“Coelho asked me to go in,” said Jim Margolis, the previous senior adviser to Barack Obama who back then was a twentysomething Democratic operative. “I believed I used to be moving into for 2 days, and I emerged, like, eight weeks later,” he told me. “I can just see us in these crowded little clerks’ offices, with the throngs of individuals, and the vote-counting attempting to happen, and all of the histrionics.”
“Hand-counting paper ballots and punch-card ballots is a grueling process,” Stephen Nix, now the senior director of Eurasia on the International Republican Institute, then the Midwest field director for the NRCC, told me. “Complete monotony,” he recalled, “after which unexpectedly there’s a questionable ballot and everybody runs to the table and surrounds the table, and there’s all this scrutiny, and there’s all this debate.”
By the center of April, because the auditors went from county to county, the day-to-day updates within the papers in Evansville read like a neck-and-neck horse race. “McCloskey jumps ahead three votes,” a headline read on April 11. “Lead seesaws,” a headline read on April 12. “McIntyre stretches result in six,” a headline read on April 13. The NRCC ran full-page advertisements within the papers. “Frank McCloskey and the Democrats in Washington,” the ads read, “are doing greater than just insulting the people of Indiana — they are attempting to steal an election.”
On April 18, though, on the intermittently testy last public hearing on the Municipal Constructing in Evansville, the duty force had had one final, fateful decision. At issue were 94 unnotarized, unwitnessed absentee ballots from a handful of counties. By law, none of them must have been counted — some extent upon which everyone agreed. The difficulty was a few of them were, because some county clerks had sent 62 of them to precincts, meaning they already had been amongst the combo of the counted. It was too late to take them out. The rub now was the remaining 32. They’d been rightfully held back by other clerks. They’d not been counted.
“These were held individually,” Panetta explained on the hearing. “They ought to not be counted.”
Clay, the opposite Democrat, concurred. It was “unlucky,” he said, that first group was counted, but to now count the second “can be to compound the issue that already exists.”
Thomas, the one Republican, was livid. He charged “hypocrisy.” The abiding proposition of the duty force was to “treat like ballots in a like way,” he said. “I heard over and once again that the cry is count all of the ballots,” he said. They need to “no less than be consistent,” he said.
“The truth is that this,” Panetta countered. “While we are saying we count all of the ballots, we do make some judgments and we do apply some discretion.”
Thomas, becoming increasingly more frustrated, which is evident even from just reading the transcript, asked Shumway for some guidance. But Shumway’s job was to be in control of the counting of the ballots — that the duty force decided to count. “I’m glad the essential decision on this,” he told the trio, “is yours and never mine.”
“Some were sent to the precinct and a few were retained by the clerks. My query is: So what?” Thomas said. “Is the difference in where they’ve been physically situated sufficient to treat them entirely in another way?”
“These became scrambled after they went to the precincts. It is just too bad. But they became scrambled on the precinct level,” Panetta stressed. He called this “the distinguishing feature.”
The duty force put it to a vote. The Democrats said no to counting the 32. The Republican said yes.
“Really surprising,” Thomas said sarcastically.
And with that, and at the top of this 5-hour, 14-minute hearing, Shumway announced the ultimate tally — McCloskey, 116,645; McIntyre, 116,641. A margin of 4 votes. The duty force audit had made the result even closer and fewer certain.
Republicans’ recriminations ramped up much more.
“They’ve the boastful power and so they use it,” Thomas said. “We is not going to be civilized. We is not going to assume it’s business as usual. We is not going to return to playing the lackey.” Thomas said he felt like he’d been “raped.” Too strong? “Confer with a rape victim,” he would tell the Los Angeles Times. “Ask them after it’s over in the event that they can just ignore it. I feel personally violated.” (Thomas declined to comment.)
