FEP 43
Page 2

P: Were you on the canvassing board during the Beckstrom v. Volusia County
 case?

M: No, that was another judge, who's still on the bench.

P: Do you regret now having served on the canvassing board in 2000?

M: No. It was a huge amount of work, and for the nine or ten days in question,
 rather than getting seven hours of sleep each night, I got no more than three [or
 four] hours of sleep each night. I will say this, my secretary and I would talk a
 couple times day while this was going on, and this was right after the
 [canvassing] board had unanimously voted to conduct a recount, a full manual
 recount, of all votes for President of the United States. She said, I'm going to tell
 you what everybody over here is saying. I said, who's everybody? She [said],
 judges, judges' secretaries, attorneys, deputy sheriffs, [and] court reporters, [are]
 all saying the same thing. I said, what's that? They're all saying, thank God it's
 McDermott, because he'll know what to do and he's got the backbone to crack
 the whip over people.

P: Now talk a little bit about what Election Day was like for you and when you first
 discovered that this was going to be an extraordinary election.

M: Well, the legislature has since changed the law on absentee ballots, which says
 that you can now [be] processing absentee ballots up to five days prior to
 Election Day. The law back then was that you cannot process absentee ballots,
 that is, running them through the tabulating machine, whichever device the
 county may have, until the polls open on Election Day. So all of us were
 frantically busy putting several thousands of absentee ballots through the optical
 scanners all day long, even into the night. In fact as I recall, we were doing it
 even after the polls closed because there were that many absentee ballots
 mailed in, not just from all over the country, but from all over the world. So, we
 were very busy doing that. Problems would come up at precincts, so the three of
 us who were on the canvassing board would get together and say, well, okay,
 we'll do this, or tell them that. See, Deanie Lowe herself was on the ballot; she
 was up for reelection.

P: So, she was not on the canvassing board?

M: That's right. She was our advisor, although we did also have the county attorney
 there with us.

P: Okay, so Patricia Northey and Ann McFall were the other two members?


2