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 He said, well, this is a serious problem, we have a bomb threat. I said, how is
 this communicated? He said, well somebody called in to the county switchboard
 and said that there's a bomb planted in the county administration building, and
 it's about to go off. I thought for a moment and I said, who else knows about
 this? He said, just you and me, and I said, we're going to keep it that way. My
 reasoning was the following, that if somebody's going to blow something up,
 they're just going to go ahead and do it. If someone has really planted a bomb
 and they really want to blow up a building and the people in it, it seems to me the
 last thing you want to do is to warn everybody about it so they can evacuate the
 building. Statistically, the overwhelming majority of cases where a bomb threat is
 communicated, it turns out to be a hoax. I realized that was almost certainly
 what was going on here. I realized that the standard procedure was to evacuate
 the whole building and to search every square inch, and I said, if we do that
 we're not going to make the deadline. So, I made that decision. Of course, if
 there had been a bomb and it had been detonated and people had been killed or
 injured, it would have been my responsibility. If I had survived any such
 explosion, I would have had to live with that the rest of my life, but my intuition
 was this was simply a hoax, one last effort to try to keep us from concluding the
 recount on time.

 I said to the major, I used baseball terminology, I want you to pull the outfield in.
 See, we had three concentric circles of security. Inside the room was one layer,
 then just outside we had another layer, then we had people in the perimeter,
 maybe seventy-five to a hundred feet away. I said, just bring some of the people
 in and start very quietly. You must swear them to secrecy, just look for any
 package or box or something that doesn't belong here, but you are to select only
 a very few people whom you can trust to keep their mouths shut. I said, we're
 going to keep on going.

P: Because if it would have gotten out, you would have had to evacuate.

M: Oh, exactly, there would have been panic. Exactly. I said, I want you to pick just
 a small handful of people whom you can trust to number one, know what to look
 for, and number two, to keep their mouths shut and not say one word to anybody,
 including [the] vast majority of the law enforcement officers who were there.

P: Did they ever determine who made the call?

M: No, and it turned out there was nothing to it because the building is still there as
 of this day. But I mean, that was a very tough call, but the major didn't come to
 the board, the major came to me.


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