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 The U.S. presidential election of 2000 took place on Election Day, Tuesday, November 7. The Republican candidate, George W. Bush won the election to the presidency, defeating Democratic candidate Al Gore. This election was the third time in United States history a candidate had won the necessary number of electoral college votes for victory while losing the popular vote. It was the fourth time a candidate won the election while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams did not receive the necessary number of electoral college votes for victory, but won in the House of Representatives).
Introduction and summary results
Sources:
Al Gore publicly conceded the election after the Supreme Court, in the case Bush v. Gore, 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. Gore strongly disagreed with the court's decision, but conceded the election "for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy". He had previously made a concession phone call to Bush the night of the election, then retracted it after learning just how close the election was. Following the election, a subsequent recount conducted by various U.S. news media organizations indicated that Bush would have won using some of the recount methods (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision) but that Gore would have won if other methods were adopted.  The Florida election has been closely scrutinized since the election, and several irregularities are thought to have favored Bush. These included the notorious Palm Beach "butterfly ballot", which produced an unexpectedly large number of votes for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan, and a purge of some 50,000 alleged felons from the Florida voting rolls that included many voters who were eligible to vote under Florida law. Some commentators still consider such irregularities and the legal maneuvering around the recounts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote, but as a matter of law the issue was settled when the U.S. Congress accepted Florida's electoral delegation. Nonetheless, embarrassment about the Florida vote uncertainties led to widespread calls for electoral reform in the United States, and ultimately to the passage of the Help America Vote Act, which authorized the United States federal government to provide funds to the states to replace their mechanical voting equipment with electronic voting equipment. However, this has led to new controversies: the security weaknesses of the computer systems, the lack of paper-based methods of secure verification, and the necessity to rely on the trustworthiness of the manufacturers. Democratic Nomination
Because of the many scandals surrounding the administration of then-President Bill Clinton, numerous candidates for his party's presidential nomination were discussed. Most of these discussions focused on House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, progressive Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. By the time of the Democratic primaries, however, all of them but Bradley had decided against running. This left the field virtually wide open for Al Gore, Clinton's vice president, who immediately became the front-runner, despite Bradley's receiving the endorsements of Kerrey and Wellstone, as well as that of respected New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Running an insurgency campaign, Bradley positioned himself as the liberal alternative to Gore, who was a founding member of the famously-centrist Democratic Leadership Council. While Michael Jordan campaigned for him in the early primary states, Bradley announced his intention to campaign "in a different way" by conducting a positive campaign of "big ideas." He made the spending of the record-breaking budget surplus on a variety of social welfare programs to help the poor and the middle-class one of his central issues, along with campaign finance reform and gun control. Despite his excellent grass-roots organization and his expenditure of over two million dollars in Iowa alone, Bradley was easily defeated by Gore in the primaries, due in large part to the support given to Gore by the Democratic Party establishment and Bradley's poor showing in the Iowa caucus, where Gore successfully painted the aloof Bradley as being indifferent to the plight of the farmer in that highly-rural state. The closest Bradley came to a victory was his 50-46 loss to Gore in the New Hampshire primary. Republican Nomination
Following Bob Dole's one-sided loss to Bill Clinton in the 1996 election, the party's presidential nomination was left wide open, which led to a larger than usual number of candidates in the running. One potential candidate, retiring Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, declined to run, while conservative political commentator and two-time candidate for the nomination Pat Buchanan decided to run on the Reform Party ticket. Of those who did announce their candidacy, a few, such as Dole, Forbes, and Quayle, were considered to have little chance at winning and soon dropped out. That left Bush, McCain, and Keyes as the only candidates still in the race. With Keyes, a two-time loser who had never won an election before in his life, frequently espousing ideas deemed to be too extreme for the consumption of average voters, it soon became obvious that Bush and McCain were the front-runners for the nomination. Bush, the governor of the second-largest state in the Union, the son of a former president, and the favored candidate of the Christian right, was portrayed in the media as the establishment candidate, while McCain, a maverick senator with the support of many moderate Republicans and Independents, was portrayed as an insurgent. When McCain received a blow-out victory in the New Hampshire primary and proceeded to rack-up victories in several other New England states and Michigan, he seemed well on his way to the nomination. When the South Carolina primary came, however, he was soundly defeated by Bush. Many credited this to the fact that it was the first primary in which only registered Republicans could vote, which crippled McCain's strong lead among Independents. Others, including the vast majority of McCain's supporters, blamed it on a campaign of push polls, smear tactics, and numerous other dirty tricks perpetrated against him by his political enemies. Although no evidence was ever found linking these activities to Bush or any member of his campaign, most members of the press and the general public seemed to believe that they were work of Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager and a man with a history of such "indiscretions." Whatever the real reason for it, McCain's loss in South Carolina stopped his momentum cold. Although McCain won a few additional primaries, Bush took the majority and, with the support of the party's superdelegates, handily won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. CampaignsIn the campaign, Bush criticized the Clinton administration policy in Somalia, where 18 Americans died in 1993 trying to sort out warring factions, and in the Balkans, where U.S. peacekeeping troops perform a variety of functions. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," Bush said in the second presidential debate. Overview and timeline (Election Day and beyond)The 2000 Presidential election was among the closest elections in the history of the United States. Other close elections include the elections of 1800 (with a tie in electoral votes), 1876, 1916, 1960, 1968, and 1976. The results of the November 7 election were not known for more than a month after the election, because the counting and recounting of Florida presidential ballots, which swung the election, extended for more than a month. Figures tallied up during election night gave 246 electoral votes to Bush and 255 to Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call at the time. Since 270 electoral votes are required to win, Florida would put either candidate over the top, and the other two states were irrelevant. (Both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of Gore over the next few days, making it 246-267.) 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 (and disputed) 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%). The Democratic Party lodged a dispute over the state's election results requesting that disputed ballots in three heavily-Democratic counties be counted by hand. During the recounting process, the Bush campaign hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee the legal process, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. 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 in which it was ordered that the recounting process 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 for clarification due to their "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons for certain aspects of the decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified their ruling on this matter while the US Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore, and the two cases were then combined, with SCOTUS approving by 6-3 the Florida court's actions in the original case based on the clarifications provided. Early in the afternoon of December 12, the Republican-dominated Florida House of Representatives voted nearly on party lines to certify the state's electors for Bush. Later that afternoon, the Florida Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings authorizing recounts in several south Florida counties. All the lower court rulings became moot when around 10pm on December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush by a 5-4 vote, effectively ending the election. 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. The crucial 5 to 4 decision held that insufficient time remained to implement a unified standard and therefore all recounts must stop. At 9pm on December 13, in a nationally televised address, Gore conceded that he lost his bid for the presidency. He asks his supporters to support Bush, saying, "This is America, and we put country before party." During his speech, Gore's family and Joe and Hadassah Lieberman stood quietly nearby. Texas Governor George W. Bush became President-elect and began forming his transition committee. Bush tried to reach across party lines and bridge a divided America, stating that "the president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background." On January 6, 2001, a joint session of U.S. Congress met to certify the U.S. Electoral College vote. Although twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congresional Black Caucus, rose one by one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida, each was ruled out of order by Gore, according to an 1877 law requiring any such objection to be sponsored by a Senator, none of whom was willing to do so. Bush took the oath of office on January 20. Vice President Al Gore came in second even though he received a larger number of popular votes (Gore won 500,000 more popular votes than Bush) and this contributed to the controversy of the election. This was at least the fourth time that a candidate who did not receive a plurality of the popular vote received a majority of the Electoral College vote, the first time probably being in the 1824 elections although popular vote records do not exist for earlier elections. Until this election, the 1876 elections had been the most contentious in U.S. history. However, it should be pointed out that if the American system were based on the popular vote, rather than the Electoral College, then the turnout of voters would have been different. Voter turnout in states that favor one party heavily tends to be lower. Because of this, the popular vote cannot be used to predict who would have won an actual popular vote election. Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state of Tennessee. Had he won, it would have avoided the Florida controversy. Gore was the first major party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972. Florida election resultsOn 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. 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 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. Final certified vote for the state of Florida (25 electoral votes)
Controversy in FloridaFollowing 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:
 Palm Beach County's butterfly ballotsThe 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.[4] (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/design/usability/use-ballot.htm). 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. Buchanan said on The Today Show, November 9, 2000:
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 Florida Ballot Project recountsThe Opinion Research Center (http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/about/index.asp|National) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. news organizations, conducted a Florida Ballot Project comprehensive review (http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl/index.asp) 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. 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 (The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage) or the Washington Post [5] (http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf).
Response to the problemsElectronic votingSince 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 installation of modern electronic voting machines. 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 Electronic voting: problems.
Exit polling and declaration of vote winnersThe 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 from Gore to Bush 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. The 2004 election is expected to have exit polling done by two professional veteran polling experts, and all vote tallying for the networks is (so far) expected to be done by the Associated Press. Whether this change in procedure results in more accurate "calls" for candidates, and avoids premature calls such as Florida's, remains to be seen in the upcoming election. Minor party candidatesThere were five other candidates on the majority of the 51 ballots (50 states plus the District of Columbia): Harry Browne (Libertarian, 50), Pat Buchanan (Reform, 49), Ralph Nader (Green, 44), Howard Phillips (Constitution, 41), and John Hagelin (Natural Law, 38). Nader was the most successful of third party candidates, drawing 2.74% of the popular vote. His campaign was marked by a traveling tour of "super-rallies"; large rallies held in sports arenas like Madison Square Garden, with filmmaker Michael Moore as master of ceremonies. After initially ignoring Nader, the Gore campaign made a big publicity pitch to (potential) Nader supporters in the final weeks of the campaign, downplaying Gore's differences with Nader on the issues and claiming that Gore's ideas were more similar to Nader's than Bush's were, noting that Gore had a better chance of winning than Nader. On the other side, the Republican Leadership Council ran pro-Nader ads in a few states in a likely effort to split the "left" vote.[6] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001027/aponline115918_000.htm) In the aftermath of the campaign, many Gore supporters blamed Nader for drawing enough would-be Gore votes to push Bush over Gore, labeling Nader a "spoiler" candidate. Media post-electoral studies/recountsIn November 2001, after conducting an unofficial recount of Florida’s ballots, the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted - regardless of the standard used for evaluating chads - Gore won [7] (http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/112101a.html). But when legal votes were evaluated, based on the standards set in law at the time, Bush won. Democrats also blamed third party candidate Ralph Nader for taking the election away from Gore. Some say had Nader not run, Gore would have won both New Hampshire and Florida and won the election with 296 electoral votes. (He only needed one of the two to win)
Abstention of D.C. electorOne elector from the District of Columbia, Barbara Lett-Simmons, abstained from voting in the Electoral College, in protest of the District's lack of a voting representative in US Congress. D.C. does have a non-voting delegate to Congress. Close states
See also
External links and references
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