EST PALM BEACH, Fla. - The whole world is watching Palm Beach County, land of Rolls Royces and canasta games, a county containing so many economic, ethnic, and political groups that it has become a mini-America. Which is fitting, really, since the county seems to hold the whole nation's fate in its hands right now.
The television trucks have arrived in downtown West Palm Beach, setting up in a parking lot across from the courthouse, descending, en masse, upon anybody with a strong opinion and a good pair of lungs.
It's all anybody's talking about by the pool at Century Village, the most famous of Florida's retirement developments, where the Gore supporters are livid at what they see as their disenfranchisement, and the Bush supporters are angry at the Gore folks.
It has even penetrated the otherwise self-contained enclave of Palm Beach island, working its way into conversations usually confined to charity galas and marital strife.
''I just can't believe it's our county holding up this stupid election,'' said Alisson Boyd, 21, who works in an interior design shop.
At issue, of course, are the butterfly ballots in this year's presidential race, where candidates' names were listed on both sides of the page, making it easy for voters to punch the wrong hole. Many residents here maintain they mistakenly cast votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Vice President Al Gore. Even Buchanan conceded that this might have been the case.
This has made Palm Beach County the object of jokes on the late-night shows and made its elections supervisor, the embattled Theresa LePore, arguably the most famous low-level elected official in the country.
''It's a little embarrassing,'' said Gina Riniker, 24, who works with Boyd. ''We're embarrassed because it makes it look like Floridians don't know what they're doing.''
Before this, Riniker said, Palm Beach was just the land of sun and fun. Oh, and Kennedy scandals.
She was referring to William Kennedy Smith in 1991, accused and acquitted of rape at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach in 1991, and to the case of Kennedy cousin Michael C. Skakel, who is charged in the killing of Martha Moxley, then 15, in Connecticut in 1975. Skakel lived just outside Palm Beach until recently.
Election 2000 has trumped both, though.
In West Palm Beach, the first of four counties to begin recounting a sample of ballots by hand, one downtown block was crammed with reporters interviewing and photographing locals, and with locals watching and photographing reporters. At the corner of Third and N. Olive, some protesters waved signs Friday, though nothing official was really taking place. Every time someone raised his voice, he was surrounded by a forest of cameras, boom mikes, and tape-recorders.
A half-dozen officers from the sheriff's department, in bottle-green uniforms, stood in a circle, watching the spectacle with amusement. ''Welcome to America,'' said one of them.
Everyone was giving interviews. Robert Dempsey, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran who wore an eye patch, was hanging out by the fountain on Clematis Street, the site of a recently completed urban revitalization project. By 11:30 a.m. Friday, Dempsey was on his third interview of the day.
''We can send a man to the moon, but we can't get a machine that can vote,'' Dempsey said. ''If they gave us another chance, I guarantee Mr. Gore would be president.''
Dave King stood on a corner across from the television trucks, taking photographs of the photographers.
''The only thing comparable to this in craziness is a hurricane approaching,'' he said. ''We certainly get our share of notoriety. We live in the shadow of the island of Palm Beach, with its wealth and glamour, so we're used to it to some degree.''
King came to Third Street because he'd been watching CNN, and saw that legal analyst Greta Van Susteren was here. To him, wealth and glamour were one thing, Van Susteren entirely another.
''I thought I'd come down to see if I could see her,'' King said. ''She puts legal terminology in a way you can understand. She has pretty hair, too.''
One person conspicuously absent yesterday was elections supervisor LePore, an elected Democrat and the woman who devised the butterfly ballot at the center of the controversy.
''It's just an accident that the focus happens to be on one county, and it's her county, but she can handle it,'' said her lawyer, Bruce Rogow.
LePore, who has worked in that same elections department since she was 16, was clearly surprised by the reaction to the ballot, Rogow said, and she has decided to stay out of the spotlight.
''There's no question that there's been a frothing of everyone's latte over this,'' Rogow said. ''They're running over the side. I told her to go to the beach. She probably didn't.''
If LePore has plans to climb the political ladder, she might want to revise them now, said Bob Jarvis, a professor at Nova Southeastern University Law Center in Fort Lauderdale. ''Right now, I would say she couldn't become dog catcher,'' Jarvis said. ''Eventually, there could be a backlash in her favor. But I wouldn't want to be her right now.''
Almost as embattled as LePore this week were Palm Beach County's many senior residents, retirees who thought they would find a quiet life here but who suddenly find themselves at the center of a maelstrom. Most of the residents interviewed at Century Village were Gore supporters who feared that they had mistakenly cast their votes for Buchanan, or invalidated their ballots by punching them twice. For that, they had become the butt of late-night humor, and they didn't like it.
''We're getting more attention in Palm Beach than the O.J. Simpson trial,'' said Morty Shoenfeld, standing outside the Century Village activity center. His wife Sandra, holding an affidavit saying she ''might have'' mistakenly cast her vote for Buchanan instead of Gore, was worried that the whole thing would end badly, and that she and her fellow seniors would be ''written off as addlebrained old people who don't know what we're doing.''
''We're gonna be known as senile,'' said Barbara Chadwick,
in her 50s, who was relaxing at one of the complex's two elliptical pools Friday afternoon.
''It could happen anywhere the ballots were like this, and they'd complain the same way we're complaining. It's B.S.''
The people making fun of seniors seemed ungrateful for the effort the elderly made to vote, she said. ''They came on their walkers and in their wheelchairs, and they came out because they cared,'' Chadwick said. ''They voted because they care about the country for their grandchildren. And what's getting out is that we're a bunch of senior idiots who don't have the right to vote.''
The controversy wasn't going away at Palm Beach, the old-money playground most commonly associated with the county, either.
On Worth Street, Barbara Harris, who worked at a local polling place this year, said she thought the ballot was easy to understand - so easy that even a 99-year-old would not have trouble, she said. Harris said she thought it remarkable that national politics had entered Palm Beach society.
''This is basically a quiet community,'' Harris said. ''We're not into national affairs here. We talk about charity balls and who's going out with whose husband.''
