Recent Presidential Elections

2000 Election

Florida -- Chaotic Returns

The presidential election of 2000 stands at best as a paradox, at worst as a scandal, of American democracy. Democrat Albert Gore won the most votes, a half million more than his Republican opponent George W. Bush, but lost the presidency in the electoral college by a count of 271-267. Even this count was suspect, dependent on the tally in Florida, where many minority voters were denied the vote, ballots were confusing, and recounts were mishandled and manipulated. The choice of their leader came not from the citizens of the nation, but from lawyers battling for five weeks. The final decision was made not by 105 million voters, but by a 5-4 majority of the unelected U.S. Supreme Court, issuing a tainted and partisan verdict (Pomper 201).

When we revisit the gut-wrenching night of Nov. 7, 2000, we recall that the TV networks looked at exit polls and sample swing precincts from Florida and declared it a win for Al Gore, who was the incumbent vice president and the Democratic nominee for president.

Among those making that call were ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press. Their predictions came not long after the official closing time for voting in the state, when relatively few votes had actually been counted.

By 8 p.m. ET on their election night specials, the national networks were calling populous swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan for Gore.

Taken together with Florida, those states triggered the network's computer programs to conclude Gore would win the Electoral College. Viewers around the country would soon see Gore's face on screen as the projected winner of the presidency. Celebrations began in Democratic headquarters everywhere.

Not so fast.

After calling the race, the networks began getting phone calls from Republicans. One of them came from the campaign of the Republican nominee, George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, phoned Fox News to insist that Florida was still in play. He shared his displeasure with someone who was likely to offer a sympathetic ear – John Ellis, a Fox analyst and member of the extended Bush family.

Soon, the on-air personalities on Fox were telling viewers to reserve judgment on Florida. Before long, other networks were hearing the objections and reaching the same conclusion (Elving 1)

At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”

Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.

As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.

By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”

Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:

“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.

Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.

“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”

Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.

Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections), in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch. Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole, however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.

The voters’ choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine.

In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?

None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.

By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, [who had run successful presidential campaigns for Ronald Reagan and the nominee's father, George H. W. Bush]… dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”

Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.

The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.

While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.

According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call, Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”

In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.

In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. …

…

On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?

In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.

Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.

At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.

That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)

Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, … rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27 (Margolick 8-20).

Worrks cited:

Elving, Ron, “The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes on Haunting.” NPR , November 12, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812854/the-florida-recount-of-2000-a-nightmare-that-goes-on-haunting

Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/10/florida-election-2000

Pomper, Gerald M., “The 2000 Presidential Election: Why Gore Lost.” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2001, volume 116, issue 2. Web. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/pomper.htm