The scene in the plaza outside the elections office that day was “volatile,” Toobin wrote. Two days earlier, county officials had decided to do a manual recount of more than 650,000 ballots. But as a deadline drew nearer, they decided to instead focus only on 10,750 ballots that had been rejected by computer tabulators.
That decision enraged Blakeman and his GOP colleagues, who claimed the three-person canvassing board was gaming the system to ensure Gore came out on top.
In the plaza, Rep. John Sweeney — a Republican from New York whom George W. Bush would later dub “Congressman Kick-Ass” for his ruthlessness — said the board had bowed to the “Democratic machine.” By the time Geller stepped off the elevator and into the elections office to grab a sample ballot, the Brooks Brothers riot was well underway with protesters shouting “voter fraud” and “let us in,” according
to the New York Times.
“They were banging on windows,” he said. “People [in the office] were scared.” As an elections officer handed him the sample ballot — clearly labeled as such, he said — a GOP organizer with a clipboard started shouting: “He stole a ballot.” Geller quickly got back in the elevator. A group of protesters followed him.
“These people who had been kicking me were suddenly very quiet,” he said of the elevator ride. “When we got to the bottom, it started back up again. They were chasing me, and I was just trying to get to the exit.” One man in particular seemed to be “setting a pick” on Geller, he recalled. “He would jump in front of me and stop, so I’d run into him,” he said. At one point, the man threw himself into Geller before delivering a warning. “If you do that again, I’ll be forced to defend myself," Geller recalled the man saying.
The scene was captured in the Times and Tapper’s book. “The crowd is pulling at the cops, pulling at Geller,” Tapper wrote. “It’s insanity!” “Several angry Republicans, many of whom had acted as observers during the recount, surrounded ... Geller ... in the lobby of the building and accused him of slipping a ballot in his back pocket in the tabulation room,” wrote
Dana Canedy and Dexter Filkins for the Times. "Soon, about a dozen sheriff’s deputies surrounded Mr. Geller, as the crowd, which had quickly grown to more than 100 people, yelled “cuff him” and “busted.”
Another Democratic official told reporters he was punched and kicked, as well.
When Geller told authorities what was going on, however, the deputies escorted him back upstairs to see the election officials, who confirmed his account, and then to his car.
He got home just in time to switch on the television and see the Miami-Dade canvassing board pull an extraordinary about-face, voting to abandon the manual recount altogether and potentially depriving the Gore campaign of hundreds, if not thousands, of votes they hoped to pick up in the county. All sides admitted the Brooks Brothers riot played a decisive role.
“This was perceived as not being an open and fair process,” said David Leahy, the elections supervisor and a board member,
according to the Times. “That weighed heavily on our minds.”
“I think the board must have searched their hearts deeply and changed their position when they realized that the results would not be deemed legitimate,” Miguel DeGrandy, a GOP lawyer, told the same newspaper.
“We scared the crap out of them when we descended on them,” Blakeman recalled. “They knew what they were doing was breaking the rules and totally subjective, so they all met and decided to put an end to it.” Geller has a darker view of the demonstration that ended the recount.
“Anybody who says it was unrelated to the intimidation and violence floating around there is not telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes," said Geller. "Violence, fear and physical intimidation affected the outcome of a lawful elections process. I think that’s pretty bad.”
Blakeman, who is now a political consultant and occasional Fox News pundit, acknowledged that history had not been kind to the Brooks Brothers rioters.
“They tried to paint it that we were thugs and were rewarded for our thuggery with prime positions in the White House," he said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m not a thug. We never broke the law. It wasn’t our intent to do that. It was our intent to enforce the law.
“We got some blowback afterwards, but so what? We won,” he said. “I became member of [George W. Bush]'s senior staff. That’s hardly a job for a thug.” -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/hist...ow-brooks-brothers-riot-killed-recount-miami/
