Disputed Presidential Election of 2000

I

Introduction

Disputed Presidential Election of 2000, controversy regarding the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election that took five weeks to resolve. The controversy involved Texas governor George W. Bush, the candidate of the Republican Party, and Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic Party contender. The primary setting for the dispute was the critical state of Florida, which each candidate needed to win. Bush won such a narrow election night victory there that it triggered an automatic statewide re-count of the votes. It also led to a flurry of charges, countercharges, and lawsuits challenging the fairness of the contest. The battle for Florida went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States before Bush was declared the winner. Along the way, the dispute raised fundamental questions about the integrity of the democratic process, from the effectiveness of the voting machines and the legitimacy of the electoral college system to whether African Americans in Florida were discouraged from voting.

II

Election Night

Besides Gore and Bush, the frontrunners in the 2000 election, the other major presidential candidates were Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. The race between Bush and Gore was expected to be extremely close. Bush held a small lead in most national polls, but some reports indicated that his margin was dwindling in the final days. In a presidential election, most of the public’s attention is focused on the popular vote—the raw number of votes cast. However, political strategists are more concerned with electoral votes—that is, the number of votes a candidate will get in the electoral college. Before an election, political parties in each state nominate a group of electors for their presidential candidate. In most states, the party whose candidate wins the most popular votes sends its electors to cast the state’s electoral votes for the candidate; in Maine and Nebraska, electoral votes can be divided among candidates depending on the proportion of the vote they received. The electoral college convenes to vote about a month after the election. Every state gets one elector for each of its national senators and representatives, and the District of Columbia gets three. A candidate must receive 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Florida, with 25 electoral votes, was critically important to both candidates in the 2000 election.

Throughout election night, November 7, and into the early hours of the next day, the presidential race in Florida was too close to call. As in past elections, news organizations were planning to project the winner in each state after the polls closed. They relied on statistical models that combine historical trends, analysis of sample precincts, and exit polls—polling of people after they have voted. At around 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, news organizations projected Gore as the winner of Florida, but a couple of hours later, they retracted that call and said the state was still undecided.

Shortly after 2 am, the major networks declared Bush the winner, and Gore called the governor to concede the election. But as Gore prepared to address his supporters in Nashville, Tennessee, Bush’s margin in Florida began to shrink. About an hour later, it was clear that the final tally in the state would be so close—less than one-half of one percent—that it would trigger a state law requiring a re-count. Vice President Gore called Bush and retracted his concession. Americans woke up the next morning to an extraordinary situation—the presidential election was still undecided. Gore had narrowly won the national popular vote. But with Florida undecided, neither candidate had the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. Gore had 266 electoral votes, and Bush had 246. Whoever won Florida would win the presidency.

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III

The Dispute Begins

Bush clung to a lead of just a few thousand votes out of 6 million ballots cast in Florida as state officials began a machine re-count. Both campaigns sent teams of high-powered lawyers to the state. Gore attorneys investigated reports of irregularities that seemed to raise questions about the fairness of the election. Many of the disputes revolved around arcane, but legally critical, technical flaws in the voting process.

In Palm Beach County, there was a confusing two-page “butterfly ballot” that had names down the left and right sides with punch holes in the middle. It resulted in about 19,000 people selecting more than one presidential candidate. It also gave ultraconservative presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan several thousand votes in an area that is generally liberal and likely to vote Democratic.

In other areas throughout Florida, reports emerged that some African Americans were denied the right to vote because their names were incorrectly removed from the official lists of eligible voters or their voter registration applications were not processed correctly. Others were discouraged from voting because of long lines or unhelpful election officials. In addition, some people claimed that many voting machines in predominately African American precincts were old and did not function properly. A computer analysis of the voting by the Washington Post newspaper indicated that percentages of spoiled ballots were higher in those African American precincts.

The Gore team also focused on heavily Democratic counties in south Florida where voters reported problems. Miami-Dade and Broward counties recorded thousands of so-called undervotes, where punch card ballots did not register a selection for president when they were run through the counting machines. Democrats suspected that when voters used the pointed stylus on the ballot, the perforation, or chad, did not fall away cleanly. It was left either dangling or merely dimpled. Democratic lawyers believed that re-counting those ballots by hand, a process known as a manual re-count, might reveal which candidate the voters intended to choose. They thought that it might show many voters who intended to choose Gore—possibly enough to change the election results.

The machine re-count cut Bush’s lead to 327 votes. On November 9, the Gore campaign asked election officials for hand re-counts in four counties—Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The Bush campaign asked a federal court in Miami to block the re-counts. The Bush team argued that manual re-counts were unfair because they used a subjective standard unlike the automated machine re-counts.

Although the court refused to block the re-counts, Bush still enjoyed a significant advantage. State law required that counties certify (declare official) election results within seven days of the election. It was clear that the manual re-counts would not be finished by the November 14 deadline. In Florida, the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, would oversee the certification process. A Republican and Bush supporter, Harris emerged as a key player in the re-count controversy. Harris refused to extend the certification deadline to include the results of the manual re-counts. She maintained that only machine malfunction or natural disaster, not voter error (that is, wrong holes punched or hanging or dimpled chads) could compel manual re-counts. Only overseas absentee ballots would be counted after November 14, but they had to be received by November 19.

Gore’s lawyers asked a state circuit judge to block Harris from requiring election results by November 14. The judge upheld Harris’s authority to certify on that date. However, he also said the four counties in question could file amended returns after the deadline and Harris could use her discretion to decide whether to accept or reject them. Again, Harris said she would reject late filings. On November 17, however, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in and ordered Harris not to certify the election results before a hearing on November 20.

IV

The Florida Supreme Court

The Florida Supreme Court had a reputation as being liberal and activist, and Republicans feared it would extend the certification deadline to include the manual re-counts. At oral arguments on November 20, the justices seemed to be most interested in one issue: At what point did allowing re-counts risk making Florida too late to participate in the electoral college vote? Gore’s lawyers, led by David Boies, argued that the state had until December 12 to pick its electors, which allowed plenty of time for the re-counts. Electors from each state would meet on December 18 to cast their votes.

The next day the court ruled unanimously for Gore and granted a five-day extension for manual re-counts, until Sunday, November 26, at 5 pm. “The will of the people, not a hyper-technical reliance upon statutory provisions, should be our guiding principle in election cases,” the justices wrote. The next day, the Bush campaign asked the United States Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the Florida high court ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in early December.

The re-count process was slow, tedious, and fraught with disputes. Each county used a different standard in evaluating undervotes. Workers struggled, sometimes with magnifying glasses, to divine the intent of the voters. Lawyers for each candidate and representatives for each party were on hand to protest decisions that they did not like. On November 22, the Miami-Dade re-count descended into chaos. When county officials attempted to move to a smaller workroom, Republican protesters pounded angrily on doors and windows because the smaller room limited the number of observers. The county canvassing board stopped the re-count, saying it was impossible to finish by the deadline. However, it denied that the protests had influenced the decision. It was a blow to Gore because he had already seen a net gain of about 150 votes in that county.

In Palm Beach County, canvassers struggled to meet the 5 pm deadline on November 26, but it was clear they would fall short by a few hours. The board asked Harris to extend the deadline until 9 am the next day, but she refused. Instead she took the set of returns compiled before the re-count. That evening, in the state Capitol’s cabinet room, Harris certified the election results and declared Bush the winner of Florida, with 2,912,790 votes to Gore’s 2,912,253. It was a difference of just 537 votes but it was enough to give Bush Florida’s 25 electoral votes and thus the presidency. Gore’s lawyers immediately filed a legal contest in state court to protest the certified results.

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