Lawyers from the 2000 recount fracas return for an anticipated Round 2, and they have reinforcements.
By DAVID KARP
Published October 17, 2004
Four years ago, Chris Griffin worked around the clock for Al Gore, helped plan the Democrat's predawn rally on Election Day in Tampa and went to bed that night thinking Gore had lost.
Then the Tampa lawyer's phone rang around 5:30 a.m. and he went back to work for the Gore campaign during the recount. Griffin appeared before election canvassing boards in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, then drove to Volusia County to attend an all-night legal training session. He was hospitalized days later for exhaustion.
This year, Griffin, 50, is among hundreds of lawyers who have been preparing for weeks to wage another Florida battle over the presidential election. The legal teams for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry already are fighting as they approach the election from different angles.
Democrats, who claim they will have 2,000 lawyers on hand in Florida on Nov. 2, say they want to make sure every qualified voter is allowed to vote. Republicans say they want election laws to be followed to prevent unqualified voters from casting ballots.
"Our strategy is really very simple," said Mitchell Berger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who is general counsel on the Kerry legal team and played a key role in the 2000 recount. "We want people to vote."
Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee lawyer who chairs the Bush legal team, contended Democrats are inundating elections offices with new voter registration cards to make it harder for supervisors to properly screen every application.
"It is part of their attempt to have a lawless election," Dempsey said. "It is clear that the Democrats in the Kerry camp are trying to disrupt the election and perpetuate fraud."
The first live round in the legal battle could be fired Monday, when early voting begins across Florida. Democratic lawyers are expected to be stationed at early voting sites to make sure all eligible voters can cast ballots. Republican lawyers may appear at the sites, too, but their strategists won't say whether they will challenge some voters' eligibility.
Both sides will be sticking to game plans that have been in the works for months.
"It has gotten real intense," said Gil Singer, a Tampa lawyer co-chairing the Bush-Cheney legal team in Hillsborough, who estimates he spends three hours a day on election law questions. "We are so organized, so set on doing our jobs, that it really is like a huge law firm on the ground."
The Kerry and Bush legal teams follow strict chains of command.
Decisions are made by state co-chairmen and then filter down to lawyers in every county. The teams communicate weekly through conference calls and a wave of daily e-mails.
"There is going to be no freelancing," Singer said. "It is going to be tightly set up. The lessons of 2000 have been learned."
Kerry lawyers
The leaders of the Kerry legal team are veterans of the 2000 recount.
Stephen Zack, a Miami lawyer and former president of the Florida Bar, heads up the team. His partner, David Boies, argued Gore's case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000.
Four years ago, Zack was in bed watching the election night returns when the Gore campaign called from Tennessee.
"I think we might need some lawyers in Florida," a Gore aide told Zack.
Berger, who opened his office to Gore's lawyers in the first days of the recount, serves as Florida counsel for Kerry.
His partner, Charles Lichtman, is the operational chief.
Lichtman headed up Gore's recount team in Broward County and recalls sleeping just four hours a night during the 2000 recount. When it ended, he swore he would never let something like it happen again.
A year ago, Lichtman started writing memos about how to prepare for 2004.
"There is no issue the Republicans will try to throw at us that we have not anticipated and have a strategy to deal with in advance," he said.
The size of the Kerry team reflects its strategy. On Election Day, Democrats say they will have a lawyer or trained volunteer in 7,000 precincts in Florida.
"I would call it the ultimate grass roots operations," Lichtman said.
Democratic lawyers have written training manuals, created a password-protected Web site for lawyers and conducted scores of training sessions in law offices around the state, including one Saturday at a theater in Sulphur Springs in Hillsborough County. Other sessions are conducted by conference call or e-mail.
Democratic lawyers also asked elections supervisors to fill out a nine-page questionnaire, which asks about issues including ballot security, poll worker training, recordkeeping of disenfranchised voters and the number of phone lines that will be active on Election Day.
During the Aug. 31 primary, the Kerry legal team stationed a handful of lawyers in Broward and some other counties in a trial run to assist voters who were turned away.
If a voter was going to walk away, the lawyer would step up to assist.
"We absolutely helped more than 537 people get to vote that day," Lichtman said, referring to the 537 votes that gave Bush a Florida victory and the White House in 2000.
Democratic lawyers also may carry laptop computers to look up the correct precinct locations for voters who show up at the wrong precinct, Lichtman said.
Bush lawyers
Republicans built their team two years ago when they set up a 350-person legal response unit to deal with Gov. Jeb Bush's re-election.
In 2002, the GOP lawyers prepared legal briefs to be filed in court if needed and researched the political leanings of every canvassing board member in all 67 counties.
Many of the same lawyers are working again, this time for the Bush-Cheney legal effort.
Barry Richard, who argued President Bush's case before the Florida Supreme Court in 2000 and was on standby for Gov. Bush in 2002, will represent the president again in 2004.
Dempsey, former deputy general counsel to Gov. Bush, is chairman of the legal team. He has organized 67 county chairmen and regional chairmen in every judicial circuit in Florida.
"We are prepared to respond to any attempt to try to steal this election from voters," Dempsey said.
Others lawyers working on the team include Carol Licko, a former general counsel to Gov. Bush who headed up a Miami-based "tactical unit" legal team in 2002; Roberto Martinez, a former U.S. attorney; and David Brown, chairman of the Broad & Cassel law firm and a Bush family friend.
Dempsey won't say if Republicans plan to plant observers in every precinct like the Democrats.
"We are watching and monitoring and waiting to see what the supervisors are able to accomplish, and what the criminal investigations are turning up," Dempsey said. But it doesn't appear likely - at least not yet. Republican lawyers in Pinellas and Hillsborough say doing so would be logistically difficult.
"What good is a lawyer in a polling site?" asked Clifton "Clif" Curry, regional co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney legal team in Hillsborough County. "Especially in Hillsborough County, we have not had an issue of voter fraud."
Elections supervisors also say they are getting far more questions from the Democratic lawyers than Bush attorneys. Last week, the Democrats sent two lawyers to a canvassing board meeting in Pinellas. Republican lawyer George Jirotka stopped by to introduce himself but then left. No Republican lawyer appeared at a canvassing board meeting in Pasco last week, but a Democratic lawyer and two Kerry staffers from Massachusetts came.
Republican lawyers have asked elections supervisors for copies of poll worker training manuals, supervisors say.
Dempsey said the Bush-Cheney team doesn't need a flood of lawyers to monitor the election.
"All we are asking is that the law on the books passed by the Legislature be enforced fairly," Dempsey said. "What they are asking is that the courts rewrite the law. In order to implement that (strategy), they need thousands of lawyers."
David Karp can be reached at karp@sptimes.com or 1-800-333-7505, ext. 8430.
