FEP 43
Page 44

M: A lot of people asked me afterwards, they said, gee, I watched you on television
 day after day and I was amazed at how calm you were. I said, well I think I'm a
 pretty "steady as she goes" type of fellow anyway, but I said in addition to that,
 fatigue is a great tranquilizer. It was amazing to me. I would go out into that
 media tent, and there were several rows of chairs, and very quickly I got to know,
 she's with the New York Times, he's with the Wall Street Journal, [and] he's with
 CNN. After awhile I got to know who everybody was with, and then I looked at
 the back of the tent and there are these twelve television cameras, each on its
 own tripod, and it really was not at all stressful. It was just, well this is something
 I have to do. I'm the chair of the canvassing board and one of the things I have
 to do is to let the public know what we're doing, and that means I have to deal
 with the news media. Although I dealt with the news media from time to time
 during my career as a judge, I'd never done anything on that scale. But, you
 know, that was my response, fatigue is a great tranquilizer. Rather than getting
 seven hours of sleep a night, which was then and still is what I normally would
 get, I was getting no more than four, and I'm sure very frequently it would be a
 fitful sleep at that, and not really that restful. Every morning when the alarm
 would go off, I'd have to flog myself to get out of bed. But I said, come on, let's
 go, you can catch up on your sleep after this is over, you've got a job to do, let's
 get moving.

P: Is there anything that we have not talked about or I have not asked you about
 that you would like to discuss?

M: There is one incident that occurred. Let me give you a little background. Rather
 early I made a decision to micro-manage the recount. I'm something of a control
 freak anyway, as the saying goes, but I realized that there were certain things of
 necessity I had to go to the board for and make decisions by majority vote,
 whether or not to conduct the recount, for example. Unlike some of the judges in
 other counties who always seemed to be asking for an opinion from this or that
 authority in Tallahassee, I realized that the judge who was the chair of a
 canvassing board has a great deal of inherent authority. Rather than wringing
 my hands and constantly saying, oh my goodness, what will I do, what will I do, I
 chose to exercise that authority. I found very quickly that the people from the
 sheriff's office or the elections office were constantly coming to me, asking me,
 well, what do we do about this? In fact they'd even follow me into the bathroom.
 I said to myself, I'd rather [that] they come to me rather than they [might] go off
 half-cocked and do something that turns out to be counterproductive. So, I lived
 with that all during the recount. The last day of the recount, in fact in the
 afternoon, when it looked as though we were going to make the deadline but just
 barely, the major who was in charge of the sheriff's office security came to me
 and said, we have a problem. I said, so what else is new? Because all we'd had
 for ten days was one problem after another.
 44