New York Times reporters David Barsto and Don Van Natta, Jr.

DATE July 19, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: David Barstow and Don Van Natta discuss their six-month
investigation into the role of overseas absentee ballots in the
Florida election
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The Florida vote in last year's presidential election is still under
investigation. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. The New York Times just
completed a six-month investigation into one aspect of the vote, Florida's
late-arriving, overseas absentee ballots. My guests are the two lead
reporters on the story, David Barstow and Don Van Natta. Their front-page
story was published Sunday. They analyzed the 2,490 ballots from Floridians
living abroad, which were counted as legal votes after Election Day. The
reporters found that 680 of those ballots were flawed. The reporters do not
know for whom each individual ballot was cast, but four out of five were
accepted in counties carried by Bush. The flawed votes included ballots
without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without
witness signatures, ballots mailed from within the US and even ballots from
people who voted twice. These ballots would have been disqualified had
Florida's election laws been strictly enforced.

In response to The Times' findings, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
said,
`This election was decided by the voters of Florida a long time ago. All
but
the most partisan Americans have moved on.' I asked David Barstow and Don
Van
Natta why they wanted to investigate what really happened in Florida's
overseas vote count.

Mr. DON VAN NATTA (The New York Times): Well, David and I were asked by Joe
Lelyveld, the executive editor of The Times, in late December, to go back to
Florida and look carefully at what happened and take some time and really
look
closely and decide what we wanted to do. And he left the playing field wide
open, and we decided to look specifically at the overseas absentee ballots
in
early January, because there was quite a bit of confusion at the time of
their
counting. And we also discovered, quite to our surprise, on Katherine
Harris'
Web site, the secretary of State of Florida that, in fact, Al Gore got more
votes than George W. Bush. When you take out the overseas absentee ballots,
Gore actually got 202 more votes than Bush, and that discovery led us to
decide that we should look very carefully at this group of ballots.

GROSS: Did you find anything that would have actually changed the outcome
of
the election?

Mr. DAVID BARSTOW (The New York Times): It's hard to say in a way. One of
the most difficult things about this project is, of course, the actual
ballots
that voters fill out when they send in an overseas absentee ballot are
separated from the ballot envelope. So there actually is no way to know
precisely and for sure how an individual voter voted. We did, to try to get
some measure of this, retain a Harvard professor to do some statistical
model,
and he came back with three conclusions, in essence, when we asked him:
`What
would have happened had these 680 ballots that we found, did not comply with
Florida law, what would have happened if these ballots had been thrown out?'

And his first conclusion was that these ballots had been thrown out--we
don't
actually know--there's no way to know with mathematical certainty whether
Mr.
Gore would have won or whether Mr. Bush would have won. However, his best
estimate, based on a number of very sophisticated modeling techniques that
he's well known for in the field of statistics and political science, was
that
Mr. Bush probably would have won by 245 votes as opposed to 537 votes. He
also found, though, that there is a small chance that Mr. Gore would have
won
the election, or could have won the election, had these ballots been thrown
out. And so that was probably, you know, the primary finding in terms of
what
would have happened had these ballots not been counted.

GROSS: Now one of your main findings in your investigation of the absentee
vote is that the Republicans used a double standard in what votes they
pushed
to have counted and what votes they wanted eliminated. They used one
standard
in Republican strongholds and another in Democratic strongholds. What were
the differences?

Mr. BARSTOW: Mr. Gore got a lot of criticism for having a strategy that, as
the Republicans put it, was aimed at disenfranchising members of the
military.
One of the big findings that we came up with here, through the course of our
reporting, was that actually the Republicans had a strategy that was set
out,
in some pretty elaborate instructions, to try to throw out as many civilian
ballots as they could, and to focus that effort in Gore counties. And it
was
our finding, through our reporting and through our statistical analysis and
through our database that actually a political strategy, this political
strategy, helped produce this unequal treatment of civilian and military
ballots. And in light of the US Supreme Court's decision in suspending the
manual recounts, that ballots should not be treated unequally, this was a
significant finding to us.

GROSS: So the Supreme Court ruled that ballots should not be decided
unequally, and therefore the manual recount should not continue. But you're
saying that the Republicans took a strategy of counting votes differently
depending on whether they were civilian or military, thus contradicting the
Supreme Court's equal treatment.

Mr. VAN NATTA: Yes. The argument that the Supreme Court embraced was the
argument that was made by the Bush lawyers, and that is that the manual
recounts that occurred in the Democratic counties applied different
standards,
arbitrary standards in that it was unfair, it was a disparate treatment of
the ballots in those places, and when the Florida Supreme Court said there
should be a manual recount all over the state, that argument was taken to
the
Supreme Court. And what we found was that several weeks before that
argument
was made in the Supreme Court, the Republican lawyers went about basically
embracing that strategy as a political strategy, and in Democratic counties
where Al Gore got more overseas absentee votes than George W. Bush,
Republican
lawyers were aggressively fighting for the disqualification of ballots sent
in
from civilian overseas citizens, whereas at the same time, the very same
time
simultaneously in Republican counties, in the northern part of the state in
particular, the Republicans were fighting for as many of those ballots to be
counted as possible. And they were the ones that really pushed this
disparate
treatment that we found all over the state.

GROSS: What were the arguments the Bush team used depending on whether they
were arguing to throw out votes or to count votes?

Mr. BARSTOW: Well, this is really quite interesting. I mean, I think a lot
of people remember that the Bush team made a lot about a Democratic
memorandum
written by an election law specialist in Tallahassee that essentially
instructed Gore lawyers on the how-tos of challenging overseas absentee
ballots. And they describe this as essentially a manifesto for
disenfranchising members of the military. One of the things that we found
that was very interesting is that the Republicans had a version of that
Democratic memorandum that was almost identical in terms of describing `Here
are the ways that you can challenge civilian ballots, civilian overseas
ballots with flaws such as no witnesses, no postmarks, etc.' But at the
same
time, they also provided Republican lawyers with a separate set of
instructions for defending military ballots with precisely the same flaws.

Now I know that in their arguments to the canvassing boards, we see from the
transcripts and tapes and so forth, that they often made the argument that
federal law allowed a different standard for military ballots and civilian
ballots, that, in other words, federal law kind of gave military voters a
little bit more leeway, a little bit more benefit of the doubt. That
actually
is not the case. Federal law does not make that kind of distinction, nor
does
state law, and I think actually in some of our final interviews with the
Republican lawyers, they acknowledged as such.

GROSS: My impression is that the arguments that were made by Republicans
and
Democrats in the count of the overseas ballots didn't get nearly the
attention
that the arguments made about the manual recount got. Do you think that the
overseas ballot was kind of underneath the radar because all the cameras
were
trained on the manual recount?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Oh, there's no question about that. That's the main reason
why David and I set out to do this project in January, it was below the
radar
screen. There are 67 counties in the state of Florida, and the counties
were
so far-flung and so spread out, there were many counties where there were no
national reporters present, and there was really no way--it all occurred on
one day, on November 17th, into the early morning hours of November 18th,
this
counting. And so there was really no accounting of what happened by the
national press. On the day after the count, the Republicans quickly went on
the offensive and attacked the Gore campaign for this Herron memo that David
talked about, and immediately all of the coverage shifted to that. It
shifted
to how the Democrats had sought to exclude the military vote, whereas there
was absolutely no attention paid, or very little attention paid, to the
Republican strategy.

So we set out to not only collect all of the ballot envelopes of all 3,700
overseas absentee ballots in January to build the database, but we also
collected the canvassing board minutes, transcripts, tapes from all 67
counties, and reviewed them all to really reconstruct what occurred in that
nine-day period from November 17th, when the first overseas ballot was
counted, to November 26th when the last one was counted.

GROSS: My guests are New York Times reporters Don Van Natta and David
Barstow. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are David Barstow and Don Van
Natta, and they did a six-month-long investigation for The New York Times
into
the overseas absentee vote in the presidential election.

Let's look at what some of the flaws were in the overseas ballots. For
example, let's look at postmarks. At lot of the absentee ballots--you can
tell me exactly how many--didn't have postmarks.

Mr. VAN NATTA: Well, the issue here is a standard that was well established
in Florida for nearly 20 years, which was--Florida is one of the few states
that actually allows overseas ballots to arrive after Election Day and be
counted. In fact, that's one of the very unique things about this group of
ballots. They're the only group of ballots that can legally be received
after
Election Day. But getting back to this standard, the standard said any
overseas ballot, to be valid, it has to have clear proof that it was cast on
or before Election Day from outside the United States. The state of
Florida,
the election officials there, have been, of course, worried about, on the
one
hand, making sure that people who are overseas get as much opportunity to
vote
as possible, but at the same time trying to prevent late voting or other
kinds
of fraudulent voting. And so this standard was widely, almost universally
enforced in Florida for many years.

What we found in this investigation is that there were hundreds of ballots
that were accepted overwhelmingly in Bush counties that had no proof that
they were, in fact, cast on or before Election Day from outside the United
States. In fact, we found a number of ballots that were postmarked four,
five, six days after the election. And in our interviews--we conducted
hundreds of interviews around the world with voters--we found a substantial
number of voters who acknowledged to us freely that, `Yes, we voted after
the
election. We were, of course, swept up in watching this drama unfold on
CNN,
and we wanted to get our votes in.'

And so the postmark issue really is meant to be sort of that threshold
barrier
against late voting, improper voting, and yet hundreds of these ballots were
counted in this election.

GROSS: I found the number that you quoted, there were 344 ballots that had
late, illegible or missing postmarks. Now what exactly were the arguments
the
Bush team used to include these ballots that had late, illegible or missing
postmarks?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Well, the most frequent argument that they made was that the
voter should not be penalized for lack of a postmark, because the lack of a
postmark is no fault of the voter. They repeatedly said that the voter
should
be given the benefit of the doubt, that they, in fact, did cast their
ballots
on or before Election Day as the law requires.

GROSS: Now how does that square with arguments that the Bush team made in
the
manual recount?

Mr. BARSTOW: Well, it's interesting because in the manual recount one of
their main rallying cries was that it's unfair to selectively change
established election standards after the game has been played. And so in
south Florida they said, `Hey, it's not fair for, say, Broward County or
Palm
Beach County to suddenly switch from counting dimpled chads or hanging chads
while other counties are applying a different standard.' But what we found
in
this case is that with these overseas absentee ballots, the Bush team
selectively went about trying to get the states established election
standards
for counting overseas ballots changed in Bush strongholds, while fighting
for
the old standards in Gore counties.

GROSS: You mentioned that during this investigation you found people who
said, `Yes, we voted late. We saw that the election was deadlocked and we
wanted to get our vote in, so even though the election was over, we voted
anyway.' And probably some of those votes were counted. How did you find
people who admitted to actually voting on an absentee basis after the
election?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Well, The Times went to extraordinary lengths to talk to as
many overseas voters as possible. We had a team of 20 reporters literally
go
physically to see voters in eight or nine countries around the world, as
well
as we called a total of about 300 voters and asked them a series of
questions
about how they voted. And in the course of that, 30 out of the 300 people
that we interviewed acknowledged to us, freely admitted to us, that they, in
fact, did vote late. And of that number, four of the 30 people had their
votes count.

Mr. BARSTOW: One thing, actually, I think it's important for us to note in
this is that one of the questions that we wanted to answer, and I think we
did
answer, was whether or not the suspicions of especially the Democrats were
correct that there was some sort of effort by the Republican Party after the
election to encourage people to vote late. We found absolutely no evidence
of
that in any of our interviews with voters. We did find some evidence, based
on some e-mails that we obtained from some members of the Bush campaign,
that
they were exploring the possibility of whether it was legal to encourage
people to vote late. But we found no evidence that they actually acted upon
that.

GROSS: Did you find that there was any political pressure, either from
Democrats or Republicans, that were put on the people who were actually
counting the overseas ballots?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Yes, there was tremendous pressure brought to bear by both
sides on canvassing board members. But in the course of looking at the
transcripts and the minutes of some of these canvassing board meetings, and
looking at all of the documents that were filed and letters that were
written
to canvassing board members in all of the counties throughout the state, we
found some extreme examples. For instance, in the Panhandle, a Bush lawyer
threatened, implicitly threatened canvassing board members with federal jail
time if they did not count overseas absentee votes. That's just one extreme
example.

GROSS: Did you try to investigate whether there was any collusion between
the
Bush team that was arguing to have ballots counted in Republican areas and
thrown out in Democrat areas, between them and Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris, who was certifying the vote?

Mr. BARSTOW: We found a number of things involving Katherine Harris. One
is
that Katherine Harris made a series of formal pronouncements during the
weeks
of the recount describing her interpretation of various election laws and
rules. And one of the startling discoveries we made was that there were two
veteran Republican strategists who were deeply involved in actually writing
those pronouncements, including a statement she made on November 13th that
dealt with the rules for counting overseas absentee ballots. That statement
was immediately controversial, because in it she suggested that overseas
ballots could be counted even if they were postmarked after the election.
This was not something that had been said before by any secretary of State
in
Florida, as far as we could find, and Democrats viewed this statement as a
gift, so to speak, to the Republican lawyers, who were anxious to count as
many of these ballots as possible.

Now it's difficult, though, to actually reconstruct everything that she did
on
this because these statements were written on several computers that were
placed in what they called a war room off of her office in Tallahassee.
Unfortunately, many of the records on those computers have been erased, or
were erased after the election, which appears to be a violation of Florida's
very strict public record laws.

GROSS: Did you find whether Governor Jeb Bush was involved in the count of
the overseas absentee ballots?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Our investigation did not focus so much on Jeb Bush as it
did
on Katherine Harris. Katherine Harris is important because--just to step
back
for a minute--as the state's top election official she has an obligation to
make sure that election rules are applied uniformly in Florida. And, in
fact,
she issued a ruling in 1999, I believe, in which she said that Florida's 67
counties have to be careful to apply the absentee ballot rules in a uniform
manner. And so we examined her role in this a little bit more carefully
than
we did Jeb Bush's role. He did have some role in this. He did help supply
the Bush team with a lot of the lawyers they used in front of the canvassing
boards. But he was not a primary focus of our investigation.

GROSS: David Barstow and Don Van Natta will be back in the second half of
the
show. The results of their six-month investigation were published last
Sunday
in The New York Times. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, the Democrat strategy for counting late-arriving absentee
overseas ballots in Florida. We continue our conversation with New York
Times
reporters David Barstow and Don Van Natta about their six-month
investigation
into Florida's overseas absentee vote.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with New York Times reporters David Barstow and Don Van Natta. On
Sunday, they published the results of their six-month investigation into
Florida's overseas absentee ballots that arrived after Election Day last
year.
The reporters found that 680 of those ballots that were counted were flawed
and would have been disqualified had Florida's election laws been strictly
enforced. Bush won the state by 537 votes.

In the first half of our conversation, we discussed the Republican strategy
of
trying to count the flawed votes in Republican counties while trying to
disqualify votes in Democratic strongholds.

What was the Democratic strategy to deal with overseas ballots?

Mr. BARSTOW: That's a simple one. Their strategy was to challenge as many
improper absentee ballots as possible. They challenged hundreds of ballots;
military ballots, civilian ballots, Democratic ballots, Republican ballots.
I
mean, even in Gore counties they were challenging ballots, and sometimes the
Bush team could simply sit back and wait for the Gore lawyers to do their
work
for them. They knew, as everyone did, that historically the overseas
absentee
vote has gone to Republican candidates.

Now there was some talk early on--some people may remember there was talk
about, `Well, maybe there's going to be a bunch of votes coming from
Israel,'
people trying to vote for Joe Lieberman and Al Gore. In fact, we found that
there were a few dozen ballots from Israel. I think it was--What?--64
ballots
from Israel. Most of those ballots were actually rejected, and so there
really ended up being no great wave of votes from Israel. So the Gore
strategy was, very simply, `Let's challenge as many votes as possible, and
let's try to minimize the damage.'

GROSS: So I think what you're saying is that the Gore strategy was
politically motivated: `Let's throw out as many of these votes as possible
because probably the majority of them will be for Bush.' But on the other
hand, they were consistent in what they challenged.

Mr. BARSTOW: Yes. I mean...

GROSS: They didn't have a double standard for Democratic and Republican
counties.

Mr. BARSTOW: No, they were consistent even when it hurt their candidate.
But yes, by all means, it was politically motivated in the sense that they
made a very basic calculation: the fewer of these votes counted, the
better.

GROSS: Now one Sunday during the recount era, Joe Lieberman was on "Meet
the
Press," and he said that the Democrats shouldn't do anything to
disenfranchise
members of the military. And he called on Florida's canvassing boards to
reconsider the rejection of military ballots. How did his statement affect
the way the Democratic Party proceeded?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Oh, it had a tremendous impact. It was seen in Florida and
among the Democrats, themselves, as an enormous retreat on this issue. The
canvassing boards, several days after that, began reconsidering rejected
overseas ballots at the request of the Bush campaign. A Democratic lawyer
called it the Thanksgiving stuffing operation because it occurred the week
of
Thanksgiving. But 14 canvassing boards, mostly in Bush counties--I think 13
of the 14 were in counties won by George W. Bush--went back and looked at
the
rejected overseas absentee ballots, and ended up counting several hundred
more
that had been rejected just one week earlier. And quite a few of the flawed
ballots--a couple of hundred of those flawed ballots--were counted then over
that Thanksgiving weekend.

But the Lieberman statements on "Meet the Press" were cited to us by those
canvassing board members as one of the reasons why they went back and took
another look at these ballots. So it had a tremendous impact on the count.

GROSS: Now do you know if Joe Lieberman intended to make the statement on
"Meet the Press," or was it just a response to the negative implications of
questions he was getting, questions implying that the Democrats were
limiting
the rights of people in the military by not counting their ballots?

Mr. BARSTOW: It appeared, actually, as though he was initially trying to
say, very simply, `Look, our strategy is not to go after military votes.
Our
strategy is to simply ask that only legal votes be counted.' But under some
pretty vigorous questioning, especially questioning that had to do with this
Harren memo that Don mentioned earlier, you know, it seemed as though at
that
point he was taken somewhat off guard. And we know, certainly from talking
to
Mark Harren(ph), who wrote this memo, that he was absolutely stunned
watching
this unfold on national TV. See, from their point of view, it was, `Hey,
all
we're asking is that these canvassing boards strictly adhere to Florida's
election rules. We're not targeting military voters, per se. We're just
consistently seeking firm application of Florida's election laws.' And yet
somehow, they suddenly found themselves on the defensive for targeting
military votes. Harren's memo, actually, doesn't say anything about, `Let's
just go after military votes.' His memo says, `Here are all the different
ways you can challenge all overseas ballots.'

Mr. VAN NATTA: It's interesting, too, that Senator Lieberman used the
phrase
`benefit of the doubt,' and saying that the benefit of the doubt should be
extended to these military ballots. Because what our investigation found is
the benefit of the doubt was not applied equally all over the state. The
benefit of the doubt was given far more often to questionable ballots in
counties that were won by George W. Bush. The counties won by Al Gore were
much stricter and much more likely to throw out votes, which most likely
would
have been for Mr. Gore, than the counties that were won by Mr. Bush.

GROSS: Now let's discuss what you didn't find in your investigation into
the
count of the oversea absentee vote in the presidential election. You didn't
find evidence of fraud on either side.

Mr. VAN NATTA: No, we did not. We interviewed more than 300 voters all
over
the world, and not a single voter told us that they had been contacted by
either party and encouraged to vote. That was something that the Democrats
in
particular suspected of the Republicans, and we found absolutely no evidence
of that.

However, in the course of that reporting, we did find that Republicans on
the
House Armed Services Committee did reach out to some voters after their
ballots were rejected to get their opinions of what happened to be used as
part of the Republicans' public relations campaign and legal campaign in
Florida. But that was quite a bit later, about three weeks after Election
Day, when that occurred.

Mr. BARSTOW: Well, actually, I just wanted to amplify a little bit on what
Don just said about the House Armed Services Committee. I mean, one of the
things that we found--and I think it's an important part of that effort--is
that the House Armed Services Committee and some Republican members on the
House Armed Services Committee used some of their contacts with the Pentagon
to persuade the Pentagon to provide e-mail addresses and other contact
information for some of these sailors. And that is something that at least
some of the Democratic members of the committee feel was an inappropriate
use
of the committee's resources.

The other thing that we found--and I think this is important, too--and that
is
one of the big challenges for the Bush campaign was, of course, to make sure
that as many of these ballots got in on time to be counted as possible. In
past elections, roughly a third of the overseas absentee ballots did not
make
it to Florida in time to be counted. They did not make it to Florida in
that
10-day window after the election that's allowed by state law. But in this
case, what we found is that 97 percent of the overseas ballots made it to
Florida in time to be counted, in part because both the United States Postal
Service and the Pentagon made a strong effort, under the prodding of the
Bush
campaign, to rush the delivery of these ballots back to Florida. And so
from
a political point of view, it was a triumph for the Republicans to get so
many
of these ballots back to Florida on time to be considered by these
canvassing
boards.

GROSS: My guests are New York Times reporters Don Van Natta and David
Barstow. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Don Van Natta and David
Barstow, and they did a six-month investigation into the overseas absentee
vote during the presidential election. And they wrote a lengthy piece on
the
results of their investigation Sunday in The New York Times.

There is a law, and I'm not sure if this is a state law or federal law, but
there's a law that says all overseas ballots can be thrown out if the number
of flawed ballots exceeds the margin of victory. Is that a state or a
federal
law?

Mr. VAN NATTA: It's actually contained in state precedents, state legal
precedents. It's in several Florida Supreme Court decisions that have
helped
kind of set the guidelines for absentee ballot rules. And you're correct.
There's a--in those Supreme Court decisions, the justices said, `Yes, if the
number of invalid absentee ballots exceeds the margin of victory, then a
judge
could, in some circumstances, throw out all the absentee ballots and simply
go
with the machine vote on Election Day.' Mr. Gore was aware of this. I
think
some of his aides argued to him that he should contest these ballots for
that
very reason, but he declined.

GROSS: Why did he decline?

Mr. VAN NATTA: There was, I think, a real split inside the Gore team on
this
issue. There were strategists on the ground in Florida who desperately
wanted
to challenge these ballots. And there were lawyers, too, who wanted to go
after them because it would give the Gore team a chance before the Supreme
Court to make the argument and rebutting the Republicans' equal protection
arguments, that, in fact, there was disparate treatment when these ballots
were counted. So they--we were told by some of those lawyers that felt
strongly about this, and strategists, that they wanted to make that argument
before the Supreme Court and also make it publicly.

But Warren Christopher and Bill Daley advised Al Gore not to challenge these
ballots because the military vote had become such a political third rail for
the Democrats, and they had felt so badly burned by the country's outrage at
what had occurred that they shied away from it.

GROSS: If the Gore team had gone to court, could they have proven that the
number of flawed ballots exceeded the margin of victory in the overseas
ballots? Would the math have worked in the Gore team's favor?

Mr. BARSTOW: It would have been incredibly difficult for them to do that.
I
mean, it took us literally months of effort to, first of all, collect all of
these absentee ballot envelopes; secondly, to analyze them very carefully.
I
mean, we went to incredible lengths to understand these ballots, the ballot
envelopes. For example, there were postmarks in Arabic, and we would--went
out and translated those postmarks. It would have been very, very tough for
them, in the time that they had, to have proven that the number of ballots
that didn't comply with state law exceeded the margin of victory.

Mr. VAN NATTA: Yeah. They only had anecdotal evidence from some counties.
They knew, for instance, that in Clay County two ballots had been faxed from
Maryland and had been accepted. I mean, they knew of certain problems with
ballots in certain places, but they were only a handful that they really
knew
about. So there's no way they would have been able to make that argument.

GROSS: How would you kind of sum up the results of your study into the
overseas absentee vote?

Mr. VAN NATTA: I think the best way to summarize it is that the Republicans
pursued an extremely sophisticated, aggressive strategy that had a direct
impact on the results. The strategy was to do everything possible to get as
many military ballots counted in Florida, while at the same time in counties
won by Al Gore, below the radar screen, challenging ballots from overseas
civilians. And we saw the results of that. The results were that 680
ballots
that had some kind of flaw, some of them multiple flaws, were still accepted
in Florida.

And some of the flaws, I wanted to add, Terry, are--you know, we found a
good
number, more than 100 ballots, that had postmarks from inside the United
States. You know, these are overseas ballots that get this privilege of
arriving within 10 days after the election. The absentee ballots from
inside
the United States must arrive in Florida by 7:00 on Election Day. Yet, more
than 100 ballots with domestic postmarks from places like Corpus Christi,
Texas, and San Diego and Nashville were accepted even though they arrived
after Election Day.

We found 19 voters who cast two ballots, and both of them were counted.
That
occurred in Duval County. The Duval County election officials there said it
was a mistake. But 19 voters--in an election where many people were very
frustrated that they didn't get one vote, 19 voters got two votes in Duval
County.

We found five ballots that were received by canvassing boards after the
November 17th deadline, and yet they were still counted. One arrived, I
think, on November 21st.

Mr. BARSTOW: I mean, it's actually--just to circle back a little bit on
these ballots that had domestic postmarks, a lot of them came from military
towns in the United States, places like Everett, Washington, and Hampton
Roads, Virginia. We actually tracked down many of these voters, and they,
again, freely admitted to us that, `Yeah, we were inside the United States
on
Election Day. We sent in our ballot, and the ballot was counted.'
Overwhelmingly, these ballots were counted in Bush counties. Of the 680
ballots that didn't comply with state law, four out of five of them were
counted in Bush counties.

GROSS: Governor Jeb Bush of Florida signed a new election law into effect
in
May. How does that change the overseas voting and vote counting?

Mr. VAN NATTA: The law has changed to allow ballots that do not have
postmarks or even have late postmarks. The law states clearly that the
election supervisors must provide a place on these ballots for voters to
sign
the date when they sign the ballot. One of the problems in Florida is that
66
of the 67 counties had no place for voters to put dates on the ballots. So
the only proof that the ballot was cast before Election Day, or on Election
Day, was the postmark. But now Florida is doing everything possible in the
future to make sure that voters actually do put the date when they sign
them.
And so postmarks will not matter nearly as much under the new law as they
did
under the old law.

GROSS: Not to be too cynical, but isn't it really easy to just postdate
something just to say it's a few days earlier than it really is?

Mr. BARSTOW: Yeah. Well, it's funny that you mention that. We did talk to
a couple of voters who actually admitted to us that, `Yeah, we did backdate
our ballots.'

But the other thing that I wanted to mention about this reform package is
that
on the one hand, while there's now a law that basically makes the postmark
irrelevant, the local election officials in Florida are also appealing to
the
Justice Department to simply do away with this 10-day window that's allowed
for receiving overseas absentee ballots. And that would just simply make
the
whole question of late voting--that would make that moot.

GROSS: So a ballot would have to be in by Election Day to be counted?

Mr. BARSTOW: Yes. Yes. They're making--they've made or are planning to
petition the Justice Department to simply do away with this 10-day window.
I
think that none of them will miss having to ponder the question of
postmarks.

GROSS: What's next on the recount front? The story really isn't completely
over yet. There's still (technical difficulties) newspapers, including The
New York Times, that is in the middle of their own recount. What's the
story
with that?

Mr. BARSTOW: Well, the story is that they're still counting. They hope to
complete their recount sometime later this summer. They have...

GROSS: What are they counting? What are they recounting?

Mr. BARSTOW: They're recounting everything, every single regular ballot,
punch card ballot, absentee ballot. They are going back with the help of a
private research firm, and analyzing ballot by ballot both the
overvotes--these are ballots where someone selected more than one candidate
for president--and the undervotes, where a machine or a man recorded no vote
for president, and trying to see whether there were votes that were missed.
That's an entirely separate endeavor from the work that Don and I did
earlier
this year.

GROSS: My guests are New York Times reporters David Barstow and Don Van
Natta. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guests are New York Times reporters David Barstow and Don Van
Natta. We're discussing their six-month investigation into the count of
Florida's late-arriving overseas absentee ballots in the presidential
election.

You got access to the overseas ballots, to about 2,490 overseas ballots.
Was
it hard to get access to them? What did you have to do?

Mr. VAN NATTA: It was not hard to get access to them in the sense that
Florida has a very wide-open Sunshine Law, which makes all of this
information
public record. It was difficult, though, practically speaking, to retrieve
them all. We had to, literally, David and I, travel around the state and go
to many election supervisors' offices and actually, literally, photocopy
them
ourselves. We also were fortunate enough to have the use of a law firm in
Florida and paralegals there and staff there that helped us also collect
them.

But we collected all 3,700 overseas absentee ballot envelopes; not just the
2,490 that were accepted, but the other 1,300 or so that were rejected, and
compiled them all and sent them to a firm in Maryland that put them into a
database so we were able to then look at the patterns and trends. And, you
know, the truth really emerged from the database about what occurred.

GROSS: Who's not talking who you still want to hear from because they have
key pieces of the puzzle here?

Mr. VAN NATTA: Well, at the top of the list is Katherine Harris. David and
I attempted to interview her over the two-week period before the story was
published, and she declined. Her spokesperson told us that she was going to
be in Argentina when the story was published, and that she would prefer to
respond to our story in an op-ed piece when she returned. So we never had a
chance to speak with her.

We also wanted to speak with Jim Baker. Mr. Baker was instrumental in the
Bush team's strategy. He was the person that made so many of the most
important public statements during the post-election period, and he also
declined our request for an interview.

GROSS: Has your investigation made you think that the outcome of the
election
was the wrong income?

Mr. BARSTOW: You know what? We haven't actually worried about that. We
worried about just trying to figure out what the heck happened in Florida.
It's such a complicated subject. We just simply wanted to try to set out
for
our readers, to the best of our ability, what happened with this critical
batch of ballots. Again, without these ballots, Al Gore wins by 202 votes.
Bush rode to victory on the backs of these ballots. And we were just--it's
a
very complicated story, and we just poured all of our energies into trying
to
figure it out and report it as truly as we could.

GROSS: So you mean without any of the absentee ballots at all, Gore wins?

Mr. BARSTOW: Without any of the overseas absentee ballots, without these
2,490 ballots that were ultimately counted after the election, Gore wins by
202 votes.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. VAN NATTA: And that information was not known last November because, if
you remember, the initial group of overseas absentee ballots were counted on
November 17th, 10 days after Election Day. And Mr. Bush picked up a net
gain
of 630 votes at that time. So he never trailed. Al Gore never caught Mr.
Bush. And, of course, that made--had a huge impact on what occurred. But
when it was all over and all of the recounts, the manual recounts,
particularly in Broward County, were completed and added to the certified
total that Katherine Harris certified on November 26th, it became clear
that,
in fact, Mr. Gore, without these ballots, actually did receive 202 more
votes
than George W. Bush.

Mr. BARSTOW: I do think, Terry, that actually our findings shift new light
onto Katherine Harris' decision to not give Palm Beach--you may recall Palm
Beach wanted a little bit more time to complete their manual recounts. And
it
was coming down to kind of the penultimate deadline, the 26th of November.
And Palm Beach was asking Harris for more time. She declined to extend the
deadline. And as a result, I think it was 176 votes for Mr. Gore were not
counted.

Our statistician from Harvard said that now if we factor those votes in,
along
with the votes--the 680 improper absentee ballots that were counted, Mr.
Gore
had a substantially greater chance of, perhaps, pulling this thing out. At
the time, that decision didn't seem decisive. It seemed as though Bush had
won by 537 votes, and this 176 votes from Palm Beach were not all that
important. Now with our findings, according to our statistician at least,
it
becomes much more significant, at least for historians.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both for talking with us about your
investigation. Thank you.

Mr. VAN NATTA: Thank you.

Mr. BARSTOW: Thank you.

GROSS: New York Times reporters Don Van Natta and David Barstow spent six
months investigating Florida's absentee overseas ballots. Their findings
were
published last Sunday in The Times.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

We'll close with a recording featuring singer Mimi Farina. She died of lung
cancer yesterday at the age of 56. Her family, including her sister Joan
Baez, were at her bedside. Farina was also the founder of the charitable
organization Bread and Roses, which presented performances at hospitals,
prisons and senior citizens' homes. Here's Mimi Farina, with her late
husband, Richard Farina, recorded in 1965.

(Soundbite from 1965 recording)

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. RICHARD FARINA: (Singing) Look who's crying, talking to a stranger.
The
pain and the sorrow you've seen. Too many bad times, too many sad times.
Nobody knows what you mean.

Mrs. MIMI FARINA and Mr. FARINA: (Singing in harmony) But if somehow you
could pack up your sorrows, and give them all to me, you would lose them. I
know how to use them. Give them all to me.

Mr. FARINA: (Singing) No use rambling, walking in the shadows, trailing a
wandering star. No one beside you, no one to hide you and nobody knows what
you are.

Mrs. FARINA and Mr. FARINA: (Singing in harmony) But if somehow you could
pack up your sorrows, and give them all to me, you would lose them. I know
how to use them. Give them all to me.
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