ynda Tocci, a former banking employee and chief of staff for the state treasurer, may be good at counting money, but she's better at counting votes.
Tocci - like many of her fellow Democratic party operatives who flew to Florida over the last week to volunteer in the presidential election - ended up in an unlikely place: a tense and steamy room inspecting ballots in Palm Beach County.
Tocci added five votes to Vice President Al Gore's column during the hand count, after straining through her glasses to see whether ballots were actually punched through.
Hundreds of miles to the north, Rob Gray, a top aide to Governor Paul Cellucci, was standing guard in the room where many overseas absentee ballots were arriving in Jacksonville, a largely Republican area populated with members of the military.
''We've gotten the fluorescent light tan, that's about it,'' Gray said in a telephone interview, lamenting that his visit has been confined to a stream of Holiday Inns, post offices, and law firms. ''It's extremely detail-oriented and very boring stuff, but it could come down to a handful of votes.''
Gray, who ran the losing campaign in Maine for Governor George W. Bush of Texas, hopes he, John Brockelman, executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, and Brian Cresta, chairman of the Massachusetts GOP, can add a few to their candidate's tally before heading home.
And so it plays out across Florida.
While no one is sure how many Massachusetts residents have offered their time, legal knowledge, or political skills to one side or the other in Florida over the last week, this much is clear: They are a dedicated, sleep-deprived bunch - so tired they slip up and say things like ''gush and bore'' instead of Bush and Gore - who still believe politics is relevant. They are the type who will eat doughnuts for their two daily meals and hope their plants don't die while they're gone.
''This is being counted as my vacation,'' said 26-year-old Joan Wasser, a lawyer at Choate Hall & Stewart who has been stationed in a strip mall retail space in West Palm Beach since Saturday, creating affidavits for hours on end for voters who believe they accidentally cast ballots for Pat Buchanan instead of Gore. Others have told her poll workers gave them erroneous instructions, refused to help, or declined to give them new ballots once the voter realized they had made a mistake.
Wasser, who is staying at her grandparents' house, said an e-mail from another Gore-connected lawyer alerted her to the need for volunteer legal help.
''I packed a few suits and some shorts in the off-chance that I would have some time to play outside, but we've actually been kept very busy,'' said Wasser, whose ''office'' here is a plastic chair at a folding table. ''People are surviving on a terrible diet of doughnuts and whatever else they've been able to scrounge up.''
Wasser said she is one of about a dozen lawyers in her area working for the Gore campaign. That figure does not include Harvard law professors Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe, who argued before a federal judge in Miami Monday that a hand count of ballots should continue.
The list would have included Cheryl Cronin, a Boston-based specialist on elections law, but it doesn't because her firm, Holland & Knight, has done work for Bush. That conflict made it impossible for her to pitch in, despite the Gore campaign's wooing.
''It's an extremely important case with extremely important consequences,'' Cronin said after returning to Boston. ''It would have been a wonderful opportunity to have participated.''
But Florida is still in experienced hands.
In Palm Beach alone, there's Cellucci's chief of staff, Stephen O'Neill, and Brian Golden, a freshman Democratic state representative from Allston who endorsed Bush, doing battle with Jack Corrigan, a former State House deputy in the Dukakis administration, as well as Lynda Tocci, the Gore vote-getter.
And then there's John Sasso, the strategist behind Michael Dukakis's presidential run, helping with the massive organization and handling media tactics for Gore from his base in Fort Lauderdale.
The mastermind behind the influx of Massachusetts Democrats is Gore consultant and Hill & Barlow attorney Charlie Baker, who had been in Nashville on election night, made a detour for his Brookline home the next day to pack a bigger bag, and flew to the state party's headquarters in Tallahassee.
Other Massachusetts Democratic volunteers: state party executive director Mark White is in Dade County; Representative Jarret Barrios of Cambridge is, in part, working on legal matters in South Florida; Julie Burns, Mayor Thomas M. Menino's deputy chief of staff, is deploying ''observers,'' as the people who are inspecting the vote recounts in Palm Beach are known. There's also Dennis Newman, a lawyer who helped elect Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley and was director of Gore's campaign in Massachusetts; Marty Walsh, who worked on US Senator Edward M. Kennedy's campaign; and Toody Healy, a Democratic State Committee member who is running the telephone outreach deploying volunteer observers.
There are other local Republicans there, as well, including former Massport official Matt Trant, who has helped with recounts in Volusia County; Alicia Davis from the GOP state committee; Ed Cash from the Cellucci Committee; and Mike Fullerton, who worked for Bush in Maine.
