Milford, Connecticut
November 20, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Joshua Goldfein, a lawyer in New York City who first wrote to Open Letters a few weeks ago to say,

I keep crossing paths with your publication. I was working on a lawsuit against New York City’s welfare officials for denying food assistance to hungry people when you ran the letter about the Herman Miller Aeron chairs; the tabs in New York reported that the welfare bureaucrats here all have them too, although they were illegally denying hungry people checks for $18.65 to buy food while their benefits were processed. I was writing a piece about the Go-Betweens for the Chicago Reader when you ran the Lethem piece. I got engaged and was immediately stricken with GERD, which basically means really bad heartburn, which caused my sweetie to tell everyone that I got sick because we decided to get married, or at least publicly committed. And then you ran that engagementletter.

In today’s letter, Josh writes about counting votes in West Palm Beach, about rebellious qi, and about public commitment.

The election rolls on here in the United States: it’s been ten days since we concluded our week of election-related open letters with a note of seeming finality, and yet still, much is unresolved. (Like how did things turn out between Michael Welch and that tall girl?) And so today, for one day only, we return to Florida, and to the election.

Last week I received another open letter about the election, and West Palm Beach. I couldn’t ascertain whether it’s accurate, or even real – though it certainly feels real – so I decided against running it as a featured letter. But I thought instead I’d run an excerpt of it here, as a complement – an amicus curiae brief – to Josh’s letter. It’s signed “Ben Austin,” and it was forwarded to me by Kevin Kelly, former Wired and Whole Earth Review editor, current Open Letters all-around adviser. It reads as follows:

Dear friends,

I don’t normally send emails like this to a large block of people, certainly when it comes to my family, and certainly when the import of the issue makes it seem like the letter might travel far and wide. But so many people have asked about this story that it seems important to send it out. This is the true story of my mother, precinct clerk in Palm Beach county, Florida.

My mother was a precinct clerk in Palm Beach county, Florida, on election day of 2000. Mom’s very good friend Leah was a precinct clerk as well. Both of them were incredibly upset during and after election day, before anyone knew the import of these specific votes. And my mother was convinced there were serious irregularities long before they gained national prominence, and she called me to say so.

I note this because some Republicans are now asking, “If there were these irregularities, how come they were not raised until after the election?” In fact, my mother and the other precinct clerks raised these issues from the moment that the polls opened in the morning – the problem is that the person they intially called on was Theresa LePore, elections supervisor of Palm Beach county. She was the source of the ballot confusion, and was uninterested in the issue.

My mother, following the rules, said the poll workers had been told not to help people with their ballots, as it might bias the voters. My mother witnessed many, many people who voted incorrectly. Some stood on a second line and had their cards re-done, some punched the second hole (and thus their votes were probably thrown out), and some found out they voted for Buchanan after they had deposited their cards in the ballot box, and there was thus nothing they could do.

Mom called me up to complain about this after the election, and she called me up again on Thursday, very upset after reading a story in the New York Times (Nov. 9 2000, p. B6). The Times story stated:

“After numerous complaints were received on Tuesday morning, Ms. LePore issued this directive to the county’s 106 precincts: ‘Attention all poll workers. Please remind all voters coming in that they are to vote only for one (1) presidential candidate and that they are to punch the hole next to the arrow next to the number next to the candidate they wish to vote for.’”

Mom never received this directive, and she believes that if anyone knew they could have helped people vote their preference, the outcome would have been very different. Instead, my mother and the others were trying to do the right thing, and they felt that helping explain the ballot to these people would have been helping them to vote for Gore, something she didn’t feel was proper. These women are honest to a fault.

Mom’s friend Leah did receive the directive, but not until 4 p.m. on election day, and only by accident – someone visiting from the main office told her about it. In the meantime, my mother and Leah (and most of the precinct clerks) had been desperately trying to call the county office. They had been given a phone number by Ms. LePore and told that the phone line would be staffed throughout the day. They were told to call if there were any problems.

Mom tried to call starting at 7:30 a.m., calling straight through when polls closed, but she got a busy signal the entire time. She was at a polling station with only a pay phone, so she had to deposit coins each time, and with long lines waiting for her, she became increasingly frustrated.

Leah was precinct chief at the retirement village where they live, and ran a polling station at the clubhouse. Leah tried to call as well, and when she couldn’t get through, she called the operator to ask her why the phone was busy. The operator told her the phone was off the hook, meaning nobody was on the line the entire day. Evidently, the supervisor’s office just didn’t want to hear the complaints.

Leah then faxed the supervisor’s office with her concerns at noon and again at 2 p.m. Nobody called Leah back until 5 p.m., when she heard from Ms. LePore, with the following words: “don’t bother me.”

Ben Austin

Tomorrow: a letter about birdhouses. Stay tuned.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough