U.S. presidential election, 2000

The U.S. presidential election of 2000 was one of the closest elections in U.S. history, decided by only 527 votes in the swing state of Florida. On election night, the media prematurely declared a winner twice based on exit polls before finally conceding that the Florida race was too close to call. It would turn out to be a month before the election was finally certified after numerous court challenges and recounts. Republican candidate George W. Bush won Florida's 25 electoral votes by a razor-thin margin of the popular vote there, and thereby defeated Democratic candidate Al Gore.

Florida election results

On election night, it quickly became clear that Florida would be a contentious state. The national television networks, through information provided them by the Voter News Service, first called Florida for Gore well in advance of the polls closing in the most heavily Republican counties, then for Bush hours after all the polls had closed (leading to questions about the influence of biased national news media in the election process), then as "too close to call". The Voter News Service was an organization backed and supported by television networks and the Associated Press to help determine the results of presidential elections as early as possible, through early result tallies and exit polling.

Related Topics:
Voter News Service - Associated Press

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Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida law mandated a statewide recount. In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law (F.S. Ch. 102.166) at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts. The county canvassing board then decides whether or not to recount (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 4) as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts. If the board discovers an error, they are then authorized to recount the ballots (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 5). The canvassing board did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial mandated recount. The Bush campaign sued to prevent additional recounts on the basis that no errors were found in the tabulation method until subjective measures were applied in manual recounts. This case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 to stop the vote count, which allowed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican, to certify the election results. This allowed Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him the winner. Seven of the nine Justices agreed that the lack of unified standards in counting votes violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection, but five agreed that there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped.

Related Topics:
Statewide recount - Subjective measures - Katherine Harris - Constitutional guarantee of equal protection

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Final certified vote for the state of Florida (25 electoral votes)

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Presidential Candidate

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Vote Total

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Pct

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Party

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George W. Bush (W)

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2,912,790

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48.850

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Republican

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Al Gore

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2,912,253

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48.841

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Democratic

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Ralph Nader

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97,421

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1.633

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Green

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Patrick J. Buchanan

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17,412

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0.292

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Reform

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Harry Browne

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16,102

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0.270

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Libertarian

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John Hagelin

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2,274

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0.038

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Natural Law/Reform

Related Topics:
Natural Law - Reform

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Howard Phillips

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1,378

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0.023

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Constitution

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Other

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3,027

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0.051

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-

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Total

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5,962,657

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100.00

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Source: CBS News State Results for Election 2000

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Controversy in Florida

Following the election a number of studies have been made of the electoral process in Florida by Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties. A number of flaws and improprieties have been discovered in the process. Controversies included:

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• The television news media called the state for Al Gore around 7:48pm EST, while voters in the western panhandle (which is in the Central Time Zone) of the state were still voting, potentially suppressing the (heavily Republican) panhandle vote. The media also announced polls were closed in Florida while polls in CST were open. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. The McLaughlin survey estimates the media announcements of closed polls and a Gore victory cost Bush a margin of 5,000 votes. Some sources say that Bush would have won by a much larger victory margin and the controversy would have been avoided if the networks had waited to call the state. Some even say that the projection may have caused some voters in other states to not vote, believing Gore elected.
• Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, was governor of Florida, leading some Gore advocates to make various allegations of impropriety, especially due to their joint campaigning for the Republican vote in Florida and Jeb Bush's assurances to George W. Bush that the Republicans could win Florida. However, it is typical for sitting governors to strongly campaign on behalf of the candidate with the same party affiliation. Some democracy advocates have taken offense at his request for the removal of Florida election officials explaining voting/recount law on TV.
• The actions of the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who was in charge of state election procedures, also came under fire, due to her status as a Bush state campaign co-chairwoman, her involvement with the "scrub list", and her behavior during the recount crisis. In particular democracy advocates have taken issue with her antagonizing of Democratic lawyers, dispatching of a lawyer to Palm Beach county to convince the voting board of voting down a manual recount (despite thousands of protesters within the county including 12,000 with affidavits), and in particular her collaboration with Republican party advisers (at one point housing them).
• There were a number of overseas ballots missing postmarks or filled out in such a way that they were invalid under Florida law. A poll worker filled out the missing information on some hundred of these ballots. The Democrats moved to have all overseas ballots thrown out because of this. These disputes added to the mass of litigation between parties to influence the counting of ballots. The largest group of disputed overseas ballots were military ballots, which the Republicans argued to have accepted.
• Some 179,855 ballots were not counted in the official tally. These were ballots which were mistakenly filled out, however, in some counties the voting machines (Accuvotes) would return the ballot and allow voters to try again, whereas in other counties the reject mechanisms were not enabled, thus giving voters only one chance to mark the ballot correctly. As a general trend, reject mechanisms were disabled disproportionately in counties with Democratic Party county leadership and African American and Hispanic populations.
• A suit by NAACP (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the US Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment. Settlement agreements were reached in this suit. http://www.choicepoint.net/85256B350053E646/0/16440966B650DEA685256BEB00461242?Open However, a systematic investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice found no evidence of racial discrimination Letter to Congress.
• 57,746 voters were listed as felons on a "scrub list" and removed from the voting rolls, but later analysis shows that many were incorrectly listed. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, and some erroneously listed felonies were dated years in the future.See bullet 2 on this screenshot) These persons were disproportionately Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent. In some cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and many successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, in many cases no effort was made to contact them before the election.
• People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen (1 p.25), have argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states), to request clemency and a restoration of their rights, from Governor Bush, in a process which might take two years and ultimately was left to Bush's discretion. One should note Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) which ruled that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.
• A full cousin of George W. Bush, John Prescott Ellis, was analysing data from the Voter News Service for Fox News and had several times contact by telephone with both George and Jeb Bush that night. It was his decision to call Florida for Bush, with Fox being the first network to do so. However, Fox had also incorrectly called the state for Gore before the polls had closed, like the other networks, and retracted around the same time they did which was at around 10pm that evening. Fox only called the state for Bush at 2:16am, shortly after the famous Volusia error which took 16,022 votes away from Gore and added the same amount of (fraudulent) votes to Bush was introduced, with the other major networks announcing the same within minutes. The error was corrected quickly and the calls retracted one by one.
• Xavier Suarez, who was ousted as mayor of Miami in 1998 on charges of absentee voter fraud, was later elected to the Executive Committee of the Miami-Dade GOP party. Suarez helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County for the 2000 presidential election. ?Dade County Republicans have a very specific expertise in getting out absentee ballots,? Suarez is claimed to have remarked. ?I obviously have specific experience in this myself.? http://www.campaignwatch.org/semdtl.htm
• However, the great irony in the election in Florida was that the automatic recount required by state law (perhaps the only undisputed aspect of the election) was never carried out in several counties.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots

The result of the Florida U.S. Presidential race was so close that one Florida county's hard-to-use ballot may have decided the presidency. Critics argue that some voters in Palm Beach County might have accidentally voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, when they thought they were voting for Al Gore, on a so-called "butterfly ballot". The Democrats are listed second in the left-hand column; but punching a hole in the second circle actually cast a vote for Buchanan, first listing in the right-hand column. Voters who punched this second hole would have ignored a prominent arrow on the ballot showing which hole was to be punched, because the design of the ballot neglected the effects of parallax due to the center row of holes being in a different plane from the two columns of printed names, and the ballot being viewed at an oblique angle.http://jerz.setonhill.edu/design/usability/use-ballot.htm.

Related Topics:
Palm Beach County - Parallax

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The Palm Beach Post's review of the discarded ballots showed that 5,330 votes were cast for the presumably rare cross-party combination of Gore and Buchanan, compared with only 1,631 for the equivalent cross-party combination of Bush and Buchanan. In response, others point out that the ballot was designed by a Democrat, Theresa LePore (who stated that she was basically unaffiliated and registered as a Democrat only because the county had historically chosen Democrats for her position), and approved by representatives of both major parties. But neither of these responses go to the issue of whether the ballot may have inadvertently cost Gore the election.

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Buchanan said on The Today Show, November 9, 2000:

Related Topics:
The Today Show - November 9 - 2000

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

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Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9, 2000, "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there", Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, responded, "That's nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded, "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said, "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."

Related Topics:
Ari Fleischer - November 9 - 2000 - Jim McConnell - Jim Cunningham

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The Florida Ballot Project recounts

The Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. news organizations, conducted a Florida Ballot Project comprehensive review of all ballots uncounted (by machine) in the Florida 2000 presidential election, both undervotes and overvotes, with the main research aim being to report how different ballot layouts correlate with voter mistakes. Its findings were reported by the media during the week after November 12, 2001.

Related Topics:
University of Chicago - November 12 - 2001

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Although the NORC study was not primarily intended as a determination of which candidate "really won", analysis of the results, given the hand counting of machine-uncountable ballots due to various types of voter error indicated that they would lead to differing results, reported in the newspapers which funded the recount, such as The Miami Herald () or the Washington Post http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf.

Related Topics:
The Miami Herald - Washington Post

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Response to the problems

Electronic voting

Since the Presidential Election was so close and hotly contested in Florida, the U.S. Government and state governments have pushed for election reform to be prepared by the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. Many of Florida's year 2000 election night problems stemmed from voting machine issues like rejected ballots, "hanging chads", and the possibly confusing "butterfly ballot". An opportunistic solution to these problems was assumed to be the installation of modern electronic voting machines.

Related Topics:
Election reform - 2004 U.S. Presidential Election - Electronic voting

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Electronic voting was initially touted by many as a panacea for the ills faced during the 2000 election. In years following, such machines were questioned for a lack of a redundant paper trail, less than ideal security standards, and low tolerance for software or hardware problems. The U.S. Presidential Election of 2000 spurred the debate about election and voting reform, but it did not end it. See .

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• National Committee on Federal Election Reform
• The Constitution Project - Election Reform Initiative

Exit polling and declaration of vote winners

The Voter News Service's reputation was badly tarnished by its treatment of Florida's presidential vote in the year 2000. Calling the state as a win for Gore 12 minutes before polls closed in Florida's central time zone may have affected the vote results, and inconsistent polling results caused the VNS to change its call twice, first from Gore to Bush, and then to "too close to call". An attempt by VNS to use computer tallying during the 2002 congressional election was a failure, and the VNS disbanded.

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