The view from the administrators.

• Position: The Legacy of Bush v. Gore in Public Opinion and American Law - Discussion

This panel of the symposium was presented on November 13, 2010, at the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens, Florida.

Michael Vera: I guess we'll go ahead and get started. But again, for those of you who were here last night, I'm going to reintroduce myself. My name is Michael Vera, and I am the editor-in-chief of the St. Thomas Law Review. I want to thank everybody for showing up 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I know that's a tough slog, but given the panelists and the topics we'll be covering this morning, it's well worth it and I promise you that.

I'm not going to go through my laundry list of thank-yous. One big thank-you to the administration, the law school faculty, professors, our wonderful deans, and our support staff. And also to The Law Review staff, you guys have been incredible this whole time, so thank you for that. One quick mention. Judge Michael Genden wasn't here last night, but we just want to recognize him and thank him for being such a great friend to St. Thomas University.

(Applause)

Michael Vera: And with that--Professor Nate Persily.

Professor Nathaniel Persily: So yesterday we heard from lawyers for the litigants in the case, but I guess litigants could be seen sort of very broadly defined considering it seemed like about two-thirds of the lawyers in Florida represent litigants of one stripe or another at the time. And so we now move to lawyers who were working for both the state government and county governments. And as with yesterday, I want to sort of begin by getting a sense of where they were and what their role was. We have with us Murray Greenberg and Jeff Ehrlich, both of whom were working obviously for Miami-Dade County, and Kim Tucker and Paul Hancock, who had been working in the Attorney General's office. And so we get different perspectives, both from the administration of elections, as well as what was happening in the courts throughout the state. Murray, to whom we all owe a great debt of thanks for organizing this symposium and being the bridge that brought this here, I want to start with you. And just could you give us a sense on Election Day what it was like in Miami-Dade and then in the days afterwards, sort of what your role was and what you were seeing.

Professor Murray Greenberg: Yeah. Election Day was relatively calm. We haven't had a calm one since then, but it was relatively calm back then. The vote was not real close in Dade County. It was pretty much what every election supervisor would want. Dave Leahy--we got the ballots counted. Jeff and I were out, you know, with the canvassing board.

We got it counted. And I remember before TV networks, you know, changed what was happening or at least announced there could be a change, calling up Dave Leahy, who was the election supervisor, and congratulating him on a very smooth election.

Everything seemed to have gone exactly the way we wanted it. I had plans--my wife and I had plans to go up to New York for Veteran's Day, which was coming up. We went up to New York. I mean, there was--you know, then there was the idea of the challenges and something going on.

And back then, for those of you who know me, I am not very technically talented. And we didn't have Blackberrys. I had a cell phone that I didn't know how to work really, and I kept seeing things roam coming in--R-O-A-M. And I couldn't figure out what was going on.

This was like two days after the election. And I didn't know how to pick up my messages. I checked home; I checked the office. There was no message there, so I kept having a good time in New York. I came back to find out that there was a hearing the next day in front of Judge Middlebrooks in federal court, which was talked about last night. But that's where it was. It was relatively calm. The storm came a couple days after the election for us.

Jeff Ehrlich: Yeah. I watched the election results from home. I didn't--I don't think I was involved with the canvassing board until when they started doing the automatic recount, which I think was the next day or the day after, but you know, I stayed up, I think, until 2:30 in the morning when they--the networks said it was for Bush, and I think I woke up in the morning and then they were saying it was much closer than they had thought. And I went to work--up to that point, I hadn't done a lot of work with the Supervisor of Elections.

I was doing a lot of commercial litigation for the County. And it seemed like a, you know, pretty normal process as far as the Miami-Dade supervisor was concerned. And it really wasn't until two or three days later that--when Miami-Dade started going back and forth with how it was going to do its recount--that things started heating up for us. So Murray didn't miss much in the first few days.

Professor Persily: Yeah. Well, we'll get into that. Now we heard a little bit from Bob Butterworth last night about what was happening with you two. Can you sort of add flesh onto those bones? In the early days after the election, what were you doing?

Kim Tucker: I actually ran General Butterworth's Washington office of which we were outposted in D.C. with--all the other people in the office worked for Governor Bush. And I called down to the office on Election Day because I voted in Maryland and they said, I can't talk to you now, Kim. There's some problem down in Palm Beach with a butterfly ballot. And I'm like, wow, really? I don't even know what that is.

And from then on, it sort of went downhill as the week progressed. And the next odd thing that happened in the Washington office was we got a call from Senator Warner to one of the guys that worked for Governor Bush on military affairs. And he said, tell Jeb we've got the military ballots on the way to him. The guy that got the message said, well, that's odd for him to call me himself, and why is he calling me about those military ballots.

And to this day, I don't really know the answer to that, but I've got my concerns. But I went down on the 11th of November and we had been waiting for President Clinton to sign a bill I'd been working on for a year and half to ban gray market tobacco importation, and from then on--there was no hotel room.

I had to sleep on a sofa, and I was outposted in the Capitol. And early in the morning, the staff would wake me up to make sure I showered before General Butterworth got to the office because I used his shower and left my makeup all over his bathroom. But it was four and a half weeks of very intense work with all of us where we got, I think, on average three to four hours of sleep with the brief turnaround times we had.

Paul Hancock: Prior to the election, my focus was on preparing for the election. And we were--I had formerly worked for many years in the Department of Justice in the Voting Rights Program, and I was coordinating with federal officials on the observance and monitoring of the election to make sure that it would be fair.

And we all thought that that was the bulk of our role, that we wanted to make sure this election would be done fair and we would work before the election, as you traditionally do. I actually had planned to leave Florida the day after the election because I thought everything was going to be over and I had serious family issues in Ohio that I had to deal with. General Butterworth talked last night about that early morning after the election when the TV cameras showed up.

My wife, Sandy Coleman, is here, woke me up about 4 in the morning. And the phone started ringing from Butterworth's home saying you better get over here, you know, we've got an issue. And it was--the debate for me was should I go to Ohio and take care of my family issues or should I stay? And General Butterworth said, go ahead. We'll talk by phone. And I went to Ohio and spent--I never dealt with the family issues.

I was on the phone with him most of the time and trying to figure out what was going on in Florida.

Eventually because of this military ballot issue, he said you better come back. And I came back and went to Tallahassee on--the election was the 7th. I went to Tallahassee on November 13, and I was supposed to meet the General at the Silver Slipper, a famous Tallahassee steakhouse, for dinner. And he said we'll get together and talk about everything we need to do at the Slipper, which we often did with wine at the same time. And he didn't show up, and I waited about a half an hour and finally called him and said what's going on? He said, well, I'm sorry, you need to get down here right now. We've got a real problem we need to deal with.

And so I went down to the Capitol building to his office and said--this was on--this was ten years ago today, November 13. And he--when I went in, he handed me an opinion that Katherine Harris had put out that said Florida law does not allow a recount in the counties that requested a recount. And he said, read this and tell me what you think. And I read it and thought, I don't--this doesn't seem right to me, but I'm not an expert in this Florida law issue.

And so General Butterworth called in his staff that was home--and this was late at night--his opinion staff. And these are career people. This isn't a political issue. He called in his people whose job is to issue opinions. And he had a request for an opinion from Palm Beach County as to whether a recount was permissible in these circumstances, and it was the same request that Katherine Harris had from Palm Beach County and she had issued her opinion. And our opinion people worked most of the night to give us their recommendation, and they concluded that she was just wrong. It was the wrong conclusion. Florida law did not prohibit a recount. In fact, it required a recount in these circumstances.

So we worked through that night to write another--to write a contrary opinion and release it the next day as General Butterworth's opinion that said you have to do a recount in these circumstances. And Palm Beach County then had two...