2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida
The 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes out of 5,963,110 cast when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Bush's win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.
Background
The controversy began on election night, November 7, 2000, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by 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 peninsula but about ten minutes before they closed in the heavily Republican counties of the panhandle. Later in the evening, the networks reversed their call, moving to "too close to call", then later giving it to Bush; then they retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call". Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the Florida count was.Bush led the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. The small margin produced an automatic recount under Florida state law, which began the day after the election. That first day's results reduced the margin to just over 900 votes.
Recount
Mandatory statewide machine recount
The Florida election was closely scrutinized after Election Day. Because the margin of the original vote count was less than 0.5 percent, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount, which began the day after the election. It was ostensibly completed on November 10 in the 66 Florida counties that used vote-counting machines and reduced Bush's lead to 327 votes. According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that a total of 18 counties—accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida—did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed.Manual recount in select counties
Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. On November 9, the Bush campaign announced they had hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker and Republican political consultant Roger Stone to oversee their legal team, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.Following the machine recount, the Gore campaign requested a manual recount in four counties. Florida state law at the time allowed a candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts. The county canvassing board was then to decide whether to do a recount, as well as the method of the recount, in those three precincts. If the board discovered an error that in its judgment could affect the outcome of the election, they were then authorized to do a full recount of the ballots. This statutory process primarily accommodated recounts for local elections. The Gore campaign requested that disputed ballots in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia Counties be counted by hand. Volusia County started its recount on November 12. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5:00 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and it soon became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline. On November 13, the Gore campaign and Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have the deadlines extended.
Meanwhile, the Bush campaign worked to stop the recount. On November 11, it joined a group of Florida voters in suing in federal district court for a preemptive injunction to stop all manual recounting of votes in Florida. Bush's lawyers argued that recounting votes in just four counties violated the 14th Amendment and also that similarly punched ballots could be tabulated differently since Florida had no detailed statutory standards for hand-counting votes. On November 13, the federal court ruled against an injunction.
Reporting deadline
On November 14, the original deadline for reporting results, with the Volusia County recount complete, Bush held a 300-vote lead. The same day, a state judge upheld that deadline but ruled that further recounts could be considered later. Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, a Republican, then gave counties until 2:00 p.m. on November 15 to provide reasons for recounting their ballots.Manual recount continues
The next day, the Florida Supreme Court allowed manual recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties to continue but left it to a state judge to decide whether Harris must include those votes in the final tally. Miami-Dade County decided on November 17 to conduct a recount but suspended it on November 22. The Gore campaign sued to force Miami-Dade County to continue its recount, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to consider the request.As the manual recounts continued, the battle to certify the results intensified. On November 17, Judge Terry Lewis of Leon County Circuit Court permitted Harris to certify the election results without the manual recounts, but on the same day, the Florida Supreme Court stayed that decision until it could consider an appeal by Gore. On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that manual counts in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade Counties must be included and set 5:00 p.m. on November 26 as the earliest time for certification. After that decision, the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state court effectively rewrote state election statutes after the vote.
Overseas absentee ballots
As the manual recounts progressed, most of Florida's counties were considering overseas absentee ballots. That part of the vote count was completed on November 18, increasing Bush's lead to 930 votes. Because recounts later showed that Gore had actually won the election day vote, it was the margin in overseas absentee ballots that won Bush the election. After the election, a New York Times six month long investigation showed that 680 of the overseas absentee ballots were illegally counted. It further claimed that this was due to "blatantly illegal actions on the part of local election officials, encouraged by Republicans." A 2004 analysis of those votes by Kosuke Imai and Gary King determined that if the bad ballots had been litigated and disqualified, Gore would have cut the margin, but probably not by enough to win without winning other votes elsewhere.Certification and recount continuation
The Palm Beach County recount and the Miami-Dade County recount were still incomplete at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, when Harris certified the statewide vote count with Bush ahead by 537 votes. The next day, Gore sued under Florida's statutory construct of the "contest phase". On November 28, Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County Circuit Court rejected Gore's request to include the recount results from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Gore appealed that decision to the Florida Supreme Court.U.S. Supreme Court involvement
The U.S. Supreme Court convened on December 1 to consider Bush's appeal of the Florida Supreme Court's November 21 decision extending the certification date.On December 4, Sauls rejected Gore's contest of the election result; Gore appealed. Also on December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its ruling that had extended the certification date.
On December 6, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature convened a special session to appoint a slate of electors pledged to Bush, based on the fact that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to determine how their electors are appointed. Some have argued that awarding the electors in this manner would be illegal.
On December 8, the Florida justices, by a 4–3 vote, rejected the selective use of manual recounts in just four counties and ordered immediate manual recounts of all ballots in the state where no vote for president had been machine-recorded, also known as undervotes.
Recount ended
On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.On December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered in Bush v. Gore that the recount must stop because it lacked a uniform statewide methodology and there was insufficient time to create one and complete the recount. The same day, the Florida House approved awarding the state's electoral votes to Bush, but the matter was moot after the Court's ruling.
Gore concedes
On December 13, Gore conceded the election to Bush in a nationally televised address.Lingering controversies
During the recount, controversy ensued with the discovery of various irregularities that had occurred in the voting process in several counties. Among these was the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot", which resulted in an unusually high number of votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. Conservatives claimed that the same ballot had been successfully used in the 1996 election; in fact, it had never been used in a Palm Beach County election among rival candidates for office, but only for referendums. Also, before the election, the Secretary of State's office ordered county election officials to expunge tens of thousands of citizens identified as felons from the Florida voting rolls, using a list that later demonstrated error levels of 15% or greater. Black people were identified on some counties' lists at up to five times their share of the population.A December 4 article exposing flaws in the process correctly claimed that many of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law. The demographics of the list strongly suggested that, of those who were wrongly on the list and thus should have been able to vote, an overwhelming number of Black people would have chosen the Democratic nominee.
Additionally, this Florida election produced many more "overvotes" than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval County, where some 21,000 ballots had multiple markings, such as 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 non-facing pages. At the same time that the Bush campaign was contesting hand recounts in Democratic counties, it accepted hand recounts in Republican counties that gained it 185 votes, including where Republican Party workers had been permitted to correct errors on thousands of applications for Republicans' absentee ballots.
Political commentator and author Jeff Greenfield observed that the Republican operatives in Florida talked and acted like combat platoon sergeants in what one called "switchblade time", the biggest political fight of the century. On the other hand, he said, Democrats talked like referees with a fear of pushing too hard, not wanting to be seen as sore losers.