2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida

Based on Wikipedia: 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida

The Night Democracy Held Its Breath

Five hundred and thirty-seven votes. Out of nearly six million cast. That's how close the 2000 presidential election came down to in Florida—a margin so thin that if you filled a large high school gymnasium with Florida voters, you'd need to find just one person who changed their mind to flip the entire outcome.

The story of the Florida recount isn't just about hanging chads and butterfly ballots, though those would become infamous. It's about how the most powerful democracy on Earth nearly broke under the weight of an election too close to call, and how the resolution—or lack thereof—still echoes through American politics today.

Election Night Chaos

November 7, 2000 started normally enough. Americans went to the polls to choose between Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, and Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican. Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, was considered a toss-up state.

Then the television networks lost their minds.

At 7:48 in the evening, Eastern time, the Voter News Service—a consortium formed by the Associated Press and major networks to call elections using exit polls and early returns—declared Florida for Gore. The networks broadcast this call immediately.

Here's the problem: Florida spans two time zones. The panhandle region, in the Central time zone, still had polls open for another ten minutes. And the panhandle traditionally voted heavily Republican.

Later that evening, the networks sheepishly moved Florida back to "too close to call." Then, around 2:15 in the morning, they called it for Bush. Gore, watching the returns, telephoned Bush to concede. He was in his motorcade, heading to Nashville's War Memorial Plaza to deliver his concession speech, when his aides got word that the margin had shrunk dramatically.

Gore called Bush back to un-concede.

"You mean to tell me you're retracting your concession?" Bush reportedly asked.

"You don't have to be snippy about it," Gore replied.

By the end of election night, Bush led by 1,784 votes out of nearly six million cast. Under Florida law, any margin under half a percent triggered an automatic machine recount. The next day, that margin shrank to just over 900 votes.

The Legal Armies Mobilize

Both campaigns understood immediately what was at stake. Whoever won Florida won the presidency. Within days, each side had assembled teams of lawyers, political operatives, and strategists.

The Bush campaign brought in James Baker, the former Secretary of State who had served under Bush's father. Baker was a veteran of high-stakes political warfare, known for his ruthlessness and discipline. The campaign also enlisted Roger Stone, a Republican operative with a reputation for bare-knuckle tactics.

Gore countered with Warren Christopher, who had served as Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. Christopher was a skilled diplomat, known for his measured, careful approach.

The difference in style would prove crucial. Political commentator Jeff Greenfield later observed that Republican operatives in Florida "talked and acted like combat platoon sergeants" in what one called "switchblade time"—the biggest political fight of the century. Democrats, by contrast, "talked like referees with a fear of pushing too hard, not wanting to be seen as sore losers."

Hand Counts and Hanging Chads

Florida law allowed candidates to request manual recounts in specific counties. Gore's team zeroed in on four heavily Democratic counties where they believed machine errors had missed legitimate votes: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia.

The problem was the punch-card voting machines used in these counties. Voters were supposed to push a stylus through a pre-scored piece of cardboard called a "chad" to register their vote. But sometimes the chad didn't fully detach. A "hanging chad" was attached by one corner. A "dimpled chad" showed an indentation but hadn't been punched through at all. A "pregnant chad" bulged but remained in place.

Should these count as votes? And who decides?

Florida had no uniform standard. Each county's canvassing board could establish its own rules. Broward County decided that any indication of voter intent—even a mere dimple—counted as a valid vote. Palm Beach County was stricter, requiring at least two corners of the chad to be detached.

The Bush campaign saw opportunity in this chaos. Their lawyers argued that the lack of uniform standards violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. The same ballot, punched the same way, might count as a vote in one county and be rejected in another.

It was a clever argument, and it would eventually win the day.

The Butterfly Ballot

Palm Beach County had another problem entirely. The county's Supervisor of Elections, Theresa LePore, had designed what she thought was a helpful ballot layout. The names of the presidential candidates were spread across two pages, with the punch holes running down the middle in a staggered pattern.

It looked, more or less, like a butterfly with its wings spread.

The problem was that the visual design was confusing. Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate, appeared on the right-hand page with his punch hole—the second hole from the top—directly across from Al Gore's name on the left-hand page. Voters who intended to vote for Gore but followed the arrow from his name to the nearest punch hole ended up voting for Buchanan instead.

Palm Beach County recorded 3,407 votes for Pat Buchanan. This was remarkable. In neighboring counties with similar demographics, Buchanan received only a few hundred votes. Buchanan himself admitted that most of those votes were probably meant for Gore.

"When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night," Buchanan said, "it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore."

There was no legal remedy. The ballot had been approved before the election. The votes, however accidentally cast, would stand.

The Overseas Ballots

While the manual recounts dragged on, Florida counties were counting overseas absentee ballots—primarily from military personnel stationed abroad. The count was completed on November 18, and it increased Bush's lead to 930 votes.

This would prove decisive. Later analysis showed that Gore had actually won the Election Day vote. It was the overseas absentee ballots that put Bush over the top.

But there was a problem. A six-month investigation by the New York Times found that 680 of those overseas ballots were counted illegally. Some arrived after the deadline. Others lacked required postmarks. Still others came from voters who weren't registered properly.

The Times reported that these violations were due to "blatantly illegal actions on the part of local election officials, encouraged by Republicans." When Democratic lawyers raised objections to questionable ballots, Republican operatives accused them of trying to disenfranchise military voters. The political optics were terrible, and Democrats backed off.

A 2004 academic analysis by Kosuke Imai and Gary King determined that if all the invalid overseas ballots had been disqualified—which they weren't—Gore would have gained ground but probably not enough to win without picking up votes elsewhere.

The Florida Supreme Court Steps In

As the manual recounts continued, Florida's Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, announced she would certify the election results on November 14, whether the recounts were complete or not. Gore's team sued to extend the deadline.

The case went to the Florida Supreme Court, whose seven justices had all been appointed by Democratic governors. On November 21, they ruled unanimously that the manual recounts must be included in the final tally and extended the certification deadline to November 26.

The Bush campaign appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the recounts stumbled forward. Miami-Dade County started counting, then stopped on November 22, claiming they couldn't meet the new deadline. The Gore campaign sued to force them to continue. The Florida Supreme Court refused to intervene.

When 5:00 p.m. arrived on November 26, Palm Beach County was still counting. They missed the deadline by two hours. Katherine Harris certified the statewide results with Bush ahead by 537 votes.

Gore sued again, this time under Florida's "contest" provisions, which allowed a candidate to challenge certified results by proving that enough legal votes had been rejected or illegal votes counted to change the outcome.

December: The Final Battle

On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling. They didn't decide the case but sent it back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to clarify their reasoning. This was an ominous sign—the nation's highest court was looking for ways to overturn Florida's courts.

The same day, Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls rejected Gore's contest lawsuit. Gore appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.

Also on December 4, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature convened a special session. They planned to appoint their own slate of electors pledged to Bush, citing the U.S. Constitution's provision that state legislatures determine how electors are chosen. If the courts ruled for Gore, Florida might send two competing slates of electors to Washington—a constitutional crisis not seen since the disputed election of 1876.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court made its boldest move. By a 4-3 vote, the justices rejected the approach of counting only four Democratic-leaning counties. Instead, they ordered an immediate statewide manual recount of all "undervotes"—ballots where the machines had detected no vote for president.

This was actually a more defensible approach. A statewide count addressed the equal protection concerns about treating counties differently. It also meant examining ballots in Republican counties that Gore's team had never requested.

The counting began the next morning, December 9. It lasted only a few hours.

The Supreme Court Speaks

That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency stay, halting the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a rare concurring opinion explaining why such immediate action was necessary. The recount, he argued, could cause "irreparable harm" to Bush "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

Justice John Paul Stevens was appalled. In his dissent, he wrote: "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm." He argued that stopping the count, not completing it, threatened public confidence in the electoral process.

The Court scheduled oral arguments for December 11.

The next day, December 12, the justices issued their decision in Bush v. Gore. The unsigned per curiam opinion—meaning it was issued on behalf of the Court rather than attributed to any individual justice—found that the Florida Supreme Court's recount order violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Different counties were using different standards to evaluate ballots, meaning identical votes would be treated differently depending on where they were cast.

This was, in some ways, the same argument the Bush campaign had been making all along.

But the Court didn't just say Florida needed uniform standards. They also said there wasn't enough time to create them. December 12, they noted, was the "safe harbor" date established by federal law—the deadline for states to resolve election disputes if they wanted their electoral votes to be automatically accepted by Congress.

The recount must stop.

The vote was 5-4 on the remedy, with the five Republican-appointed justices in the majority. Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter agreed there was an equal protection problem but would have allowed Florida to continue counting under uniform standards.

The decision included an extraordinary disclaimer: "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." In other words, don't cite this case as precedent for anything else.

Justice Stevens's dissent was devastating. "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election," he wrote, "the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Gore Concedes

On December 13, 2000, more than five weeks after Election Day, Al Gore addressed the nation.

"Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States," Gore said. "And I promised him that I wouldn't call him back this time."

The audience laughed. Gore continued:

"I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

He praised the American constitutional system and called for healing. He did not challenge the Supreme Court's legitimacy. He did not encourage his supporters to march on Washington. He did not refuse to accept the results.

He simply lost.

What the Later Counts Showed

After Bush's inauguration, several news organizations conducted their own comprehensive reviews of Florida's ballots. The results were maddeningly inconclusive.

Under the strictest standards—requiring a cleanly punched chad for a vote to count—Bush won. Under more lenient standards that counted dimpled chads as votes, Gore won. Under the specific standards the Florida Supreme Court had ordered before being stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court, the outcome depended on exactly how you interpreted "voter intent."

One finding was clear: if you counted all the overvotes—ballots where voters had selected more than one candidate for president—Gore won decisively. Many overvotes occurred when voters both punched the chad for their candidate and wrote that candidate's name in the write-in space, essentially voting for the same person twice. The machines rejected these as invalid, but the voter's intent was obvious.

In predominantly African American precincts in Duval County—Jacksonville—some 21,000 ballots were thrown out, mostly overvotes. The Duval County ballot had spread the presidential candidates across two pages, confusing voters who didn't realize all the names were for the same office and selected candidates on both pages.

No one would ever know for certain who really won Florida in 2000. The answer depended on which votes you counted and how you counted them.

The Purge

One aspect of the Florida fiasco received less attention than the butterfly ballots and hanging chads, but it may have been more consequential.

Before the election, Florida's Secretary of State's office had ordered county election officials to purge from the voter rolls anyone identified as a convicted felon. Florida law, a legacy of the post-Civil War era, permanently disenfranchised people with felony convictions.

The state hired a private company, Database Technologies, to compile the purge list. The company used loose matching criteria. If your name was similar to a felon's name, you might end up on the list. If you shared a birthday with a felon, you might be flagged.

Later investigations showed error rates of fifteen percent or higher. Thousands of Florida citizens who had never been convicted of anything were illegally removed from the voter rolls.

The demographics of the errors were striking. African Americans were identified on some counties' purge lists at up to five times their share of the population. And African Americans voted Democratic by overwhelming margins.

A December 4 article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune exposed the flaws. Many people on the list weren't felons at all. Some had convictions in other states but had had their voting rights restored. Some were guilty only of misdemeanors. Some shared names with felons but were entirely different people.

At an NAACP-sponsored hearing in Miami four days after the election, Black voters told of being turned away at the polls, denied ballots because they'd been wrongly labeled as felons. Others reported police cars blocking the way to polling places, though local authorities called this coincidence.

For many African Americans, especially those with memories of the civil rights era, it felt like the return of Jim Crow.

What It All Meant

The 2000 election revealed how fragile American democracy could be. The world's most powerful nation couldn't count its votes accurately. Different counties used different equipment, different standards, different levels of competence. The margin of error in the voting process was larger than the margin of victory.

Congress responded by passing the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which provided funding to replace punch-card machines and improve election administration. Many states adopted electronic voting systems—which created new controversies about security and auditability.

The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore has never been cited as precedent by the Court itself. Lower courts have struggled with what to make of it. The decision explicitly limited itself to "present circumstances," which critics saw as an admission that the legal reasoning couldn't withstand broader application.

Political scientists and historians continue to debate whether the outcome would have been different under various counting scenarios. They also debate whether Gore's cautious, legalistic approach cost him the election, and whether a more aggressive strategy might have prevailed.

What's clear is that the 2000 election exposed fault lines in American democracy that would widen over the next two decades. Questions about voting rights, election administration, the role of courts, and the peaceful transfer of power would become increasingly contentious.

In 2000, despite everything, the transfer of power was peaceful. Gore conceded gracefully. The country moved on, however bitterly divided.

That, at least, was something.