United States presidential election in Florida, 2000

The outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election was not known for more than a month after balloting, because of the extended process of counting and then recounting of Florida presidential ballots. State results tallied on election night gave 246 electoral votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush and 255 to Democratic nominee Al Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call that evening. Mathematically, Florida's 25 electoral votes became the key to an election win, and although both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of Gore over the next few days, Florida's statewide vote took center stage even as voting continued in western states. The debacle led to calls for electoral reform in Florida.

Timeline

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, an organization formed by them and the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling) first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the eastern peninsula but before they closed in the heavily Republican counties of the western panhandle. (The peninsula is in the Eastern time zone, while the panhandle is on Central time.) After the polls had closed in the panhandle, the networks retracted their call for Gore, calling the state for Bush; then retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call". [harvnb|Ceaser|Busch|2001|pp=252-253] In an editorial for "National Review" magazine, Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, claimed that the media's premature call for Gore's victory in Florida might have disenfranchised many pro-Bush voters in the Panhandle. [cite web|last=Graham|first=Tim|title=TV News in Deep Gumbo|url=http://www.mediaresearch.org/oped/2000/20001120.asp|work=National Review|publisher=Media Research Center|date=2000-11-20|accessdate=2008-04-04] Gore made a concession phone call to Bush the night of the election, then retracted it after learning just how close the election was. [cite web|title=Memorable Presidential Elections|url=http://www.history.com/minisite.do?content_type=Minisite_Generic&content_type_id=293&display_order=3&mini_id=1045|work=The History Channel|publisher=Miller Center of Public Affairs|date=2003|accessdate=2008-04-05]

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 at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts. [F.S. Ch. 102.166] The county canvassing board would then decide whether to recount as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts. [F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 4] If the board discovered an error, they were 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.

Bush won the election night vote count in Florida by a little over 2,000 votes. Florida state law provided for an automatic recount due to the small margins. There were general concerns about the fairness and accuracy of the voting process, especially since a small change in the vote count could change the result. The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes, making it the tightest race of the campaign (at least in percentage terms; New Mexico was decided by 363 votes but has a much smaller population, meaning those 363 votes represent a 0.061% difference while the 537 votes in Florida are just 0.009%). Most of the reduction in the ensuing recount came from Miami-Dade county alone, a statistical anomaly.

Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. The Bush campaign hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee their legal team, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The Gore campaign, as allowed by Florida statute, requested that disputed ballots in four counties be counted by hand. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and, when it became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline, both Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have their deadlines extended. The Bush campaign, in response to state litigation in the case of "Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris", filed suit in federal court against extending the statutory deadlines for the manual recounts. Besides deadlines, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily-Democratic counties would be unfair. Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court which ordered the recounting process to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) which took up the case "Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board" on December 1. On December 4, the SCOTUS returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating "Bush v. Gore".

At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of disputed ballots in all Florida counties and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live world-wide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The Court further ordered that only undervotes be considered. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 14 tally. This count was in progress on December 9, when the United States Supreme Court 5-4 (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting) granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount, which had an unofficial lead of 154 votes for Bush.

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush by a 7–2 vote that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional, as well as a 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision that ended the Florida recounts and allowed Florida to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. Seven of the nine justices cited differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount, both of which, they ruled, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.This ruling stopped the vote recount, allowing Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris 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 of the laws, but five agreed that there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped.

The United States Supreme Court voted 7–2 to end the recount on the grounds that differing standards in different counties constituted an equal protection violation, and 5–4 that no new recount with uniform standards could be conducted within the time available. The 5–4 decision became extremely controversial due to the partisan split in the court's 5–4 decision and the majority's irregular instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore publicly disagreed with the court's decision, but conceded the election.

Irregularities

The Florida election has been closely scrutinized since the election, and several irregularities are thought to have favored Bush. These included the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot," which produced an unexpectedly large number of votes for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan. Also noted was a purge of some 50,000 alleged felons from the Florida voting rolls, which were nearly half African-American voters. The majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law. Additionally, there were many more 'overvotes' than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval county (Jacksonville), where some 27,000 ballots showed two or more choices for President. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County 'butterfly ballot,' the Duval County ballot spread choices for President over two pages with instructions to 'vote on every page' on the bottom of each page.

Final certified vote

References

Further reading

*citation|last=Ceaser|first=James W.|last2=Busch|first2=Andrew|title=The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=ALcmhxK0rPAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=perfect+tie&sig=OHBHarcc0vvDN-7UsBbp9YVHh70|place=Lanham, Maryland|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|year=2001|isbn=0742508366
*Keating, Dan and Balz, Dan. "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12623-2001Nov11.html] "The Washington Post", published Nov. 12, 2001.

Citations

External links

* [http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html BUSH v. GORE]
* [http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/election/electiontime.htm Presidential Election Law]