While the votes were counted on the night of November 7, 2000, Bush observed the returns to the governor’s mansion in Austin. Gore saw returns at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville. The climate in both villages is cool and humid. At the end of the evening, Gore had an advantage over Bush in the national popular vote, which he would never lose, but the Electoral College contest was pressed and everything went wrong in Florida. Elections, well understood campaigns, are far from over.
Before the election, polls had indicated that the race between Bush and Gore would be tight, with a narrow margin in several key states. Two other candidates would influence the outcome: Ralph Nader of the Green Left Party and Pat Buchanan of the Right Reform Party.
On Election Day, several Florida counties reported problems. A confusing election, the so-called butterfly poll in Palm Beach County led thousands of voters to vote unknowingly for Buchanan. Ballots in Duval County also caused confusion; some 22,000 votes were disqualified because the electorate elected more than one candidate. The punch card device used in other parts of the state does not absolutely drill a hole, which means that the device does not record a selection of votes.
Ben Ginsberg (Bush Campaign Attorney General): The Monday before the election, we had the luxury of going out for lunch. Campaign agents avoid asking lawyers questions as Election Day approaches; you know what the law is right now. We were at our favorite place to eat Mexican diving in Austin. Someone asked about the recounts and I said, “I’ve done a lot of recounts in the last 16 years, and there’s no way we’re going to have a presidential recount. The last one was in 1876. It probably wouldn’t be like that. take place again.
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Ron Klain (General Counsel of the Gore Counting Committee): I won a call on Election Day from a lawyer named Lester Hyman, probably at 8 a.m. Nashville time. His daughter, Liz, had called him to tell him that other people were leaving polling stations in Palm Beach and that they did not know who they had voted for. They think they voted for Pat Buchanan by accident. I discovered [Gore’s advisor] Michael Whouley, informed him of this, and honestly, I didn’t think about it. It was just a polling station in Palm Beach.
Nick Baldick (Gore agent in Florida): About 11 a.m. when we were given our first call about the ballot. We knew that it generated a lot of anxiety and fear, that we would lose votes, and we knew that the elections were going to be closed.
Karl Koch (Gore’s assistant): My phone burst with calls, other people said, “Oh my God, something terrible is going on in Palm Beach.” We try to start communicating messages: “Be sure to pay attention to your ballot.” But at this point, we’re halfway through Election Day.
Just before 8 p.m. Eastern Time, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN projected that Gore would win Florida, which would lead him to get the 270 electoral votes needed to take over the presidency. Premature screening. The polls remained open in western Florida, where Bush’s vote is likely to be strong, and there were unrest with voting data and vote counting provided through the Voter News Service consortium, on which all networks were based.
Clay Roberts (Director of the Florida Electoral Division): I had a television in my workplace and I watch national coverage. They called Florida while polling stations were still open west of the Apalachicola River. I sent a letter to all the chains to make sure they knew that Florida had two time zones and that they didn’t report the effects of Florida until after 7 p.m. Central time.
Karl Rove (Bush’s leading stratitre): We are communicating with [Tim] Russert; we are communicating with Bob Sleaderfer; we communicate to anyone in the press with whom we can communicate. I rebuked Bernie Shaw for calling Florida without closing all polling stations. He was incredulous, like, “What do you mean, not all ballot boxes are closed?” I said, “Everyone in Florida begs in the central time zone and vote.”
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Chris Lehane (Gore Press Secretary): I have this brilliant reminiscence of being on the most sensible terrain of the Loews, in the presidential suite, where the vice president was with his family. The networks called Florida for Gore. At the time, he was the president-elect and I didn’t forget to call him.
David Morehouse (Gore Travel Director): We thought we had it. I didn’t blow up the champagne corks, but I’m sure there were champagne corks. I see Karl Rove on the nets saying they had called Florida prematurely. I think it was just Bush’s crusade that was doing his turn.
Before long, the chains repositioned Florida in the “Undecided” column. Then, after 2 a.m., they gave the state and the presidency to Bush. Gore asked Bush to resed and turned to the War Memorial Auditorium to make a concession speech.
Judy Woodruff (CNN presenter): We weren’t making the call. It’s not Bernie Shaw and Judy Woodruff, it’s CNN’s political unit, who are in contact with the consortium. We were live on set and got data that they transmitted through our headphones. We started hearing that there was going to be a cancellation of the appeal.
Joe Lieberman (Gore’s vice-presidential candidate): The networks withdrew the ad we had made in Florida. My exhausted wife said, “Let’s go back to our room.” We returned to our suite in our hotel, and upon entering, there is a table in the lobby, and she simply sweeps a bowl of flowers on the floor. Maybe my wife is more expressive than me.
Karl Koch (Gore’s assistant): My wife on the phone in Tallahassee with a line open to the national war room, and she laughed and said, “All I can hear is Michael [Whouley] walking and saying, ‘Oh, whore.’ “
Michael Feldman (Gore’s chief of staff): It all happened so fast. I can’t tell you what network it was, however, the network called Florida for Bush and then the election for Bush. Someone went to replace channels, then replaced channels again, then switched channels again. Each chain had called for Bush’s election.
Betsy Fischer Martin (NBC producer): I [Tom] Brokaw saying, “It would be anything if the networks could explode twice in one night.” He later said: “We don’t just have an egg on our face. We have a total omelet.
Michael Feldman (Gore’s assistant): We didn’t say much about it, however, at one point, the vice president and [his crusade manager] Bill Daley went to the next room. That’s when the vice president called Governor Bush and had that first conversation.
But new data is temporarily available, and in an hour, Gore asked Bush to withdraw his concession, saying, “The cases have been drastically replaced since I first called him. With only a few thousand votes separating the two candidates.” Florida is at stake.
Jeff Greenfield (CNN analyst): While we were waiting for Gore to grant, even a virtual challenger like me began to realize that Florida’s voting margin for Bush was shrinking minute by minute. Wow, it’s weird. We call the race; he’s the next president. But those new numbers …
Karl Rove (Bush’s strato): I had this red telephone on my desk, talking about a classic cliché, and only one user had the number, so when he called, it was a pizzeria or Governor Bush. I picked up the phone and he said, “What’s going on?” And I said, “We don’t know.”
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Michael Feldman (Gore’s assistant): We were on our way to the Memorial to the Fallen in War and, at one point, my White House pager rang. It’s Michael Whouley. He said: “I take a look at the Florida Secretary of State’s website. That’s less than 6, 000 votes. We’re in the automatic count. Are you with Bill? We added Bill Daley to the call.
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): My cell phone and that Ron Fournier from the Associated Press rang out. And Ron said, “Why do you grant Al Gore?” I said, “Because we lost the election, Ron.” And he said, “Do you know that the Associated Press, the oldest news firm in the country, has not yet declared Florida for Bush?” I hung up and called Nick Baldick, who ran Florida for Gore, and I thought, “What the hell is going on?” He said, “Hey, nobody in Nashville called me. I hear you’re conceding. What’s going on there?”
Excerpt from the September 1896 issue: The Election of the President
Chris Lehane (Gore’s assistant): Me, the waiting room we were in at the War Memorial, the bowels of the amphitheater, you know, stone and brick, as in the 1920s, water dripping everywhere. And it is in this room that, for example, the fate of the loose global is at stake.
Michael Feldman (Gore’s assistant): Gore came in and wasn’t happy to be there. Bill [Daley] told him, “There are less than 1,000 votes.” I’m on the phone and only he’s chasing Bill and me, and it was like what?
Joe Lieberman (Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee): Bill Daley called [Bush Crusade President] Don Evans and said the vice president would like to speak to Governor Bush. They put it on and Al said, “Governor, it’s so close now that I have to tell you that I feel compelled to withdraw my concession.” And there’s silence, and a little back and forth, then silence, and then Al says, “Well, I don’t care what your little brother says. I’m officially telling you, I don’t give anymore, thank you, smart night. “Someone said, “Oh, man, it’s unbelievable. You called Jeb his little brother. And Al said, “I didn’t call him his little brother. He said, “My little brother tells me we’re definitely going to use Florida.” “
Bret Baier (Fox News Reporter): One weekend, all hotels were booked due to the Florida-Florida State party. I ended up staying in someone’s house, like in a guest room. I woke up in a picture of a circle of relatives, thinking: What is this room? And who is this circle of relatives in the picture?
David Boies (Gore’s lawyer): When I arrived at Tallahassee’s offices, I greeted through Ron Klain, who said, “Welcome to Guatemala.”
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): If you had to think of the worst position imaginable to fight this, unless maybe in Texas, Florida was the worst circumstance you could imagine. The guilty user of all this is the brother of the candidate, Jeb Bush. If I showed you how Florida works on a piece of paper, I’d say, “This is a third world banana republic.”
Karl Koch (Gore’s assistant): Bush’s argument is less difficult than our argument: “Votes were cast; it’s over.” We had to make it clear why the election didn’t end, and other people don’t need to hear that argument.
Mark Fabiani (Gore’s assistant): Some of us have devised a plan in which on Sunday night, after NFL games, Gore would give a speech. I would have done it in Florida, and I would have done it in front of an organization of other seniors, you know, basically Jews who had been deprived of their right to vote through the butterfly vote and who ended up voting for Pat Buchanan. And I was like, “Listen, I know it breaks your heart. But this is what I think is the most productive thing for this country. I am committed not to take legal action, and I know that some of you would possibly need to commit myself to legal action on the butterfly vote. I adopt not bring this action to the courts. However, I promise to resolve it as temporarily as you can imagine with a statewide recount that would be overseen by some, you know, other eminent people. That’s the idea some of us deserve to do. Bush probably would have turned her down. But at least it would have given us a dramatic moment, and it would have put Gore in a smart position. Even if we had to approve the counts in each county, we can also simply say, “Look, we’re looking to do a statewide recount, and the other aspect wouldn’t.” And it was all very touching. And then Senator Lieberman finished an assembly on saturday after Saturday’s end and I strongly opposed that. finished taking a position, you know, limited stories in limited counties. And that has led to the other aspect, of course, to take into account that it is unfair.
Joseph Geller (President, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): When the first of the official crusade, other people began to arrive, they made a decision, without asking, that they were only interested in manual stories in Miami-Dade, Broward. Palm Beach and Volusia. Well, you know, that might be his opinion, though, that might have been the moment he missed the crusade.
Robert Zoellick (Bush’s Assistant: We try to focus on goal and equity. And the component of the goal and equity was to conform to the regulations, rather than drafting the regulations to serve the desired result through the other component. We have had to pay attention to a public dynamic that everyone deserves to keep counting until the result is reversed. Our message was that Bush won, various reports restored it, and it’s time to put an end to tension for another result. Gore’s motto was “Count all votes,” however, he undermined his own position, as he began looking for manual recounts in only 4 very democratic counties. He didn’t ask for a statewide recount, and his team tried to block some missing army ballots.
The organizational styles of Bush and Gore’s efforts were markedly different. Bush remained distant, pointing to an alleged transition to the presidency; Florida was watching Baker (Bush’s brother, Jeb, the governor, had officially recused himself). Gore, on the other hand, participated personally; more inclusive and dispersed decision-making.
Robert Zoellick (Bush’s counting assistant): The Gores were way ahead of us. They have a plane with 70 lawyers. They did all this preparation. I arrived the day after the election and Baker and [Bush Crusade Manager] Joe Allbaugh had come from Texas on a personal plane. We were the first 3 there. We’re literally starting from scratch. But in the end, we had specialized groups that focused on Florida courts and the various divisions of Florida courts, absences and other voting matters and federal courts. We had other separate people on TV. Then we had counting groups. Baker and some of us are coordinating briefings with Governor Bush. If you look at David Boies, last week he was making all the short films, television and advising Gore through himself. Boies was very good, but it was too stretched and we had a skill that could fit it into each and every area. In addition, Governor Bush had empowered Baker, so that we can simply make decisions and stick to them.
Fred Bartlit (Bush’s lawyer): After the election, Ron Klain and I would move to some positions and communicate on the recount. Ron would make the mass convention calls with 40 or 50 people. Gore himself would be attractive. And the calls lasted a long time. Then they’d ask me. I said we had a morning assembly of about 40 minutes with four of us led by Secretary Baker. George Bush was never there. We believed in SEAL Team Six, not the 3rd Infantry Division.
Kimball Brace (expert witness in voting equipment): A one-hour phone call with Al Gore. I was very curious to know what I knew about voting materials. Either he was very knowledgeable or had a giant folder by his side. I kept asking, “What about those salesmen? Who owns this company? All sorts of things.
Joshua Bolten (Bush’s policy director): Bush didn’t have much to do. He knew he didn’t feel he was going to be the commander on the ground. I was at the top ranch of that time.
Prosecutions have been initiated on many fronts; the chairman of the Miami-Dade exploration committee called the proliferation of lawsuits “musical courts.” Bush’s side sought to avoid manual denunciation and lost, for constitutional reasons, in federal court. Gore’s camp sought, in state court, to spare him the certification of the effects until the end of the count of hands in four counties, and momentarily prevailed before the Florida Supreme Court. In addition, Gore’s side received a ruling through a Florida judge, Jorge Labarga, that so-called dimple chads can be considered as through officials guilty of the accounts.
Meanwhile, the harsh manual counting procedure began in Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. It’s tedious and difficult. Suspended from everything: a clock that runs. The Electoral College would meet on December 18. If the electoral disputes were not resolved, the matter would be referred to the Florida Legislature before that date.
Jorge Labarga (Circuit Judge): The most important thing I was asked to say was: what was the purpose of the voters? The way the vote was was that you had this little card and inserted it into that machine, and then you break the circle of other people you vote for. And then this card full of holes was inserted into a computer. People don’t stick to the instructions. Instead of just drilling the gap for Al Gore, other people would write Al Gore. Or you can just see where they tried to push little chad, there’s, like, a lump in it, but it stayed. It would be a “pregnant” chad. The consultation for me was: do we absolutely deserve to remove chad? Or what about someone who wrote on behalf of Al Gore? Shall we tell that? Obviously, they involve a goal. I made a decision that had to be told.
Mark Glaze (Volunteer Count): They took out the physical polls at the polling place. And the monitor, a theoretically impartial person, passed the voting papers one by one and supported them. And there would be one observer in the look of Gore and another in the Bush aspect. The monitor doesn’t intend to let us touch the polls.
Jon Winchester (volunteer count): She was a maquiladora. We got there and counted the ballots for hours and hours. One observer said, “Oh, that’s a smart question,” and the other said, “Oh, I object, this is questionable.” And we’re going to have to put it in the stack of the prospecting table [for review].
Ann McFall (Member of the Volusia County Prospecting Committee): They fed the prospecting committee and prospecting committee staff: they had turkey legs every night they brought from the prison. There were other vital people holding the long, long turkey legs. Oh, my God, it was something.
Jorge Labarga (Circuit Court Judge): When the matter was resolved, the election manager rented a Ryder van and the van transported all those ballots to Tallahassee. The happiest day of my life when I saw this yellow truck on the Florida Turnpike heading north, away from me.
Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, head of election oversight, turned out to be a lightning rod. Democrats questioned whether she was independent because she had co-chaired George W. Bush’s crusade in Florida. Some Republicans became involved in their political skills in times of crisis.
Gore’s crusade was hoping to achieve as many effects as you could imagine during the period of “protest,” before certification, at the county level. Harris argued that the demanding situations would be greater thereafter, statewide, during the period of “competition.” By pressing for certification, Harris sought to complete or temporarily complete the recounts. The role played in his workplace through Republican agent Mac Stipanovich remains controversial.
Leon St. John (Palm Beach County attorney): Time on the Republican side because Bush had an advance and there was a deadline to certify the vote under Florida law.
Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State): My role was to protect Al Gore’s legal rights, not its political viability. Gore’s crusade felt they needed to make the protest phase bigger and win more votes, but what happened when they did, shortened the time of the war phase and there was no time to do manual recounting across the state. how we deserve to have had.
Robert Zoellick (Bush Account Assistant): All political whirlwinds shook Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. She seeks to be fair under Florida law, but the Florida Supreme Court invents a new law and the press beats her. I don’t know if it came from Jeb Bush or the Republican Party, but Katherine was given Mac Stipanovich as an adviser to calm her nerves. His nickname “Mac the Knife”. Mac, a former sailor, had led [Jeb] Bush’s first campaign, and lost, for governor. A wonderful personality and spirit, one of the colors of other people you know in state politics, with great wisdom about personalities, battles and local bodies. At the time, I was reading for a master’s degree in Medieval French history.
Mac Stipanovich (Republican agent): I sat elegantly Latin when my phone vibrated. I looked down, saw who she was and went out, and asked, “Can I get into Katherine Harris’ workplace and help her? I had a smart date with Harris. I had helped with your choice and have been private friends ever since. The strategy to get the election to land, to finish it, to finish it, to continue limiting the options. My main task is to give strategic recommendations and advise Katherine. I’m pretty well known in Tallahassee. I arrived early in the morning, drove from the outside to the parking lot, got up to their workplace, stayed there until it was all over at night, and then left the parking lot to my car off site. . Driving past the hounds to the capital I would have identified would not have fostered confidence that impartiality is the rule in the workplace of the Secretary of State.
Deborah Kearney (lawyer, Secretary of State’s office): Mac Stipanovich is a friend of Katherine’s and he would come, stop at her, and talk. I think he once tried or went to an assembly with us, and we just said, “No, we don’t want your opinion, we don’t want your opinion, we don’t like your contribution.”
Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State): By the way, there are those who say they turned to the Bush campaign, or that I’m a puppet and they were pulling my strings, but that’s probably not true. Mac is just Mac. It’s vital for him to be able to say what he meant so he could write history, so that he can help write a film, so that he can be so vital in that story. But it’s not even a footnote to me.
On Wednesday, November 15, Harris announced that no additional manual recount votes would be accepted and that he intended to certify the results of the Florida election. According to the Associated Press, at the time, Bush had an 286-vote lead over Gore. It would expand to around 930 when ballots for those absent abroad were counted; Gore’s attempt to exclude mailed ballots arriving after the official deadline proved fruitless in court. On November 17, the Florida Supreme Court intervened to keep its certification until it can rule on the acceptance of manual recounts; meanwhile, manual narratives continued. On Tuesday, November 21, the court unanimously that the review manual deserved to continue and gave the counties five days to complete them.
Charles T. Wells (President of the Florida Supreme Court): We made our ruling Tuesday night before Thanksgiving and prolonged the counting era until Sunday after Thanksgiving until 5 p.m. if the Secretary of State’s workplace opens that day, or nine a.m. the next day if it doesn’t open. Well, that did very poorly through the bush people, who argued that we had no room for manoeuvre to extend the deadline. He also found an adverse reaction from the Miami-Dade County Prospecting Committee, which argued that there was not enough time for them to count. Then they simply dissolved their efforts.
Craig Waters (spokesman, Florida Supreme Court): Several corporations learned that they can put their logo on global television if they simply send someone to stand in front of the position I make classified ads and hold a sign. I looked up once and there a septic tank service that was still passing in front of the podium.
Joseph Klock Jr. (Katherine Harris’ lawyer): We developed a rule, and the rule that each and every time we earned something would make sure to celebrate in two hours, because it was about two hours before the court would oppose what we were able to achieve.
Ben Ginsberg (Bush’s assistant): We feel that most Florida Supreme Court justices don’t like us very much. We think we had the most productive arguments, but the loss was not a terrible impact. [Bush’s lawyer] Ted Olson had all the papers ready, so we went fast enough to move on to the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, November 22, the day after the state Supreme Court’s decision, Bush’s crusade asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a certiorari, that is, asked him to review the decreasing court’s decision. On the same day, Bush’s running mate Dick Cheney suffered a slight central attack. Also that day was the so-called Brooks Brothers mutiny, which took place in the construction of the workplace where the Miami-Dade tale took place. Dozens of Bush volunteers from out of state had arrived in Miami: “50-year-old white lawyers with mobile phones and Hermes links,” as the Wall Street Journal reports. Many joined to protest the recount, and the protest has become uncontrollable. Caught in the Joe Geller showdown; him at the scene by chance, hoping to show how voting machines treated punched cards. In the process, Miami-Dade’s count stopped.
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): I think we were going to advance the countdown after Thanksgiving weekend. We had this delay in certification until Sunday. We just needed to end the countdown in Miami-Dade, and we would have arrived early. On Sunday night, Katherine Harris would have faced certification with Gore at the helm. And that plan went wrong. One of the reasons was the Brooks Brothers mutiny.
Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We may see examples, anyway, that I think Democrats were cheating. Difficult things. Delay things. And that was starting to be a farce, in my opinion. About a dozen of us said, “That’s a lot of nonsense. Let’s see what happens in the election workplace,” which was in the Miami-Dade County workplace building. And what happened was that the leader of the Democratic Party in Miami-Dade, entered there, as carte blanche. There’s a big glass window, like a bank. And all the polls are there, aren’t they? And I see this guy does a survey and sings it in his pocket. I think, “You’re going to have to be making fun of me.”
Joe Geller (President, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): I arrived in the middle of a protest rally. They chanted, “Let us in! Let us in!” They played glass doors and screens. The staff knew me all. So I went to the window and said, “Can you give me an example of a survey?” The protest around us is getting stronger, and it turns out we’ve waited forever. Finally, the woman voter returned and gave me an example of a poll. He ranked the official Democratic Party poll in capital letters, obviously visible. And a Republican agent says, “What have you got here?” And I lift it up so I can see what’s written on it. And she looked at me, and looked at the other people who were screaming, and shouted, “They gave him a survey! He stole a poll! He may not have been confused.”
Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We were shouting, “Hey, he took a ballot! He took a ballot! We thought, “It’s a farce.” We don’t know what’s going on with the ballots that are there. I mean, who knows if they’re taking fleeting votes or making new ones. Ballots are handed over to the leader of the Democratic committee in Miami. So we screamed. “Stop the bill! Stop the fraud! And it’s become more powerful and energetic. And the cameras came.
July/August 2020: The Dark Soul of the Sunshine State
Joe Geller (President, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): They say, “This guy stole a ballot.” A crowd fell on me, yelling at me and yelling at me and poking me with my elbows. I get to the elevator and take the elevator downstairs, and in the elevator, everything is silent. When the elevator doors open and there are cameras again, they start screaming. There was a specific guy who was harassing me, who had followed me upstairs. It helps me keep saying things like “You’re in trouble.” When I leave the building, he throws himself at me, the whole body. I turn around and back to the escalator, and right at the foot of the stairs, a cop comes up to me and says, “They say you stole a ballot.” I say, “Absolutely not. I have a Democratic Party ballot. I can have that.” Your sergeant arrives and I’ll explain again. He said, “Well, I need to see it.” And I say, “That’s okay, but we’re not going to go on to do it here with CNN Live. At the distance of the cameras, you may not be able to read them. If you come to the corner with me, feel satisfied to show you. “I turn the corner and show it to the boy. He said, “Let’s go back to the election workplace and they’re going through to check what you’re saying, I’m sure.” And, of course, the woman says, “Yes, it’s Mr. Geller. I gave him an example of a Democratic Party ballot. Then the police say, “Okay, I’m sorry, Mr. Geller, ” and they take me to the electoral workplace for a rear elevator. I walk past what used to be called the counting room and see, through the glass walls, the 3 members of the prospecting board and some of their staff. Everybody’s looking worried. I drive home and without delay turning on One of the prospecting committee members said, “Well, we were looking to finish this recount, but under the existing circumstances, I don’t think it’s possible.” They were scared.
Jamie Holland (Democratic Polls Observer): I saw a component of the demonstration and wondered why our hobby is rarely as strong as theirs. The other aspect is to capture the media, and we’re just crushing them without that feeling of being so outraged.
Mac Stipanovich (Republican agent): Someone said at the time, it’s probably unfair, that as Democrats leaned over their calculators, we would break stools over their heads.
Mark Fabiani (Gore’s assistant): Me in Washington DC at the Ritz-Carlton, around Thanksgiving. [Chris Gore’s Assistant] Lehane’s coming and we’re sitting in the lobby. There’s a harpist playing in a corner. And while we’re sitting there talking, this huge rat walks through the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, as if he had no worries in the world. We think of it as a metaphor for the total situation. We started calling the hotel “Rats-Carlton.”
On Friday, November 24, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to reconsider the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Gore. Two days later, on Sunday night, Katherine Harris rated the vote count in Florida and Bush led 537 votes. Some counting effects were excluded: the effects of Palm Beach County were delayed by two hours. Miami-Dade had stopped his count.
Laurence Tribe (Gore’s lawyer): Ron Klain called and said, “We want help. It turns out that there is a challenge with the Federal Court’s participation in the election recount, and we want it to pass without delay to Florida. The consultation of whether, from a federalist point of order, this was a proper intervention was unresolved. The next morning, I gave the impression in federal court and I did not forget to argue that it made no sense for a federal court to interfere in this If there were constitutional challenges with the recount, they may be treated either in state and state court.
Read: Is Brett Kavanaugh agreed with Bush v. Gore?
Charles Fried (Bush’s lawyer): The feeling many of us had was that the Florida Supreme Court had a commitment first and foremost: that George W. Bush was not elected. They hated him, not all of them, because of civil liability reform. At the time, the Florida Supreme Court was heavily involved with the plaintiffs, and many of them had taken the top competitive steps of the plaintiffs’ bar. The concept of this kind that fit with the president was unbearable, because in Texas it had two characteristic problems: school reform and land reform.
Barbara Relative (Judge, Florida Supreme Court): Our court has been criticized for being a politician, yet there have been at least two other instances we have: adding the Palm Beach County Butterfly case and the case by mail of Martin County and Volusia County. – where we are for then-Governor Bush. Another resolution in either case would have “given” the election to Vice President Gore.
Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court were made on Friday, December 1. Laurence Tribe advocated for Gore’s campaign. Theodore Olson advocated for Bush’s campaign. On Monday, December 4, the Court opted to hit the ball on the road, when the magistrates agreed to overturn the Florida ruling and ask the state Supreme Court to explain its arguments.
Joseph Klock Jr. (Lawyer for Katherine Harris): That day they had another 750 people in the courtroom. The tables where the avocados sit are at a respectful distance from the bench, however, they had pushed the tables completely up so that they almost touched them. From where I was sitting, I can look up and see Judge Ginsburg, four and a half yards away.
Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court Reporter): The court first referred the case to the lower court to reconsider its decision, and I think when they did, what was written on the wall. Either the Florida Supreme Court is going to do what the Supreme Court asked it to do, or the Supreme Court is not going to uphold what the state court did.
Charles T. Wells (President of the Supreme Court of Florida Supreme Court): We were asked to discuss in more detail the merits of our decision. I think what they did was really a kick: they declared that there was literally no case of controversy at that time by Bush, and they gave it back to us.
Theodore Olson (Bush’s lawyer): We were delighted. The Court overturned the ruling and asked the Florida Supreme Court what it was doing and what kind of legal criteria it was applying and whether it was aware of safe federal law and constitutional issues. And the Florida Supreme Court ignored it. We felt that we had a very strong argument that the way the statewide recount was conducted was capricious, arbitrary and very inconsistent.
Laurence Tribe (Gore’s lawyer): I think this is a victory because I believe the Florida Supreme Court would react temporarily and convincingly. I did not know that the Florida court would necessarily take this request from the United States Supreme Court for an explanation and keep it in a workplace drawer, and that it would galvanize the wrath of Supreme Court justices.
Although it did not respond without delay to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, December 8, the Florida Supreme Court overruled a declining court ruling and ordered a statewide manual recount of approximately 60,000 ballots that had voting machines, for an explanation or another of why, rejected. The vote this time was not unanimous – four votes to 3, the president of the Supreme Court is in the minority – and it is almost certain that without delay he will invite a review through the High Court. On Saturday, December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a deferment and ended the recount.
Barbara Relative (Judge, Florida Supreme Court): When we had our court convention, it wasn’t as collegiate as the convention after the first review, where we all signed our names in the opinion. At the time of issuing this opinion, it was difficult to think that we could approach this controversy in a way that would not have a significant political impact.
Charles Fried (Bush’s lawyer): The Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount, which they were told to avoid doing so. And it was so bragging that three of Florida’s judges, adding the Chief Justice, opposed the decision. So my attitude is precisely what constitutes an apparent violation of due process and equivalent protection.
Barbara Relative (Judge, Florida Supreme Court): In fact, it’s not a nice environment to write that review. I had a sleepless night. But it has become more unpleasant for me the next morning. I turn to Barnes and Noble to take a copy of The Federalist, to reread what it says about the role of the judiciary, and I hear on NPR that the U.S. Supreme Court accepted jurisdiction, not only that, but they stopped the recount.
Laurence Tribe (Gore’s lawyer): The pardon of the U.S. Supreme Court, despite everything 5-4, was the decisive sign that something dramatic was happening. And I thought, my God, I’m going to have to convince the Supreme Court that the Florida Supreme Court understands what it’s talking about.
David Boies (Lawyer Gore): I was at a sports bar across the street from the Governors Inn in Tallahassee. I was in the workplace and had spoken to Vice President Gore. We were all very happy. Votes counted. He beat Governor Bush. My paintings were necessarily made and I was going home. They had all those television screens, and an exploration robot learned of the fact that the Supreme Court had factored an order preventing the votes from counting. My first reaction was that it should have been a mistake. There was no opportunity to bring or defend the case. There were fundamental questions about whether a federal factor was really at stake. The Supreme Court had never intervened in a presidential election to influence the counting of votes in a state.
Tamarra Matthews Johnson (Justice Secretary Sandra Day O’Connor): We knew the rest would come true. A television was installed in a convention hall and showed the ballot count in Florida. A guy used a device, like a magnifying glass, to examine the ballots. And then you’ll see the banner on the back of the screen indicating that the Supreme Court has issued a guard. I am amazed that this order comes thousands of miles away, the Court said to stop and everyone to stop.
Laurence Tribe (Gore’s lawyer): I don’t forget to be a squirrel in a giant suite at the Watergate Hotel, looking to prepare for the discussion, and I get a call from Ron [Klain] saying, “Are you going to be, did I have to contact Warren?” So Warren Christopher is going to my sequel in Watergate. He was an absolutely real man. He sought to know if he could leave his coat. So he leaves his coat and says, “Can we sit down and communicate?” His temper was so bad. Obviously, I didn’t have any smart news. He said, “I spoke to the vice president and we said that David [Boies] deserves to take care of the argument of the moment.” I said, “Well, it’s actually up to the vice president and you, Mr. Christopher, but what’s the theory?” He said, “When he believes that the court’s greatest interest will be to know how things are going in Florida, what is the nature of the recount.” And I said, “With all due respect, I think it’s ridiculous. I don’t think the court doesn’t care what’s going on in Florida as such. It just needs the country what happened in this chaotic scenario where it turns out that the florida tally is a kind of exercise in chaos rather than in democracy. And I think it is vital that the Court understands, in federal law, why it is appropriate to allow the recount to continue, even in a corrected Formula. He said: “It’s all very well, but the vice president has said that David deserves to take care of it. Need to help him get ready for the fight? I said, “Of course.”
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): I didn’t know David Boies before we stayed in Florida. I’ve come to have great respect for him as a lawyer, a brilliant lawyer. But arguing in the Supreme Court is a very specialized thing, and Larry Tribe is probably the most productive user living today to argue before the Supreme Court. Clearly, I have a long non-public date with Larry. He was my teacher in law school, my mentor. People didn’t like their argument the first time we went to the Supreme Court, yet there was no doubt that Larry was the right choice. I never knew we were going to do anything else until the vice president called me and said, “Look, I need to reconsider this.
March 2020: The Supreme Court’s Persistent Bias
Laurence Tribe (Gore’s lawyer): David appears in the sequel and says, “I only have a few hours.” I don’t know what else he had in his schedule. But he said, “Can you help me get the equivalent protection claim?” So we spent, at most, two or three hours talking about how the Fourteenth Amendment limited the formula or technique that an ideal state court can use to retell ballots. And I said that I think there was a strong, if not persuasive, argument for the proposition that the chaotic and inconsistent way of counting votes violates equivalent protection, but the key will be the remedy. What if the Supreme Court still makes a decision that there is a genuine argument in the Fourteenth Amendment? And he said, “That’s a stupid argument; we’re going to win that.” And I said, “I wouldn’t count on that.”
Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court took place on Monday, December 11. The written opinions, which were added to a 5-4 revocation of the Florida court, were made public at 10 p.m. Tuesday, December 12. Even supporters of the outcome stated that the ruling did not reflect the Court in the most productive way. Disagree, Judge John Paul Stevens wrote: “While we may never know with complete certainty the identity of this year’s presidential election winner, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the country’s confidence in the opinion as an independent parent of the rule of law. On Wednesday, December 13, Al Gore admitted defeat.
David Boies (Lawyer Gore): The atmosphere was electric. It has never presented the U.S. Supreme Court as an establishment like this in a presidential election, and has never had a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court has told a state how to count ballots in a presidential election. From an analytical point of view, from an old point of view, from a political point of view, [Anthony] Kennedy and O’Connor issued judgments that I think I can get, and I just needed one of those. On the other hand, last Saturday, the Court, through a 5-4 majority, made a decision on counting votes, and I think it would be incredibly difficult for any opinion on who took the regular step of preventing the vote. count for now canceled and verify what the Florida Supreme Court did.
Theodore Olson (Bush’s lawyer): Article II of the Constitution stipulates that a state legislature will have to prescribe the approach of deciding on the electorate in a presidential election. We argued that this provision of the Constitution was violated because the judiciary replaced the regulations under which votes would be counted and the electorate would be chosen. We also argued that the recounts violated the equivalent coverage and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment because the regulations were replaced on the fly after the election, county to county and hourly, in an effort through democrats. to produce votes that replace the outcome. Individual voters in other parts of the state were treated in terms of the weight given to their votes.
Joseph Klock Jr. (Lawyer for Katherine Harris): At one point, the Chief Justice was chasing David, and the Chief Justice said, “Well, Mr. Boies, how long does the recount last?” At what point [Judge Antonin] Scalia said, “Oh, until they win.”
Karl Rove (Bush strata): That night I stayed at the Hilton in McLean, Virginia. I had room service and was in my pajamas. I’ve got the TV on and 10 p.m. The Supreme Court is back. I have NBC on, and Pete Williams and Dan Abrams are outdoors on the Supreme Court looking to describe the opinion. As I recall, Williams asked someone to give him his opinion from the back to the front. Read the conclusion, and the Court discovers that the Florida Supreme Court is violating the Equal Protection Clause and Section II, and the election ended.
Ben Ginsberg (Bush assistant): The resolution began to arrive one page at a time on an old fax machine. We shared the opinion among all the former supreme court clerks, thinking they would have the maximum quick knowledge. And it was [future senator] Ted Cruz, reading the dissent of Judge Stevens, who said, “Oh my God, we’re going to have to win.”
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): Among Bush’s many negative aspects as opposed to Gore, one of the worst is that it takes, for example, up to page seven to know the final results of the case. It’s a horribly written opinion. So I read, I read, I read. I’ve got Gore on the phone, other people bring me the pages one at a time. Finally, we got the seventh page.
Karl Rove (Bush’s strata): I call Bush at the governor’s mansion. He’s in bed reading with the TV off. Then turn on the TV, and when you turn it on, it’s set to CNN. Charles Bierbauer reads the resolution from the front and has no transparent concept of conclusion. I say, “Congratulations, Mr. President,” and Bush says, “What are you talking about?” I’m telling you what Pete Williams says on NBC. And he tells me the GUY at CNN says something else. After some circular trips, he said, “I’m going to call Baker” and hang up.
Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court Reporter): The ruling is the resolution, it’s a price ticket for a singles trip. He has never been quoted in any other case and no one expects any one to argue about him one day. The strange thing about this was that the five majority judges were the moderate conservative and very conservative judges of the Court, but they all agreed on one thing in their general philosophy, namely that they were in favor of more competitive coverage of the states. Rights. And in this case, they opted for a federal resolution that necessarily rejected the rights of states. By contrast, the four liberals were other people who, in most cases, were not strong defenders of state rights and, in this case, were strong defenders of state rights.
Chris Lehane (Gore’s assistant): I got an email, I don’t even know what it was called at the time. It’s somewhere between a pager and a phone. You used it on your hip. The message came here from Gore and said, “Please don’t destroy the Supreme Court. Al”. And I didn’t. I inspired and incredibly struck the vice president who sought to put the country’s values first. But I don’t think there’s a day when I don’t think about how different the global would be today in many ways.
Joshua Bolten (Bush’s assistant): I don’t forget that Bush warned staff who oppose triumphalism. He said it had been a difficult time, and that if he sought to be able to govern properly, many other people who did not think that he was the legitimately elected president would have to settle for him as president.
Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court Reporter): I know in retrospect that Judge O’Connor had doubts. It may just sink, but she’s a user who can think and think she was wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean she would have done something different. This means that, in retrospect, he had genuine doubts as to whether the resolution had been correct.
Joshua Bolten (Bush’s assistant): I don’t forget to think, man, that’s not how you decide. I think Bush won the election, but there would never be a way to bring it to light.
Ron Klain (Gore’s assistant): I’m not done. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
A comprehensive review of the countless surveys in Florida was conducted through two teams: first, the Miami Herald and USA Today, in collaboration with accounting firm BDO Seidman; and later through a consortium of multi-point news organizations, adding the New York Times and the Washington Post, in collaboration with the National Center for Opinion Research, or NORC. The Herald’s investigation concluded that Bush would have won and probably extended his advantage a little, even if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount Gore had requested. The review also made us think that, if all of the contested polls had been conducted in Florida, each of the polls had been tested from scratch and the accountants using an inclusive standard could have won through a few hundred votes. Gore had never asked for a recount of this guy in the whole state. The consortium had similar conclusions.
Marty Baron (editor of the Miami Herald): We end up with the big question of whether the vote was accurate. Mark Seibel, who was our news editor at the time and now works here at [Washington] Post, said, “You know, ballots are public records.” In your opinion, we may have access to one’s ballots and we may deserve to do our own recount.
Kirk Wolter (Director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): The purpose was simply to find out what would have happened if SCOTUS had not stopped the count. There were voting criteria on the voting station at the time. It’s been so long since I can’t tell you, yet the Bush team advanced proposals, Gore’s team advanced proposals, the Florida Supreme Court advanced proposals, Katherine Harris had her way of doing things, and so on. And the consultation was, under each of these proposals, what would have happened if the stories had continued?
Marty Baron (editor of the Miami Herald): In some counties, we have encountered the resistance of election supervisors. They argued that, in fact, it was not a public record, and we had to sue them. We have succeeded in each and every one of those cases. Now we had to make a decision about which popular it was going to be used. First, each county had its own formula, so in many counties, if not in the maximum number of counties, it was a formula of punched cards. We made the decision to look at it according to several citizens. In places like Duval County, if I don’t forget correctly, he really marked the ballot. You were filling it up. And there were a lot of other people who voted for the first time, and they’d mark anything, cross it out and then mark anything else. And, obviously, we may not count the ballots. And then there was the debate in Palm Bevery one one County, where they had the so-called butterfly ballots, where other people were very … they thought they were voting for Al Gore and instead voted for Patrick Buchanan. There were a lot of those other people. That said, you can only count the way they voted. You may simply not step back and make a decision about what you intended to do. You can just take a look at what they were really doing. So we went to each of the 67 counties. We look at the effects of other inhabitants. We did a calculation. We took a look at BDO Seidman. We agreed very well with the calculation of BDO Seidman. We come to the same conclusion here. And the conclusion was that George W. Bush had won Florida and therefore won the presidency.
Kirk Wolter (Director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): We weren’t allowed to play the polls. Only one county worker is allowed to get a vote. So the county worker is holding the survey for our staff to review, and if the survey is clear, that’s fine, but if the survey isn’t clear, we were allowed to touch the county worker’s hand and move his hand. and rotate the survey and replace the survey position in a variety of tactics to get the most productive view possible.
Marty Baron (editor of the Miami Herald): When we presented this poll, the Bush Crusade and Republicans in general were outraged. They considered it an effort to delegitimble a Bush presidency. That’s not our goal at all. Our goal is to find out what the genuine vote is: to continue with the recount that the U.S. Supreme Court would not allow to continue. And it turned out that he showed that George W. Bush had won the election by almost any criteria. I can tell you two things. First, there are still many Democrats who do not settle for this as a result and forget about this study. And number two, Republicans have never apologized for falsely accusing us of wanting to delegitimized the bush presidency.
Mac Stipanovich (Republican agent): To this day, George Bush won the election with a plurality of votes cast legally that day. If you ask me, do I think a plurality of people who went to the polls that day and tried to vote tried to vote for George Bush? I don’t think so. But we count the legal votes.
The nearly 6 million votes cast in Florida in the 2000 election remain intact, stored in boxes and wrapped in plastic in the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee.