker 1: the months leading up to the recount, for all the
Speaker 1: what ifs packed into the thirty days that followed election Day.
Speaker 1: The campaign that preceded it was full of tiny turning
Speaker 1: points that could have changed the outcome one way or another.
Speaker 1: As you heard me say on the first episode of
Speaker 1: the show, the Elian Gonzales saga and the environmental activism
Speaker 1: around the Homestead Air Force Base were just two factors
Speaker 1: that might have changed the razor thin margin on election day.
Speaker 1: So today we have two interviews taking a deeper dive
Speaker 1: into the what ifs that might have prevented or recount altogether.
Speaker 1: First up, Ralph Nader. Nader has been America's most famous
Speaker 1: consumer advocate since nineteen sixty five, when he published a
Speaker 1: groundbreaking expose about the auto industry. Nader trained an entire
Speaker 1: generation of activists. They called themselves Nator's Raiders, and he
Speaker 1: deputized them to investigate all kinds of injustice, inefficiency, and corruption.
Speaker 1: By two thousand was an icon, and he ran for
Speaker 1: president as the Green Party candidate, railing against the two
Speaker 1: party system and sold out arenas.
Speaker 4: What about poverty in the Land of the Free, Home
Speaker 4: of the brave, booming economy. On the one hand, twenty
Speaker 4: percent child poverty in the USA, richest country in the world.
Speaker 4: There are countries in Western Europe that have abolished poverty.
Speaker 4: They did it.
Speaker 1: We interviewed Nator for the first episode of the season
Speaker 1: because his candidacy is so often blamed for Gore's defeat
Speaker 1: and we wanted to hear his perspective on it. Nator
Speaker 1: mapped out why he thought he was a necessary alternative
Speaker 1: and why he thought Gore struggled as a candidate.
Speaker 2: Because he was the front runner, he was too cautious,
Speaker 2: and because he was too cautious, he didn't take pioneering stands.
Speaker 2: He thought he could just say to the public, Look,
Speaker 2: I had eight years of experience in Washington's vice president,
Speaker 2: I was senator, I was representative. I was a journalist
Speaker 2: in Vietnam. And who's this guy, this bumbling governor from
Speaker 2: Texas who couldn't put four sentences together and had a
Speaker 2: horrible record on children's poverty to a corporate pollution.
Speaker 1: And when you when you looked at him and Bush
Speaker 1: side by side on the campaign trail, and I realized,
Speaker 1: you know, you're making distinction between the old al Gore
Speaker 1: and the al Gore who was running for president. When
Speaker 1: you looked at them side by side, what did you see?
Speaker 2: Bush was horrible? I mean, one of the reasons I
Speaker 2: ran was to push the Democrats into a more comprehensive
Speaker 2: assault on Bush's record, because they weren't doing it, and
Speaker 2: so I was saying to myself, well, you know, I
Speaker 2: got to show them how to do it. Unfortunately, in
Speaker 2: the two party duopoly, the press doesn't pay attention to
Speaker 2: third party agendas. By and large.
Speaker 1: When you were on the trail, I know that you
Speaker 1: sort of had a recurring argument that you would make
Speaker 1: that these two guys are in many ways the same,
Speaker 1: or that they were that they you could make distinctions
Speaker 1: on certain policy areas, but that you saw them in
Speaker 1: some ways as fundamentally the same. Can you elaborate on
Speaker 1: that or explain it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, on certain social safety nets, obviously, they're very different.
Speaker 2: On things like child health, health and childcare and medicare
Speaker 2: preservation and some of the more basic civil liberty, civil rights,
Speaker 2: housing issues. The Democrats were of course better, I mean
Speaker 2: nowhere near enough, but they were very distinctly better than
Speaker 2: the Republicans. But on the biggest issue of AWE, which
Speaker 2: is the corporate state, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, militarism, they
Speaker 2: were increasingly alike.
Speaker 1: Did that carry over into a sense among the electorate
Speaker 1: that this election wasn't that important? Did you detect an
Speaker 1: unusual level of disengagement due to these these pacific candidates.
Speaker 2: Let's put it this way, it was not an exciting election.
Speaker 2: You had boring candidates. Al Gore is very boring candidate.
Speaker 2: George W. Bush was a boring candidate. They agreed with
Speaker 2: each other incredible number of times on the debate. Somebody
Speaker 2: counted once that Bush and Gore agreed with each other
Speaker 2: over twenty times in one residential debate. And so the
Speaker 2: attention of the activists was they would paint George W.
Speaker 2: Bush as bad on the environment, which is true. But
Speaker 2: then Gore, he allowed Bill Clinton to shut him down
Speaker 2: on regulating auto pollution, fuel efficiency standards, and generally were
Speaker 2: very unexciting in the area of environment, which is his
Speaker 2: principal claim to fame. People saw that he wasn't authentic
Speaker 2: when he said I'm for power for the people, not
Speaker 2: the corporations. I'm not for the insured companies, I'm not
Speaker 2: for the oil companies. People really didn't believe them. It
Speaker 2: was too little, too light, and not specific enough. He
Speaker 2: could have done a lot, but he was coasting because
Speaker 2: he thought he had it in a bag.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to hear you say that he was cautious
Speaker 1: because he thought he had it in the bag. I
Speaker 1: feel like there's a competing narrative, or at least one
Speaker 1: I've absorbed somehow that he was cautious because he didn't
Speaker 1: know who he was.
Speaker 2: Well, when I say he was cautious because he thought
Speaker 2: he had it in a bag. That wasn't the only
Speaker 2: reason he was cautious. He's a cautious politician to begin
Speaker 2: with in his prior races, very very cautious. Finger to
Speaker 2: the wind of the powers that be? That's Al Gore
Speaker 2: fingers to the wind of the powers that be.
Speaker 1: Do you agree that there's this phrase that he didn't
Speaker 1: know who he was? Is that something that you subscribe to?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. If you look at the way he came
Speaker 2: out for each debate, he was a different Al Gore.
Speaker 2: One time he was aggressive, another time he was aloof
Speaker 2: a third time he was like a boxer in a clinch.
Speaker 2: I agree with Governor Bush. You know, over twenty times.
Speaker 1: In one debate you said you didn't do much campaigning
Speaker 1: in Florida, that you'd just gone down for I think
Speaker 1: you said two and a half days. Was that because
Speaker 1: you didn't want to draw votes from Gore in a
Speaker 1: battleground state as close as Florida.
Speaker 2: No, it was not the best management of my schedule.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wasn't pulling that high in Florida. I
Speaker 2: was pulling much higher in places like Massachusetts, California, Oregon,
Speaker 2: Washington State, Illinois, and that's where I wanted to spend
Speaker 2: a lot of time because I was looking for the
Speaker 2: aggregate vote. I wasn't in the running for electoral college votes.
Speaker 2: I was looking try to get five percent of the
Speaker 2: total popular vote so we could qualify four years hence
Speaker 2: for federal funds.
Speaker 1: Were there gore people or people from the DNC who
Speaker 1: begged you to not campaign in battleground states.
Speaker 2: Well, in the last few weeks, they didn't beg me.
Speaker 2: They opposed me. They literally took people like Lauria Steinem
Speaker 2: and so on on a tour to turn again against
Speaker 2: my candidacy. Some of them took out ads attacking me.
Speaker 1: Were there any backchannel efforts to get you to not
Speaker 1: go to those states like ay other Buchanan, for example,
Speaker 1: like very deliberately did not go to battleground states. You
Speaker 1: only can't because he was only also going for five percent.
Speaker 1: He campaigned only in safe states that were safe for Bush.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I just thought of principle, I wouldn't listen to
Speaker 2: that sort of thing because you have to respect the
Speaker 2: voters in every state. You can't say I'm not going
Speaker 2: to go to a state because it's a battleground state.
Speaker 2: That's disrespecting potential voters and the interest of all voters
Speaker 2: to have more voices and choices. That's why I rigorously
Speaker 2: campaigned in every fifty states. No other candidate did that,
Speaker 2: small candidate or major party candidate, because it was a
Speaker 2: matter of principle with me.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the emergence of the Nators raiders for Gore?
Speaker 2: Yeah, very much. I was campaigning in Minnesota and got
Speaker 2: their one or two days press. But you know, they
Speaker 2: weren't in a position to adopt the principle I had.
Speaker 2: They weren't running, Therefore, they didn't want to be obliged
Speaker 2: to respect the voters. They just saw the winner take
Speaker 2: all electoral college duopoly, culled the sac and had to
Speaker 2: adjust to it.
Speaker 1: Did you feel betrayed by them at all, that these
Speaker 1: were your supporters who were going against this principle of
Speaker 1: yours about respecting the voters. That it feel like, I like,
Speaker 1: these guys don't really understand you.
Speaker 2: Well, they were more numerous in two thousand and four.
Speaker 2: Almost the entire progressive lineup of well known progressives dropped
Speaker 2: their supported me in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: Is that because they just felt so sad about the
Speaker 1: fact that your votes in Florida could have been Gore votes,
Speaker 1: and thus Gore could have been present.
Speaker 2: It's like all smart people they were fact deprived and
Speaker 2: they didn't realize that there were tens sena quantons, any
Speaker 2: one of which, if change, would have won for Gore
Speaker 2: and electoral college and three hundred thousand Democrat voters going
Speaker 2: for Borsch's Supreme Court loss of Tennessee. They bought into
Speaker 2: blaming the Greens and me for every other sena quantone,
Speaker 2: giving us delusions of grandeur. It's amazing. It's almost a
Speaker 2: intellectual tick. It doesn't matter how smart they are, how
Speaker 2: savvy they are. All they look at is the difference
Speaker 2: between the two major candidates and how many votes I got.
Speaker 2: Every third party candidate in Florida got more than five
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty five votes, by the way, But the
Speaker 2: one thing you can look back on is that a
Speaker 2: winner take all system electoral college determination is full of mischief,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 1: That was Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate in
Speaker 1: two thousand. For many frustrated Gore supporters, Ralph Nader's candidacy
Speaker 1: is one of the most enduring what ifs of the election.
Speaker 1: But there's another election day question mark, one that received
Speaker 1: much less attention during the recount that's coming up after
Speaker 1: the break.
Speaker 3: Some people said that they went down and they were
Speaker 3: told they weren't on the registration rolls, and they couldn't
Speaker 3: understand why they weren't on the roles because they'd been
Speaker 3: voting before.
Speaker 1: This is Mary Francis Berry, a professor at the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania. She's referring to a population of largely African
Speaker 1: American and Latino voters who said they were turned away
Speaker 1: from the polls on election Day. In two thousand, Barry
Speaker 1: was the chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights,
Speaker 1: which was tasked with investigating complaints of disenfranchisement around the country.
Speaker 3: We had to set up a hot land before the
Speaker 3: election so that if there were any complaints, we would
Speaker 3: have a number out there that people could call. We
Speaker 3: had done that in other elections, but in this one
Speaker 3: you had all of these different people calling from Florida
Speaker 3: and leaving messages saying do something, Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1: And so this was like an unusual volume of complaints
Speaker 1: and they were specifically concentrated in Florida.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, they were a volume higher than any I had
Speaker 3: seen and all the time I'd been on the Commission,
Speaker 3: and I was first appointed to the Commission in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: In early two thousand and one, the Commission on Civil
Speaker 1: Rights investigated the large number of Florida voters who had
Speaker 1: reported problems at polling sites that prevented them from voting.
Speaker 1: Over the course of their investigation, Barry and her colleagues
Speaker 1: her testimony from dozens of Florida voters and officials, including
Speaker 1: Governor Jeb bush I.
Speaker 5: Asked for a briefing on the alleged concern that felons
Speaker 5: were voting and that non felons were not allowed to
Speaker 5: vote because they were allegedly felons.
Speaker 1: One of the priorities of the investigation was to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of what's now known as Florida's felon purge.
Speaker 1: In two thousand, it was illegal for anyone with a
Speaker 1: felony conviction to vote in Florida, even after they had
Speaker 1: served their time. So in two thousand, the state of
Speaker 1: Florida commissioned a contractor to create a list of felons
Speaker 1: living in the state and to ensure that they weren't
Speaker 1: registered to vote. The list was deeply flawed and resulted
Speaker 1: in more than a thousand legal voters being turned away
Speaker 1: at the polls. The state office in charge of this
Speaker 1: operation was one that you might be familiar with at
Speaker 1: this point.
Speaker 3: Catherine Harris, as Secretary of State, had direct responsibility under
Speaker 3: the law for the elections, and she testified. I recall
Speaker 3: her saying something like she was in a hurry and
Speaker 3: didn't have much time because she was going to New
Speaker 3: York on a shopping trip or some thing like that,
Speaker 3: which I didn't understand why she told us that, but anyway,
Speaker 3: she said that she had handed it over to her subordinates,
Speaker 3: and we in particular asked her we had testimony from
Speaker 3: a firm that her office had hired to purge clean
Speaker 3: up the voting roles, to make sure that there were
Speaker 3: in no extraneous names and it was all clear, and
Speaker 3: to do it scientifically. And the head of this company,
Speaker 3: which had many contracts with the government, testified that under
Speaker 3: oath that they told her office that if they did
Speaker 3: the procedure the way they had asked them to do it,
Speaker 3: they would get a lot of false positives of people
Speaker 3: who were actually registered, and asked if they should change
Speaker 3: the procedure, and that Harris's office and her staff told
Speaker 3: them to go ahead and do it the way they
Speaker 3: had told them to do it, which they did, and
Speaker 3: so the result was that there were people whose names
Speaker 3: were confused with other people's names, people who had told
Speaker 3: they weren't registered when they were. And one black minister
Speaker 3: testified that when he went to vote and took his
Speaker 3: family with him, he liked his kids to watch when
Speaker 3: he went to vote, to get the experience of seeing
Speaker 3: the polling place and all that. And he went in
Speaker 3: and he'd voted before, and they told him in a
Speaker 3: very loud voice where everyone could hear, that he was
Speaker 3: a convicted felon. And he was outraged because he said,
Speaker 3: not only aim, I'm not ever convicted of anything. I've
Speaker 3: even been charged with anything, and the only time I've
Speaker 3: been to the courthouse is when I served on a jury,
Speaker 3: So I don't understand how I could be a convicted felon.
Speaker 3: Could you call up somebody and find out, you know,
Speaker 3: this is a mistake. And then they said they couldn't
Speaker 3: get through to the office where they would check this,
Speaker 3: so he ended up having to slink out of the
Speaker 3: room with everybody looking at him as this convicted felon,
Speaker 3: when in fact his name was on the roll and
Speaker 3: he had been on the rolls. He said he felt
Speaker 3: slingshotted back to slavery when they told him that he
Speaker 3: was just and he was so disconsolate even by the
Speaker 3: time he came to the hero and so it was
Speaker 3: really sort of an outrageous sort of thing that happened.
Speaker 6: Was it your sense at that point that the fellon
Speaker 6: purge list was the primary driver of the problems you
Speaker 6: were getting reports on election day?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was our understanding, or it seemed to me
Speaker 3: that that list, that process was a major problem, that
Speaker 3: there were any number of people who were not on
Speaker 3: the rolls. The other major problem that compounded it was
Speaker 3: that we found out in one county that the election
Speaker 3: office state election office made sure that there were cell
Speaker 3: phones given to some of the precincts, but there weren't
Speaker 3: any given to the precincts where there were Latino voters
Speaker 3: or whether they were.
Speaker 6: Black voters, so that cell phones they could use to
Speaker 6: the election.
Speaker 3: That the volunteers who were there or who were hired
Speaker 3: to conduct the election, the people who sit there at
Speaker 3: the tables, you know, during election checking the rolls and
Speaker 3: so on could call up if they had some problem,
Speaker 3: and they didn't give cell phones. In some district. They
Speaker 3: were very particular about who had a cell phone and
Speaker 3: who could call up and who could not. And it
Speaker 3: just turned out that the ones who couldn't call up
Speaker 3: were the district where there were the problems.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: Can you describe the reaction to your report and how
Speaker 6: it worked politically, what its impact was politically.
Speaker 3: Sometimes when you do reports in government agencies like the
Speaker 3: Commission that are investigative and informative, the reports sort of
Speaker 3: collect dust. You know, there might be a one day
Speaker 3: half story about you did a report, but then after
Speaker 3: that you know it served its purpose. It has been
Speaker 3: a safety valve for people who want to talk about it,
Speaker 3: to complain or do whatever, and you make your recommendations.
Speaker 3: But I was determined when I was chair of the
Speaker 3: Commission that we would only do reports that were important
Speaker 3: and substantive, and that we would make sure that our
Speaker 3: recommendations had some kind of teeth and were in conformity
Speaker 3: with what we found, and that we would look toward
Speaker 3: trying to get some kind of legislation help the Congress
Speaker 3: and the President is trying to get some kind of
Speaker 3: legislation to remedy whatever problems we found. Okay, so the
Speaker 3: report came out, and it did not just gathered us
Speaker 3: the Senate, thank Senator Dodd from Connecticut. Chris Dodd was
Speaker 3: chair of the committee over there that considered it. I
Speaker 3: remember Diane Feinstein was on the committee, a leading member
Speaker 3: of it. That committee and its staff held hearings on
Speaker 3: the report. We recommended that the federal government pass a
Speaker 3: law which set up some kind of election commission and
Speaker 3: in fact required the states to change and clean up
Speaker 3: their procedures so that we wouldn't have this kind of
Speaker 3: purge that took place from this company that ended up
Speaker 3: calling people felons who weren't felons and all that sort
Speaker 3: of stuff. And that the states looked to see that
Speaker 3: polling places are accessible, and that the Congress and also
Speaker 3: that discouraged the states from having police officers patrolling up
Speaker 3: and down a highway patrolment on the roads leading to
Speaker 3: the polling places, which sometimes intimidated people who wanted to
Speaker 3: vote and didn't know what was happening. And that all
Speaker 3: of these different problems ought to be addressed by legislation.
Speaker 3: And I was pleased to see. The Congress passed some
Speaker 3: legislation called Help America Vote Act up and the Election
Speaker 3: Assistance Commission and appropriated a bunch of money. Sometimes Congress
Speaker 3: authorizes things, but they don't appropriate any money to give
Speaker 3: to the states in order for them to fix some
Speaker 3: of these problems.
Speaker 6: How effective was that legislation and the formation of that organization?
Speaker 3: Well after the law passed and the money came and
Speaker 3: people's attention went elsewhere. The Election Assistance Commission had no teeth.
Speaker 3: I knew that to begin with, because the Constitution in
Speaker 3: Article one leaves the way elections are conducted to the
Speaker 3: states unless there is discrimination under the fourteenth Amendment, and
Speaker 3: then you can file a civil rights complaint, which is
Speaker 3: what we had been looking at. But the normal election process,
Speaker 3: that is, how do they handle the roles and where
Speaker 3: the polling play. All that stuff is under the control
Speaker 3: of the states. So the Election Assistance Commission was not
Speaker 3: given the authority to force the states to do anything,
Speaker 3: because Congress couldn't give them the authority to do that.
Speaker 3: But they thought that if they gave them the money
Speaker 3: and then monitored how they spent the money, then indeed
Speaker 3: they might change some of these procedures, and some of
Speaker 3: the states did a lot of them did. They used
Speaker 3: the money to buy new equipment and so you wouldn't
Speaker 3: have all those chad things again and to use paper ballots,
Speaker 3: and they some of them put out policies where they
Speaker 3: wouldn't have an overriding police presidence around the roads to elections.
Speaker 3: I mean, there were some things actually that actually got
Speaker 3: changed as a result.
Speaker 1: You sort of got up this with the answer you
Speaker 1: just gave. But do you think there's the fact that
Speaker 1: a federal national election is administered by the states in
Speaker 1: the federal system that we have is inherently flawed. Do
Speaker 1: you think it's possible for a national election to be
Speaker 1: fair and fairly administered and equally administered across the country
Speaker 1: when each state is in charge of their own operation.
Speaker 3: Well, one answer to that question is that we've had
Speaker 3: federal elections in which federal officials have involved in corrupt behavior.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't necessarily mean that because they're state officials.
Speaker 3: So that's one answer. Okay, I think that it's okay
Speaker 3: to unless we amend the constitution, which is hard to do,
Speaker 3: you can't change that procedure. I do think the answer
Speaker 3: is for now for the Congress to give more powers
Speaker 3: to the Election Assistance Commission to hold hearings which it
Speaker 3: doesn't have, to call people in to monitor them, to
Speaker 3: staff them, to show that some people weren't serious about it.
Speaker 3: They didn't give their much staff to the commission that
Speaker 3: commissioned it, didn't hardly had anybody to do anything. So
Speaker 3: just putting some sunlight on what people were doing and
Speaker 3: having enough staff to do that, I think would help
Speaker 3: the process.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, Florida voters passed an amendment to the
Speaker 1: state constitution restoring voting rights to approximately one million Floridians
Speaker 1: with felonies on their records. The following year, Republican legislators
Speaker 1: passed a law stating that people with felonies cannot cast
Speaker 1: a ballot until they've paid off their outstanding fines and
Speaker 1: court fees. As a result, most of the one million
Speaker 1: people who regained the right to vote back in twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen still can't actually do it. Fiasco BUSHVII Gore is
Speaker 1: produced by Prolog Projects and district bed by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: The show is produced by Madeline kaplan Ulla Culpa, Andrew
Speaker 1: Parsons and me Leon nafak We. Had additional editorial support
Speaker 1: from Lisa Chase and Daniel Riley. Thanks for listening, We'll
Speaker 1: see you next week.