[florida 2000] did bush win

[The vote came down to Florida.]

Early in the evening, television newsrooms mistakenly declared that Gore had won in Florida.

Hours later, the news services corrected this mistake, only to follow with another erroneous announcement that Bush had taken Florida and won the presidency.

At one point, Gore called Bush to concede the election and to congratulate him on his win, only to call back minutes later to take back his concession.

The vote in Florida was a statistical tie. The margin was less than one half of one percent, triggering an automatic machine recount. When the votes were tallied, Governor Bush led by only 300 votes out of nearly 6 million.

After the absentee votes were counted, his lead widened to 930 votes. This was only .02 of one percent of the votes cast, and the machines used to count the votes in many counties were unable to account for as much as 3.9 percent of the vote in some places.

The uproar was furious and the spectacle mounted daily. Hundreds of media crews descended on Florida, and the country was overtaken by twenty-four-hour news coverage and banner headlines. The close election exposed many weaknesses in election law and procedures.

In Florida, the candidates could petition for hand counts in close elections, and the Democrats did so in four heavily Democratic counties. For a statewide election this was a serious flaw, because vote totals could be corrected in some counties but not in others, thereby affecting the outcome in the entire state.

The Florida legislature had established no standards for reading disputed votes cast by widely different methods, and the burden fell on a three-person election canvassing board in each county.

The Republicans insisted that a hand count was unfair and that the machine count should stand. They immediately petitioned the Eleventh Circuit Court in Atlanta to stop the manual recount permitted by Florida law.

The Democrats demanded their rights under Florida law to request a hand count in such a close election, saying the machines were not able to read tens of thousands of votes. On November 14, the deadline for submitting revised counts, a Republican official certified the Bush victory, pending the count of the absentee ballots.

Candidate Bush was leading by 300 votes. Due to legal challenges and the large number of votes involved, three counties were unable to complete their work by the deadline. The Republican secretary of state declared her intention not to include revised totals in the final count.

Midnight on Friday, November 17, was the deadline for tabulating absentee ballots. A lower court had ruled that the secretary of state was within her power to ignore revised vote totals. The absentee votes gave Bush a lead of 930 votes.

In an extraordinary move, the Florida Supreme Court intervened and forbade the election officials to certify the final vote until the court ruled. The court called for the submission of legal briefs regarding the hand counts and agreed to hear the case the following Monday.

Late in the evening of November 21, the court announced its unanimous decision. They set a new deadline of November 26 for final election certification and ordered that hand counts be included in the final tally.

This would likely give the election to Gore.

Tensions mounted and rhetoric escalated. The country was beset with dueling court cases and dueling press conferences from the two campaigns. More than forty legal actions were filed in Florida courts.

On November 22, vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney checked into a Washington hospital with a minor heart attack. One county, Miami-Dade, decided to abandon its efforts to hand-count the vote saying they could not finish by the deadline.

By November 24, the Republicans had appealed the Florida Supreme Court decision to the United States Supreme Court, which astounded the nation and the experts by agreeing to hear the case, thought by many to be solely a matter of Florida law. The case was to be heard Friday, December 1.

On Sunday evening, November 26, the Republican officials in Florida certified a final vote tally, which gave Bush a diminished lead of 527 votes. Hundreds of legal votes identified by the counties were not included for procedural reasons.

Once again, the Democrats appealed to the Florida courts to demand that legally cast votes be included in the final number and to demand that Miami-Dade finish its manual counts.

On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court chastised the Florida Supreme Court, invalidating their ruling on the inclusion of manual recounts.

On the same day, the Florida circuit court ruled resoundingly against the Democrats' appeal to continue the manual recounts. This decision was also immediately appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.

The country widely assumed that the Florida Supreme Court would uphold the lower court and end the election.

In the late afternoon of Friday, December 8, the Florida court once again astounded the nation. By a divided ruling of 5 to 4, the court issued a stunning repudiation and reversal of the lower court.

They ordered a statewide hand recount of every ballot where no vote for president had been tabulated by the counting machines.

This project involved approximately 45,000 votes statewide. In addition, the court ordered the inclusion of previously identified votes for Gore, which had not yet been included in the tally.

The Bush lead was reduced to a whisker-thin 157 votes.

The unexpected decision turned the political world upside down. Feverish plans got under way throughout the state to identify and examine thousands of votes. The statewide effort was to be coordinated by the courts and finished in three days.

The Bush lawyers frantically rushed one more time to the Eleventh Circuit Court in Atlanta and the U.S. Supreme Court. In less than twenty-four hours, by Saturday afternoon, the Supreme Court, by a closely divided vote of 5 to 4, abruptly stopped the process under way to review the votes.

On Monday, December 11, the Supreme Court heard the case. Its ruling came on Tuesday 12 at 10:00 PM, only two hours before the deadline for Florida to name uncontested electors. The court gave no explanation for its extraordinary late-night ruling or for the unusual fact that the ruling went unsigned.

By the vote of 7 to 2, the court ruled it would be unfair to count the ballots under Florida law unless all the counties used the same standard plus the results had to come by midnight, two hours away.

In this case, the court effectively ruled that it was more important to reach the December 12 deadline and to keep the dispute out of Congress than to examine the votes to see which candidate won.

The decision did save the country from a damaging battle in Congress to settle the tie, but it left a sour aftermath for many disgruntled voters.

On December 13, thirty-six days after the election, Vice President Gore finally spoke to the nation and offered his concession to President-Elect Bush.

Final vote

George Bush 50,456,141

Al Gore 50,996,039