United States presidential election in Florida, 2000

United States presidential election in Florida, 2000

1996 ← November 7, 2000 → 2004

Nominee George W. Bush Al Gore Party Republican Democratic Home state Texas Tennessee Running mate Dick Cheney Joe Lieberman Electoral vote 25 0 Popular vote 2,912,790 2,912,253 Percentage 48.85% 48.84%

County Results   Gore—60-70%   Gore—50-60%   Gore—<50%   Bush—<50%   Bush—50-60%   Bush—60-70%   Bush—70-80%

President before election Bill Clinton Democratic Elected President George W. Bush Republican

The 2000 United States presidential election in Florida took place on November 7, 2000 as part of the greater 2000 United States presidential election.

Florida, a swing state, had a major recount dispute that took center stage in the election. Thus, 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. The arithmetic of the available electoral votes in all three states meant that at that point, the result in Florida was all that mattered, and even when both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of the eventual loser Gore over the following few days, the drama in Florida uniquely dragged out for several weeks before eventually settling the election for the entire nation.

After an intense recount process and the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, Governor George W. Bush officially won Florida's electoral votes, by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost 6 million cast, and as a result, the entire presidential election. The process was extremely divisive, and led to calls for electoral reform in Florida.

The Florida election saga became an HBO straight-to-TV movie Recount (2008).

Campaign

Elections in Florida
Federal government Presidential elections 1860 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 Presidential primaries Democratic 2008 2012 Republican 2008 2012 U.S. Senate elections 1968 1970 1976 1980 1982 1986 1988 1992 1994 1998 2000 2004 2006 2010 2012 2016 U.S. House elections 2006 5th 8th 9th 16th 2008 2010 2012 13th, 2014 19th, 2014 2014
State government Gubernatorial elections 1966 1970 1974 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 Attorney General elections 2002 2006 2010 2014 Chief Financial Officer elections 2006 2010 2014 Agriculture Commissioner of Florida 1994 2006 2010 2014 Ballot measures Other elections 2006 2010
Jacksonville Mayoral elections 2003 2007 2011
Tampa Mayoral elections 2011
St. Petersburg Mayoral elections 2013
Orlando Mayoral elections 2012
v t e

Initially Florida had been considered a reliable red state.^{[citation needed]} It was governed by Jeb Bush, a staunch conservative and George W. Bush's brother. Nonetheless the Republicans appear to have focused significant advertising resources in the large state, and later polls indicated that the state result was very much in play as late as September 2000.^[1] Some late momentum for Gore and his Jewish running mate Joe Lieberman may also have come from the significant Jewish population.^[2] Also various Northern-born population from reliable blue states in the Northeast have been migrating to Florida in the past few decades since the 1950s, as well as a large growing Asian and Hispanic immigrant population have been moving into Florida, thus supplanting Republican gains in the state, and making the state in general a swing state in 2000.

Also there was heavy backlash amongst the Cuban-American population against democrats during the Elian Gonzalez dispute, which Janet Reno the attorney general under Bill Clinton ordered Elian to be returned to Cuba. The democrats share of the Cuban vote dropped dramatically compared to four years earlier. And a large swing to republicans from the Cuban American population was not unnoted. Which some say were also a huge factor in the closeness of results during this state. Of which is speculated had it not happened then gore's chance of winning Florida would have been all but certain given the mere 537 vote difference.

In 1996, exit polling showed 42% of the state were made up of voters older than 60 years old, thus making Social Security and Medicare the top issues in Florida. Polls showed older voters favored Gore 51% to 37%.^[3]

In late October, one poll found that Gore was leading Bush and third parties with 44-42-4 among registered voters and 46-42-4 among likely voters.^[4]

Recount

Election night

The controversy began on election night, 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 eastern peninsula (which is in the Eastern time zone) but before they had closed in the heavily Republican counties of the western panhandle (which is in the Central time zone).

Once 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".^[5] In an editorial for National Review magazine, Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative 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;^[6] however, this claim was deemed "extremely unlikely" by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watch group.^[7] Gore made a concession phone call to Bush the night of the election, then retracted it after learning just how close the election was.^[8]

Bush won the election night vote count in Florida by 1,784 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.

Recount 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 over 54,000 citizens from the Florida voting rolls identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-Americans. The majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.^[9] 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.^[10]

Controversial issues

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:

• All five major US TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) made the incorrect assumption that all of Florida's polls closed at 7:00 p.m. EST. All five of them reported this incorrect statement at the top of the 6:00-7:00-hour. Westernmost counties in Florida had polls open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they were part of the Central Time Zone. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. Because of the above mistaken assumption, some media outlets reported at 7:00 p.m. EST that all polls had closed in the state of Florida. Also, significantly, the Voter News Service called the state of Florida for Al Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000, which theoretically reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes;^[11] a study by John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes.^[12] This survey assumes that the turnout in the Panhandle counties would have equalled the statewide average of 68% if the media had not incorrectly reported the polls' closing time and if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. This opens the possibility that Bush would have won by a larger victory margin and controversy would have been avoided if the networks had known and reported the correct poll closing times, and called the state after all polls were closed. Some individuals made public statements to the effect that they would have voted for Bush, but did not vote because of the poll close time confusion, or the Gore call.^{[citation needed]}

In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the premature calls for Gore's victory ranked #2 on a list of TV's ten biggest "blunders", and is blamed for ushering in a new era of public distrust of the media.^[13]

• 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 would win Florida. While it is typical for sitting governors to campaign strongly on behalf of the candidate with the same party affiliation, it is unusual for the governor to be related by blood to the candidate.
• Democratic State senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up road-blocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election.^[14]
• Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo distributed to Democratic election canvassers on how to invalidate military absentee ballots. The Herron Memo stated postmark and "point of origin" criteria Herron maintained could be used to invalidate military ballots. However, the Herron Memo was in line with a letter sent out by Secretary of State Katherine Harris which stated that if a postmark was not present on the military ballots that the ballots had to be thrown out. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore backer, later told the counties to go back and reconsider those ballots without a postmark.^{[15][citation needed]}

• 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-chairman, 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, her 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 absentee ballot applications; the Democrats moved to have the returned ballots thrown out because of this.^{[citation needed]} These disputes added to the mass of litigation between parties to influence the counting of ballots.^{[citation needed]} The largest group of disputed overseas ballots were military ballots.^{[citation needed]} On November 19, 2000, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Up until that point, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce those requirements disqualifying illegal ballots and reducing votes from overseas, which were predominantly cast for Bush.^[16]
• A suit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the United States Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment. Settlement agreements were reached in this suit.^[17] However, a systematic investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice found no evidence of racial discrimination.^[18]
• Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, contracted with a new company (DBT Online Inc.), at an increase of $4.294 million to have the "scrub list"'s re-worked. Nearly 1% of Florida's electorate and nearly 3% of its African-American voters - 96,000 citizens were listed as felons and removed from the voting rolls. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, some listed "felonies" were dated years in the future, and some apparently were random.) In a vast minority of cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and some successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, most were not told that they weren't allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls. The company was directed not to use cross-checks or its sophisticated verification plan (used by the FBI).^[19]
• 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 analyzing 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 10 p.m. that evening. Fox only called the state for Bush at 2:16 a.m., shortly after the famous Volusia error was introduced. This error took 16,022 votes away from Gore and added those votes and more to Bush, producing more total votes in the precinct than there were registered voters. The other major networks announced the same totals 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 Republican 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.”^[20]
• The Brooks Brothers riot: the manual recount in Miami-Dade County was shut down shortly after screaming protestors arrived at Miami's recount center. It turned out that these protesters were Republican Party members flown in from other states, some at Republican Party expense.^[21]
• The suppression of vote pairing. In brief, web sites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas: the Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore and the Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This would have allowed Nader to still get his fair share of the vote and perhaps get into the Presidential debates, while also allowing Gore to carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the web sites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them reluctantly to shut down. The ACLU got involved to protect the web sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Bill Jones two years later, but by then the election was over. The vote pairing web sites tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who vote paired for Gore, and if only a few more of the 97,421 people who did vote for Nader in Florida had known about vote pairing, the election might have had a different outcome.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots

Much evidence suggests that many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore or Bush actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots, because of a confusing layout of the ballot.

The number of ballots marked for Buchanan in Palm Beach County was oddly large. Early reports had Buchanan receiving about 0.8% of the vote in Palm Beach County (a total of 3,407 votes), significantly outperforming his state-wide vote share of 0.29%. Furthermore, absentee ballots from the same county showed far less support for Buchanan than election day ballots, even normalizing for the difference in choice shown by absentee voters in the neighboring county. Finally, an unusually large number of ballots were spoiled because of two votes in the same race, and one of those two votes was for Pat Buchanan with the other being for Bush or Gore.

Representatives of Buchanan's campaign and the Reform Party estimated Buchanan's true vote total at between 400 and 1,000 votes.

One theory is that voters might have accidentally voted for Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore on a so-called "butterfly ballot". In this ballot format used in Palm Beach County polling places (but not absentee ballots or other counties), 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. If the machine loading the ballot did not line it up with the candidates properly, then it became confusing for the voter to discern where they should punch the hole. Voters who punched the second hole would have ignored an arrow on the ballot showing which hole was to be punched if the arrow did not line up with the hole correctly due to machine error, 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.^[22]

A later review of discarded ballots in Palm Beach County by the Palm Beach Post showed that 5,330 ballots were spoiled with votes cast for both Gore and Buchanan, and 1,631 for Bush and Buchanan. These could have indicated voters misunderstanding that the Buchanan hole applied to the right side of the ballot and punching what appeared to be multiple holes for their true candidate of choice. A counter theory says these voters were not confused by the ballot but simply believed they could vote for two candidates. But it would be rare for someone's two candidates to be Gore and Buchanan, considering how unlike the two candidates were.

Other statistical studies looked at what parties a voter voted for in other races when the voter selected Buchanan and his Reform Party for president. They showed that these Buchanan voters tended to vote Democratic, not Reform or anything closer to Reform. This provides further evidence that voters were confused by the butterfly ballot and intended to vote for Gore.

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

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.

He, unlike the voters, did not see the ballot before Election Night. 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."

The ballot was redesigned earlier that year by Theresa LePore (Supervisor of Elections, and member of the Democratic Party).^[23] She said she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger so the county's elderly residents could more easily see the names.^[24]

Prior to the election, unusually substandard paper ballots, including misaligned chads, were manufactured by employees of the Sequoia Pacific company, out of normal specifications and failing quality testing, prior to shipping to Palm Beach County. (see http://election-reform.org/dan_rather.html#palm_beach)

Timeline

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.^[25] The county canvassing board would then decide whether to recount as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts.^[26] If the board discovered an error, they were then authorized to recount the ballots.^[27]

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 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.

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.

Florida Supreme Court appeals

The trial of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris was a response from the Bush campaign to state litigation 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 which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court 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.

U.S. Supreme Court Proceedings

The recount 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.^{[citation needed]}

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. Five justices held there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped and Florida be allowed to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. The 5–4 decision became extremely controversial due to the partisan split in the 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.

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.

Final certified results

Federal official vote for the state of Florida (25 electoral votes)

Presidential candidate	Vote total	%	Party
George W. Bush (W)	2,912,790	48.847	Republican
Al Gore	2,912,253	48.838	Democratic
Ralph Nader	97,488	1.635	Green
Patrick J. Buchanan	17,484	0.293	Reform
Harry Browne	16,415	0.275	Libertarian
John Hagelin	2,281	0.038	Natural Law/Reform
Howard Phillips	1,371	0.023	Constitution
Other	3,028	0.051	—
Total	5,963,110
Source: 2000 official presidential general election results

Results breakdown

By county

County	Bush	Votes	Gore	Votes	Nader	Votes	Buchanan	Votes
Alachua	40.28%	34,135	55.91%	47,380	3.81%	3,226	0%	263
Baker	69.65%	5,611	29.69%	2,392	0.66%	53	0%	73"
Bay	66.26%	38,682	32.33%	18,873	1.42%	828	0%	268"
Bradford	63.16%	5,416	35.86%	3,075	0.98%	84	0%	45"
Brevard	53.1%	115,253	44.84%	97,341	2.06%	4,470	0%	570"
Broward	31.06%	177,939	67.7%	387,760	1.24%	7,101	0%	795"
Calhoun	56.69%	2,873	42.54%	2,156	0.77%	39	0%	90"
Charlotte	53.26%	35,428	44.55%	29,636	2.2%	1,461	0%	182"
Citrus	52.55%	29,801	45.02%	25,531	2.43%	1,379	0%	270"
Clay	73.34%	41,903	25.67%	14,668	0.98%	562	0%	186"
Collier	65.86%	60,467	32.61%	29,939	1.52%	1,399	0%	122"
Columbia	60.02%	10,968	38.57%	7,049	1.41%	258	0%	89"
De Soto	55.03%	4,256	42.94%	3,321	2.03%	157	0%	36"
Dixie	58.64%	2,697	39.73%	1,827	1.63%	75	0%	29"
Duval	57.91%	152,460	41.04%	108,039	1.05%	2,757	0%	252"
Escambia	63.14%	73,171	35.37%	40,990	1.49%	1,727	'0%"	502"
Flagler	46.82%	12,618	51.57%	13,897	1.61%	435	0%	83"
Franklin	53.51%	2,454	44.64%	2,047	1.85%	85	0%	33"
Gadsden	32.57%	4,770	66.48%	9,736	0.95%	139	0%	38"
Gilchrist	62.18%	3,300	35.99%	1,910	1.83%	97	0%	29"
Glades	55.14%	1,841	43.19%	1,442	1.68%	56	0%	9"
Gulf	58.85%	3,553	39.72%	2,398	1.42%	86	0%	71"
Hamilton	54.95%	2,147	44.1%	1,723	0.95%	37	0%	23"
Hardee	60.9%	3,765	37.88%	2,342	1.21%	75	0%	30"
Hendry	58.67%	4,747	40.04%	3,240	1.29%	104	0%	22"
Hernando	47.31%	30,658	50.38%	32,648	2.32%	1,501	0%	242"
Highlands	57.86%	20,207	40.57%	14,169	1.56%	545	0%	127"
Hillsborough	50.52%	180,794	47.39%	169,576	2.09%	7,496	0%	847"
Holmes	68.82%	5,012	29.89%	2,177	1.29%	94	0%	76"
Indian River	58.02%	28,639	40.05%	19,769	1.92%	950	0%	105"
Jackson	56.6%	9,139	42.55%	6,870	0.85%	138	0%	102"
Jefferson	44.29%	2,478	54.35%	3,041	1.36%	76	0%	29"
Lafayette	67.2%	1,670	31.75%	789	1.05%	26	0%	10"
Lake	56.8%	50,010	41.54%	36,571	1.66%	1,460	.32%	289'
Lee	57.91%	106,151	40.13%	73,571	1.96%	3,588	0%	305"
Leon	38.14%	39,073	59.97%	61,444	1.89%	1,934	0%	282"
Levy	54.71%	6,863	43.03%	5,398	2.26%	284	0%	67"
Liberty	55.5%	1,317	42.86%	1,017	0%	0	1.64%	39"
Madison	49.75%	3,038	49.37%	3,015	0.88%	54	0%	29"
Manatee	52.87%	58,023	44.86%	49,226	2.27%	2,491	0%	271""
Marion	54.26%	55,146	43.96%	44,674	1.78%	1,809	0%	563"
Martin	55.05%	33,972	43.14%	26,621	1.81%	1,118	0%	112"
Miami-Dade	46.42%	289,574	52.72%	328,867	0.86%	5,352	0%	561
Monroe	47.75%	16,063	49.01%	16,487	3.24%	1,090	0%	47"
Nassau	69.47%	16,408	29.45%	6,955	1.08%	255	0%	90"
Okaloosa	74.38%	52,186	24.21%	16,989	1.4%	985	0%	267"
Okeechobee	51.72%	5,057	46.94%	4,589	1.34%	131	0%	43"
Orange	48.28%	134,531	50.33%	140,236	1.39%	3,879	0%	446"
Osceola	47.57%	26,237	51.1%	28,187	1.33%	732	0%	125"
Palm Beach	35.72%	152,964	62.99%	269,754	1.3%	5,564	0%	3,407
Pasco	48.46%	68,607	49.14%	69,576	2.4%	3,393	0%	570"
Pinellas	46.73%	184,849	50.73%	200,657	2.53%	10,022	0%	1013"
Polk	53.89%	90,310	44.88%	75,207	1.23%	2,060	0%	533"
Putnam	51.88%	13,457	46.67%	12,107	1.45%	377	0%	138"
Santa Rosa	72.85%	36,339	25.7%	12,818	1.45%	724	0%	311"
Sarasota	51.93%	83,117	45.53%	72,869	2.54%	4,069	0%	305"
Seminole	55.34%	75,790	43.24%	59,227	1.42%	1,940	0%	194"
St. Johns	65.62%	39,564	32.36%	19,509	2.02%	1,217	0%	229"
St. Lucie	44.7%	34,705	53.53%	41,560	1.76%	1,368	0%	124"
Sumter	54.95%	12,127	43.67%	9,637	1.39%	306	0%	114"
Suwannee	65.3%	8,009	33.23%	4,075	1.47%	180	0%	108"
Taylor	59.98%	4,058	39.15%	2,649	0.87%	59	0%	27"
Union	61.76%	2,332	37.26%	1,407	0%	0	0.98%	37
Volusia	45.11%	82,368	53.3%	97,313	1.59%	2,903	0%	498"
Wakulla	53.09%	4,512	45.16%	3,838	1.75%	149	0%	46"
Walton	67.35%	12,186	31.19%	5,643	1.46%	265	0%	120"
Washington	63.34%	4,995	35.48%	2,798	1.18%	93	0%	88"

By congressional district

Bush won 15 of 23 congressional districts.^[28]

District	Bush	Gore	Representative
1st	69%	31%	Joe Scarborough
2nd	53%	47%	Allen Boyd
3rd	35%	65%	Corrine Brown
4th	66%	34%	Tillie K. Fowler
			Ander Crenshaw
5th	54%	46%	Karen Thurman
6th	58%	42%	Cliff Stearns
7th	54%	46%	John Mica
8th	54%	46%	Bill McCollum
			Ric Keller
9th	54%	46%	Michael Bilirakis
10th	49%	51%	Bill Young
11th	39%	61%	Jim Davis
12th	55%	45%	Charles Canady
			Adam Putnam
13th	56%	44%	Dan Miller
14th	61%	39%	Porter Goss
15th	57%	43%	Dave Weldon
16th	53%	47%	Mark Foley
17th	15%	85%	Carrie Meek
18th	57%	43%	Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
19th	27%	73%	Robert Wexler
20th	31%	69%	Peter Deutsch
21st	58%	42%	Lincoln Diaz-Balart
22nd	48%	52%	E. Clay Shaw Jr.
23rd	20%	80%	Alcee Hastings

Post election studies

Florida Ballot Project recounts

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States 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. The total number of undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The findings of the review were reported by the media during the week after November 12, 2001.

The NORC study was not primarily intended as a determination of which candidate "really won". Analysis of the results found that different standards for the hand-counting of machine-uncountable ballots would lead to differing results. The results according to the various standards were reported in the newspapers which funded the recount, such as The Miami Herald^[29] and the Washington Post.^[30]

Note these figures also do not take into account a dispute over 500 absentee ballots that Bush requested to be added to the certified totals. If found to be legal votes that would put Gore totally out of reach regardless of any manual recount standard.

Candidate outcomes based on potential non-absentee recounts in Florida presidential election 2000 (outcome of one particular study)[31]
Review method		Winner
Review of all ballots statewide (never undertaken)
•	Including dimples, optical marks, or overvotes	Gore by 171
•	Fully punched chad and limited marks on optical ballots	Gore by 115
•	Any dimples or optical mark	Gore by 107
•	One corner of chad detached or optical mark	Gore by 60
Review of limited sets of ballots (initiated but not completed)
•	Gore request for recounts of all ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties	Bush by 225
•	Florida Supreme Court of all undervotes statewide	Bush by 430
•	Florida Supreme Court as being implemented by the counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes as well as undervotes	Bush by 493
Unofficial recount totals
•	Incomplete result when the Supreme Court stayed the recount (December 9, 2000)	Bush by 154
Certified Result (official final count)
•	Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only	Bush by 537

Media based

Following the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision) but that Gore might have won under other scenarios.^[32]

After the election, USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes, that is, ballots which did not register any vote when counted by machine. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today, show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes.^[33] Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:

• Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush won by 1,665 votes.
• Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush won by 884 votes.
• Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush won by 363 votes.
• Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore won by 3 votes.

The study remarks that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore was surely the winner under the strict standard. It also remarks that there are variations between examiners, and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots which registered more than one vote when counted by machine.

The study also found that undervotes break down into two distinct types, those coming from punch-card using counties, and those coming from optical-scan using counties. Undervotes from punch-card using counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan using counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.

A larger consortium of news organizations, including the USA Today, the Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, the Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, under stricter standards for vote counting, Bush won, and under looser standards, Gore won.^[34] However, a Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request. But one could argue that the recount of overvotes should have happened nonetheless, because faxes discovered after the media recount indicated that the judge overseeing the recount effort intended to have the overvotes counted. These were faxes between Judge Terry Lewis and the canvassing boards throughout the state.^[35]

According to the study, only 3% of the 111,261 overvotes had markings that could be interpreted as a legal vote. According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice-president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential race was split across two pages. Voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this error alone cost Gore the election.

Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:

• Lenient standard. Gore by 332 votes.
• Palm Beach standard. Gore by 242 votes.
• Two-corner standard. Bush by 407 votes.
• Strict standard. Bush by 152 votes.

As stated by Lance DeHaven Smith in his interview with Research in Review at Florida State University:^[36]

...Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000...

Opinion polling on recount

A nationwide December 14–21, 2000 Harris poll asked "If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for -- with no misleading ballots and infallible voting machines -- who do you think would have won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?". The results were 49% for Gore and 40% for Bush with 11% unable to make up their mind or not wishing to respond.^[37]

Electors

Technically the voters of Florida cast their ballots for electors: representatives to the Electoral College. In 2000 Florida was allocated 25 electors because it had 23 congressional districts and 2 senators. All candidates who appear on the ballot or qualify to receive write-in votes must submit a list of 25 electors, who pledge to vote for their candidate and his or her running mate. Whoever wins the majority of votes in the state is awarded all 25 electoral votes. Their chosen electors then vote for President and Vice President. Although electors are pledged to their candidate and running mate, they are not obligated to vote for them. An elector who votes for someone other than his or her candidate is known as a faithless elector.

The electors of each state and the District of Columbia met on December 18, 2000^[38] to cast their votes for President and Vice President. The Electoral College itself never meets as one body. Instead the electors from each state and the District of Columbia met in their respective capitols.

The following were the members of the Electoral College from the state. All were pledged to and voted for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney:^[39]

1. Alred S. Austin
2. Deborah L. Brooks
3. Armando Codina
4. Maria De La Milera
5. Sandra M. Faulkner
6. Thomas C. Feeney III
7. Feliciano M. Foyo
8. Jeanne Barber Godwin
9. Dawn Guzzetta
10. Cynthia M. Handley
11. Adam W. Herbert
12. Al Hoffman
13. Glenda E. Hood
14. Carole Jean Jordan
15. Charles W. Kane
16. Mel Martinez
17. John M. McKay
18. Dorsey C. Miller
19. Berta J. Moralejo
20. H. Gary Morse (best known as the developer of The Villages, the large Central Florida retirement community)
21. Marsha Nippert
22. Darryl K. Sharpton
23. Tom Slade
24. John Thrasher
25. Robert L. Woody

Film

• Fahrenheit 9/11

• Recount is a made-for-TV political drama about the 2000 US Presidential election. The show was written by Danny Strong, directed by Jay Roach, and produced by Kevin Spacey (who also stars in the film). It premiered on HBO on May 25, 2008, and the DVD was released on August 19, 2008.

• Orwell Rolls in His Grave

References

• Ceaser, James W.; Busch, Andrew (2001). The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-0836-6 
• Keating, Dan and Balz, Dan. "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush." The Washington Post, published Nov. 12, 2001.
• See also Category:Books about the United States presidential election, 2000

External links

• BUSH v. GORE
• Presidential Election Law
• The Butterfly Ballot Controversy, West Palm Beach, and its impact on the election

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