Democracy with a Margin of Error: The 2000 Presidential Election Vote Dispute in Florida
p. 123-136
Texte intégral
1The 2000 United States presidential campaign was the fourth time in the nation’s history that a presidential candidate won the popular vote but lost the election.1 It was one of the closest, wildest and most hotly contested presidential elections ever fought.2 Pitting Republican candidate George W. Bush, the incumbent governor of Texas and son of former President George H. W. Bush, against Democratic candidate Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s Vice-President, the election was followed by several weeks of recounts and court challenges in the state of Florida, culminating in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore. After a controversial ruling, Bush was declared the winner over Gore by 537 votes in Florida, ending a “36-day national electoral nightmare”3 that had lasted from November 7th to December 13th, 2000. The result of the election had a negative impact on the Republican Party, accused by many disillusioned Americans, political observers and Democrats of tarnishing the image of American democracy nationwide and worldwide. For them, the Republicans had stolen the White House by interfering with the electoral process in the crucial state of Florida, with the help of top-ranking Republicans in Florida, including Bush’s own brother, and in the higher judiciary. This paper will first describe the procedure for electing an American president and the context of the 2000 election, and then go on to examine the war for votes in Florida and the controversy over the final ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.
Electing a President
2Every four years, Americans elect their president on the Tuesday following the first Monday of November. The president is not elected by all the qualified voters (“popular vote”), but on the votes of an electoral college (“electoral vote”). The Unites States Electoral College was created in the early days of the republic as a voting system that would allow the disparate states to come together and elect a single president to represent them all. As provided for in Section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the number of Representatives that a state receives is determined by considering the state’s population in proportion to all the other states. In 2015, California, the largest state, gets 55 votes while sparsely-populated Wyoming gets only three. All but two states4 use a winner-takes-all system whereby the candidate who wins the most votes in a state takes all of that state’s Electoral College votes. Since there is a total of 538 Electoral College votes (for the 100 Senators, 435 Representatives and 3 extras for the District of Columbia), a ticket needs a majority of the electoral votes, or 270, to claim the White House. When voting finishes on the evening of Election Day, reporters around the country provide live updates, analyses and results that usually give an accurate idea of who the winner is. But the result may also either be too close to call before every single vote is counted, or legal battles over presidential election procedures may delay the result or force a recount.5 Such was the case in the 2000 election when the outcome of the race remained unknown for five weeks due to a dispute over close vote totals in Florida, a state that became the stage of an extremely controversial legal battle that delayed the result until December 13th and eventually involved the U.S. Supreme Court.
3During the 2000 U.S. presidential contest, the two major party candidates were Bush and Gore. Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, was vacating the position after two terms (1993-2001) during which his administration had raised taxes on the wealthy and cut government spending, a strategy that had helped create the conditions for low unemployment and a record 115 months of economic expansion.6 However, Clinton’s presidency had been stained by the failure of his healthcare reform plan (1994), and by two major scandals: the Whitewater scandal7 (1994-98) during which investigations were made into the Clintons’real estate dealings in Arkansas, where he had been governor before becoming President, and “Monicagate” (1998), the scandal over Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which dominated the domestic political agenda and led to impeachment proceedings in Congress until Clinton was finally acquitted in a historic Senate impeachment trial in February 1999.
4During the 2000 presidential race, the Bush campaign did not make an issue of the Clinton sex scandal, and Gore refused to let Clinton campaign. Domestic issues dominated the campaign with key issues like Social Security and health care, tax cuts, education but also hate crime and racial profiling. In April 2000, Gallup opinion polling predicted a victory for Bush with 47% of the votes against Gore (41%) and Green candidate Ralph Nader (4%); six months later, just a few days before Election Day, the Gallup poll had tightened, indicating a very close finish: “The final Gallup projection is for Bush to win 48% of the vote, Gore 46%, Nader 4%, Buchanan 1% and others 1%. However, given the 2-point margin of error, it is possible that Gore could emerge as the popular vote winner, although the final Gallup poll suggests that Bush is the more likely winner.”8
5On Election Day, held on Tuesday, November 7th, 2000, 111 million Americans, or 55% of the total population, went voting.9 On election night, just before the nation learned about Florida’s presidential vote, state results gave 248 electoral votes to Gore, and 246 to Bush, meaning that whoever won the ultimate battleground state of Florida, which happened to be then governed by Bush’s brother Jeb Bush (1998-2007), would pick up the 25 electoral votes and reach the 270 needed to be elected President.
6From the Civil War until the mid-20th century, Florida’s voting pattern, like most southern states, was to vote almost exclusively for the Democratic Party. A change took place in the 1960s with the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy plan of getting the white Southern population to shift their views from Democrat to Republican.10 Since 1952, this plan had been successful in turning Florida into a primarily Republican state. However, due to its spectacular population growth over the last decades–Florida has attracted considerable influxes of service workers, retirees, Cubans and other groups–resulting in a very broad political diversity, Florida has also occasionally voted Democrat. Such had been the case in 1964 in the election opposing Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson to Republican Barry M. Goldwater, and more recently in 1996 when Clinton had opposed Republican candidate Bob Dole.11 For this reason, Florida was considered a critical swing state during the 2000 election, and one of major electoral importance due to its high number of electoral votes: with 25 votes, Florida was the fourth most powerful after California (54), New York (33) and Texas (32).12
7On 2000 election night, the confusion over the Florida scores started at 7:50 p. m. E.T. when Associated Press declared Gore the winner in Florida, based on Voter News Service projections from exit polls. Then, around 10 p.m., networks began retracting their projection on receiving estimates with Bush leading Gore by 50,000 votes. Later during the night, at 2:17 a.m. on November 8th, they announced that Bush had won Florida and the presidency. Two hours later, at 3:58 a.m., the broadcasters again retracted their statement, announcing that Florida’s election was being considered “too close to call,”13 which meant that the presidency was once again undecided. In the morning of Friday, November 8th, the final margin of the Florida vote was reported to be 1,784 votes, with Bush leading Gore by 2,909,135 to 2,907,351.14
8With the presidency hanging on just a few hundred votes, Gore, who had conceded to Bush earlier in the evening, retracted his concession, knowing that an automatic statewide recount would be ordered in Florida. This recount, a process from which Florida Governor Jeb Bush immediately recused himself, marked the beginning of a historic five-week dispute involving a variety of voting irregularities. Among them, were uncertainties arising from punch-card ballots such as the hanging-chads but also complaints of violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and even disputes over absentee military ballots from overseas members of the nation’s military. With Gore requesting that votes be recounted manually in four disputed counties (“Ignoring votes means ignoring democracy itself,”15 he declared on November 27th), Florida found itself at the center of this historical presidential contest, the battle for the state’s electoral votes now becoming “a life-and-death struggle for the presidency.”16
The War for Votes in Florida17
9Under Florida law, the recount rules and procedures for close-calls state that an automatic paper ballot recount is mandatory if the vote margin is 0.5% or less, and that a hand recount is initiated if that margin is 0.25% or less.18 On November 9th, 2000, only one day after the automatic recount of 6 million presidential ballots was ordered in Florida, Gore’s team, being allowed by Florida law to ask for manual vote recounts in the counties of their choice, decided to challenge the election results by demanding the manual recount of nearly a million votes in the predominantly Democratic counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia where widespread complaints of voting machine malfunctions had been made.19
10The day after Election Day, in these four counties at the epicenter of the voting dispute, many lawyers gathered complaints from disgruntled voters alleging a range of voting irregularities resulting in confusion as to which candidate they had actually voted for. For example, in Palm Beach County, many voters contested the two-page butterfly ballot by pointed that Bush and Gore were the first two candidates listed on the left side, but the hole corresponding to Gore’s name was the third one down, not the second one, which meant that voters had to punch the third hole to vote for him. By punching the second hole, voters picked Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan, whose name was listed on the opposite page, thus voting for the wrong person.20
11Two days after the election, thousands of supporters of Vice-President Gore whose ballots had been disqualified, along with Reverend Jesse Jackson, protested in the streets of Palm Beach, wearing T-shirts reading “It’s not your vote that counts... It’s how your vote is counted!” and chanting “Re-vote! Re-vote!” to denounce Theresa LePore, the county supervisor of elections, who had approved the design of the ballots. “There was a misalignment in the process,” Jackson said. “If you drive your car down the road in a little car and your wheels are not aligned, you have a wreck. That was a wreck in West Palm.”21
12Jackson’s presence during the street protests was also justified by another issue at stake during these elections: on Election Day, thousands of African-American voters in Florida had been told they could not vote because the computer system said they were convicted felons, and so ineligible to vote. Those voters claimed they were guilty only of misdemeanors, and so had the right to vote. They were now filing private lawsuits in the name of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Leading about 2,000 protesters in a half-mile march in West Palm Beach, Jackson said: “We Blacks and Jews find ourselves fighting old battles we thought we had won. We must stand together or we will perish alone. This march is not about the presidency; this is about the right to vote.”22
13Another example, the most commonly mentioned in the many complaints filed by voters in all four counties, blamed the chad–the tiny scored portion of a paper ballot that voters punch out using a small stylus to indicate their preference for a candidate–which they said had stayed either partially or completely stuck to the ballots. If the hole was not clearly punched, it was impossible for machines to read them, and the result was an undervote; if the machine punched more than one hole, the result was an overvote. Most importantly, in both cases, these questionable ballots were considered invalid votes, and so had not been counted in the final tally. Of the 462,000 votes cast in Palm Beach County, only 432,000 were found valid when the results were first counted automatically; of the 30,000 discarded ballots, 19,000 were double-punched, and an additional 11,000 were not properly punched through.23
14The duty of the election officials asked to urgently recount tens of thousands of votes by hand, one by one, was to discern “voter intent” when considering questionable ballots, but they were never told precisely how to do this. In recount rooms, watched closely by lawyers from both parties, election officials spent hours holding cardboard ballots in the air, sometimes using a magnifying glass to try and determine the intent of the voters from punch cards that were not quite punched.24 Some of them adopted the “light test”: “If light shined through, it was counted as a vote; if there was no light, it wasn’t counted.”25 For others, a ballot could be counted as a valid vote if a least one corner of a chad had been punched, or if the chad was partially punched. At this point, whichever way the officials leaned, and despite the general confusion surrounding this laborious manual recount, Gore was hoping that enough ballots with unattached or “hanging” chads next to his name would give him the lead in Florida, and consequently the presidency. On Friday, November 9th asked about the election at the vice-presidential house in Washington D.C., Gore declared himself “very optimistic.”26
15The next day, however, the Bush campaign made a surprising move, officially announcing that their lawyers were filing a suit to oppose the manual recount. Their counterattack consisted in seeking an injunction that would block any additional vote recounts by hand. Bush’s representative in Florida, former Secretary of State James Baker, questioned how election officials could possibly guess the intent of the voter (to him, the process of checking by hand and eye was too subjective), and declared that the Bush team was prepared to “vigorously fight” the recount by hand, which they believed would eventually make for an even more inaccurate result because of the “huge potential for human error and […] for mischief.”27 “The purpose of our national election is to establish a constitutional government, not unending legal wrangling. For the good of the country, and for the sake of our standing in the world, the campaigning should end and the business of an orderly transition should begin,”28 he said, before adding that this tense presidential standoff was “a black mark on our democracy and on our process.”29 An hour later, Bill Daley, chairman of the Gore campaign, answered back arguing that it was premature to talk of any concession: “Calls for a declaration of a victory before all the votes are accurately tabulated are inappropriate.”30 Clinton’s former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, sent to supervise the contested recount for Gore, added that the procedure which consisted in waiting for a court decision on contested ballots was no threat to the U.S. Constitution: “What we’re doing is a constitutional process. There is no constitutional crisis.”31
16Florida law required that the results of the manual recount be certified by the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, within seven days of the election (by 5 p.m. ET on November 14th, 2000). But because the first hand-counting of ballots began on November 11th only, three of the four counties (Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade) failed to complete the process by this date and asked to have their deadlines extended. On November 13th, Harris, who was also the Republican co-Chairman of Bush’s Florida campaign, rejected their claim. In her original statement, Harris cited the only unforeseen circumstance she might have considered if such had been the case, and that circumstance was a hurricane.32 If Gore’s opponents considered that Ms. Harris had acted properly (she had a duty to enforce a statutory deadline on county reporting of election results, they said), her arbitrary decision shocked the Democrats and provoked such public uproar that in Palm Beach County, election officials sent in partial results and then continued recounting past the deadline. Harris excluded the partial results and ignored the completed recount, saying neither complied with Florida law.33 A hearing on Gore’s appeal against Harris’s authority was scheduled for the next Monday (November 20th). On Tuesday, November 14th, Harris announced the results of the automatic recount of ballots in all 67 Florida counties: Bush was ahead by 300 votes out of almost 6 million cast. Harris said she was certifying this tally, specifying that as election officials had also been required to count absentee ballots cast by Floridians living abroad, her calculation included pending results from an estimated 4,000 absentee ballots from abroad which had to arrive by Friday. The Florida Supreme Court asked Harris to certify the results on Saturday only, when the count of overseas ballots would become known.
17On November 15, Gore appeared on television offering to abandon all legal challenges to the Florida vote if Bush agreed to a state-wide hand recount of votes, but Bush refused to compromise. The Florida Supreme Court having just denied his request to block hand recounts of ballots, Bush decided to attack the legitimacy of the Florida Supreme Court by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.34 This appeal would soon determine the outcome of the 2000 election.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Controversial Decision in Bush v. Gore35
18On November 18, after overseas absentee ballots had been received, Harris confirmed Bush’s victory over Gore in Florida: the official results were 2,912,790 votes for Bush, and 2,912,253 for Gore, a margin of victory of 537 votes. But ongoing legal action by both parties kept the election outcome uncertain. Two days later, on November 20th, the Florida Supreme Court heard recount arguments from both the Gore and Bush camps regarding whether Harris should consider hand-recounted ballots before she certified results of the presidential election. The next day, the Florida Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that manual recounts could continue and that the totals would be included in the final results.36
19In parallel to this procedure, on November 24, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Bush’s appeal, and the hearing of the Bush v. Gore case was set for December 11. This decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to seize control of the vote-counting conflict in Florida surprised many legal experts: a majority of the federal justices being keen supporters of states’rights, an electoral law was an area traditionally left to the states. But, as mentioned in the November 28, 2000 issue of The Economist, “the justices seem to have felt that there was too much at stake for them to stay completely out of the dispute.”37 Thus, while waiting for the Supreme Court decision, most experts and commentators agreed that the Court, although 7 out of its 9 justices had been appointed by Republicans38, seemed very likely to uphold the Florida Supreme Court’s decision allowing the recounts to continue. The New York Times even predicted that the Court would never enter the Florida thicket.39 But to everyone’s surprise, on December 12, by a 5-4 vote40, the U. S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, decided to overturn the Florida Supreme Court decision and to grant Bush the presidency by voiding the Florida recount, therefore ending the dispute. The Court’s argument was that Florida’s recount was unconstitutional as each county had different vote-counting standards. To the Rehnquist Court, voting for a President constituted a “fundamental right” strictly guarded by the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, and that the Florida Supreme Court’s order violated this right because it was “arbitrary.”41
20Although it was already clear to everyone that he had won the national popular vote over Bush, Gore offered his concession the next day, but with obvious bitterness: “Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”42 Later the same day, in his acceptance speech, Bush referred to a “difficult election” and pledged to “deliver reconciliation and unity to a divided nation”: “Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests, and I will work to earn your respect.”43 For the first time in American history, it was the judiciary that had finally chosen the new President of the United States, undermining the fundamental principle of checks and balances through the separation of powers. The fact that the Court could be suspected of sympathy for the Republican Party cast further doubt on its legitimacy.
21One important question that remained unanswered after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the election was: would Gore have won the election if the Florida hand-recounts had been completed? In their paper published on September 28, 2001 and entitled “Overvoting and Representation: An Examination of Overvoted Presidential Ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties,” Harvard researchers Michael C. Herron and Jasjeet S. Sekhon show that a disproportionate fraction of the presidential overvotes cast in Broward and Miami-Dade counties were produced by Democrats (mostly Blacks and Hispanics), thus diminishing the total votes for Gore: “Given the evidence that Democrats overvote more frequently than Republicans, it seems certain that, had all overvoted ballots cast in 2000 been cast in a valid way, Gore would have won the state of Florida and the presidency.”44
22This disputed election highlighted flaws in the U.S. voting process and undoubtedly raised fundamental questions not only about how the country elects its President but also about the role of key figures like Harris or even Jeb Bush, and obviously about the ultimate role of the U.S. Supreme Court. In a January 2008 interview to U.S. News and World Report, Barry Richard, a Democrat who had been Bush’s lead trial litigation attorney in November 2000, explained that there had “probably been hundreds of thousands of mistakes in past elections, but they were not noticed before 2000 because they didn’t have such an impact.”45 By questioning the efficiency and equity of the electoral system itself, this election led to some reform efforts like the Help America Vote Act of 2002 enacted as a direct response to the problems in Florida. By providing funds to states to replace punch card voting systems, to establish an Election Assistance Commission, to assist in the administration of federal elections and to provide assistance with the administration of certain federal election laws and programs, it improved the way elections are run. This act did not prevent dysfunctions during the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, but certainly limited them.46
23Interestingly, eleven years after the 2000 election brought the complexity of the Electoral College into full view, a Gallup poll also revealed that when asked about which system they preferred for electing U.S. Presidents, 62% of Americans were now in favor of amending the U.S. Constitution to replace that system with a popular vote system, while barely 35% said they would keep the Electoral College as it is today. For the first time since 2000, a second Gallup poll held the same year revealed that the majority of Democrats (71%) but also of Republicans (53%) now favored a popular vote system.47 These polls clearly expressed a desire by a large portion of the American people to see their electoral system reformed.
24Among the key figures implied in the Florida recount process were Harris and Jeb Bush. Naturally, as a Republican, Harris instantly appeared as a controversial figure: she presided over the conduct of the elections and was strongly suspected by Democratic strategists of trying to “blur the rules”48 when refusing to extend the recount deadline in four Florida counties. But The New York Times also reported that she may have violated the public records law by allowing two top Republican strategists to use state computers while writing a statement about her policy on accepting absentee ballots from overseas, and then by erasing the files on those computers.49 During the months following the presidential recount, the image of the Republican Party was badly dented by the personal attacks Harris received from her political opponents, especially when she was demonized by comics caricaturizing her as a political vampiress and even comparing her to Cruella De Vil, the puppy-stealing villain in 101 Dalmatians.50
25As for Jeb Bush, he may have to answer questions about his level of responsibility in the hand recount in the upcoming months since he is currently running to become the Republican nominee for the 2016 elections. In July 2001, Katie Baur, his communications director, admitted that “while he recused himself from any involvement in what happened after November 7, he did not recuse himself from his role as a brother.”51 On July 14, 2001, The Los Angeles Times reported that during the 36-day recount, records showed that the Florida governor’s office in Tallahassee had made 95 phone calls to the Bush campaign including advisors, lawyers and staffers like for example Karl Rove, his brother’s campaign strategist.52 Many questions remaining unanswered include whether Jeb Bush called the Bush camp to discuss the recount, whether he helped suppress targeted votes before and during the recount, and also whether he was involved in the rejection of black voters cast ballots.53 In other words, the judicial and political control of the Republicans over the state of Florida left no chance to the Democratic ticket. The dice had already been cast beforehand.
26The last and perhaps most important issue of the 2000 election is the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. In the introduction to a documented essay about the boundary between law and politics in Bush v. Gore, Jack M. Balkin, a Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School, explains how the U.S. Supreme Court, by becoming partisan in this historical case, lost its credibility in the eyes of the general public:
“Shortly after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, one member of the majority, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, addressed a group of students in the Washington D.C. area. He told them that he believed that the work of the Court was not in any way influenced by politics or partisan considerations. This speech was widely reported in the press. Afterwards the question on many legal scholars’minds was not whether Justice Thomas had in fact made these statements. The question was whether he also told the students that he believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. It is no secret that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore has shaken the faith of many legal academics in the Supreme Court and in the system of judicial review.54”
***
27In the year 2000, just before the presidential election, 85% of the U.S. public expressed confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court. It is clear that when the Rehnquist Court snatched the case out of the hands of the Florida Supreme Court, they ruled on a very contentious presidential election in a very contentious way, clearly putting public confidence on the line. And yet, as A. E. Dick Howard, from the University of Virginia, explains, most Americans did not consider that Bush had stolen the election, and the Bush v. Gore ruling produced only a short, temporary U.S. Supreme Court legitimacy crisis: “A few months later, the Supreme Court’s reputation was as high as it ever was. When polls were taken and people were asked: “Do you think the Supreme Court was bipartisan?” the majority of people said yes. But interestingly enough, people trust the Court, so people seem to be entertaining two conflicting views: Bush v. Gore was bipartisan, but we trust the Court!”55 The results of the election falling with a margin of error, a final decision was necessary and urgent. The Supreme Court’s ruling called the end of the contest. The Republican Party entered the White House with a feeling of confidence that justice had been finally rendered and that the election of the new Republican President was totally legitimate.
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Notes de bas de page
1In 1824, Andrew Jackson, who belonged to no distinct party, received 43% of the popular vote against Independent-Republican John Quincy Adams’s 31%, but won 99 electoral votes to Adams’s 84. Because Jackson did not receive a majority in the Electoral College, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, when thirteen of the twenty-one states voted for Adams. The second time was during the extremely controversial election of 1876: Samuel Tilden (D) won the popular vote but lost the election when Rutherford B. Hayes (R) got 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. Nineteen electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon were claimed doubtful, both sides trading charges of ballot fraud. Congress appointed a special commission made of 15 members (5 each from the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court) to investigate the contested electoral votes, and they voted 8-7 in favor of Hayes. The third case occurred in 1888, when the popular votes for Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland exceeded Republican Benjamin Harrison’s by only 100,000 but Harrison won the presidential race with 233 electoral votes to Cleveland’s 168 (George Brown Tindall, David Emory Shi, America, A Narrative History, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 312-313; 628-629; 768-770).
2The 2000 election was dubbed “the wildest election in history” by Time in its issues dated November 20, 2000 and December 25, 2000.
3Adam Cohen, Can the Court Recover?, Time, December 25, 2000.
4Maine and Nebraska divide their states into districts and assign one electoral vote per district. The Presidential candidate who wins a particular district receives that district’s electoral vote ([https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/elections], retrieved on June 28, 2015).
5It can even be a tie, with both candidates stuck at 269, in which case the House of Representatives will vote to choose the next President ([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9480396/US-Election-guide-how-does-the-election-work.html], retrieved on June 28, 2015).
6[http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-01.html], retrieved on June 28, 2015. The U.S. enjoyed the lowest inflation in thirty years, the highest home ownership and the lowest unemployment rate in the country’s history: unemployment rates consistently decreased, dropping from more than 7 percent in 1993 to 4 percent in November 2000, reaching the lowest levels since the 1960s ([http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/clinton-legacy/], retrieved on June 29, 2015).
7[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/timeline2.htm], retrieved on June 24, 2015.
8[http://www.gallup.com/poll/2338/major-turning-points-2000-election-primary-season-partyconventio.aspx], retrieved on June 24, 2015.
9Somewhere between 55% and 65% of eligible Americans usually vote in a presidential election. In November 2000, of the 203 million people who were 18 and older, 186 million were citizens, and 130 million were registered. In the election, 111 million people voted. Thus, the voting rates for the population 18 and older were 55 percent of the total population, 60 percent of the citizen population, and 86 percent of the registered population (Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2000: [https://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p20-542.pdf], p. 2, retrieved on June 25, 2015).
10“In the 50s and 60s, Democrats embraced the Civil Rights Movement, costing them the white Southern vote. Meanwhile, the Republican Party successfully wooed disaffected white racists with a “Southern strategy” that championed “states’rights” (Clay Risen, “The Myth of the Southern Strategy,” New York Times, December 10, 2006).
11For further information on Florida’s voting history, see [http://www.270towin.com/states/Florida], retrieved on June 19, 2015.
12At the end of WWII, Florida, with 2.8 million inhabitants, represented 9 electoral votes. In 2000, 15.9 million people lived in Florida, giving the state 25 electoral votes. In 2014, Florida passed New York to become the third most populous state with 19.9 million. During the 2016 presidential election, Florida voters will gain 4 electors and choose 29 electors to represent them in the Electoral College ([https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf], p. 4; [http://www.270towin.com/states/Florida], retrieved on June 19, 2015).
13To see the 2000 Election night and post-election timeline, see the following links: [http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/ElectionNight/pe2000elecnighttime.php]; [http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/pe2000timeline.php], retrieved on June 20, 2015.
14[http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/pe2000timeline.php], retrieved on June 20, 2015.
15“Bush Claims Victory,” The Economist, November 28, 2000.
16“The Battle for Florida,” The Economist, November 17, 2000.
17This phrase was published on the cover of a Special Election issue of U.S. News and World Report dated November 20th, 2000, and entitled “The Ugly Election.”
18For additional information on Florida recount laws, please read: [http://ceimn.org/ceimnstate-recount-laws-searchable-database/states/Florida], retrieved June 21, 2015.
19In Palm Beach County alone, 460,000 votes had to be recounted.
20On the Palm Beach County Butterfly Ballot Controversy, see Monica Davey, “Ballot Designer Living In Political Nightmare,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2000.
21Ann Lolordo, “Vote Controversy Swirls in Florida,” Baltimore Sun, November 10, 2000; Dexter Filkins, “The 2000 Election: Palm Beach at the Epicenter of a Voting Dispute, a Chasm in the Streets,” The New York Times, November 10, 2000. To watch the street protests held in West Palm Beach on November 9, 2000, see [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/index.html], retrieved June 27, 2015.
22Michael Mcleod, “Jackson Yields To Hostile Rivals,” Orlando Sentinel, November 14, 2000.
23Carter M. Yang, “Presidency Hinges on Tiny Bits of Paper,” ABCNews.com, November 12, 2000 ([https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/275f00/abc-chads.html], retrieved June 21, 2015). To illustrate the complexity of the recount, Yang provides us with the Palm Beach Recount Guidelines. They are as follows: Chad: the scored portion of a ballot card that is punched out when a voter casts a vote; Hanging Door Chad: one corner is still attached to the ballot (counted as a vote); Swinging Door Chad: two corners are still attached to the ballot (counted as a vote); Tri Chad: three corners are still attached to the ballot (counted as a vote); Dimpled Chad: indented but still fully attached to the ballot (not counted as a vote); Pregnant Chad: pierced but still fully attached to the ballot (not counted as a vote).
24“Ten Years Later, Infamous 2000 Election Ballot Recount still Defines Palm Beach County to Many,” Palm Beach Post, November 9, 2010.
25Yang, op. cit.
26Mark Z. Barabak and Bob Drogin, “Bush, Gore Camps Dig In as Manual Recount Is to Start,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2000.
27Brian Knowlton, “Republicans Urge Gore to Back Outcome After Overseas Tally: Recount Proceeds in Florida, Roiling the Political Waters,” The New York Times, November 13, 2000. As part of the recount, election officials were also required to count absentee ballots cast by Floridians living abroad, but again, they remained uncertain how many were expected. All they knew was that during the 1996 election, of the 30,000 requested overseas ballots, only 2,300 had been returned.
28Barabak and Drogin, op. cit.
29Tim Nickens, Alicia Caldwell, Shelby Oppel and Adam C. Smith, “Bush Camp Urges Gore to Concede,” St Petersburg Times, November 11, 2000.
30Barabak and Drogin, op. cit.
31Nickens, Caldwell, Oppel and Smith, op. cit.
32Peter J. Wallison, “Katherine Harris Is Following the Law,” Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2000.
33“Bush Claims Victory,” The Economist, November 28, 2000.
34“The Battle for Florida,” The Economist, November 17, 2000.
35For the full text of the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, see [https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/search/display.html?terms=Gore&url=/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html], retrieved June 27, 2015.
36[http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/pe2000timeline.php], retrieved on June 20, 2015.
37“Bush Claims Victory,” The Economist, November 28, 2000.
38In 2000, the 7 members of the Supreme Court of the United States nominated by Republican Presidents were John Paul Stevens (appointed by President Ford in 1975), Sandra Day O’Connor (appointed by President Reagan in 1981), William H. Rehnquist (Chief Justice, appointed by President Reagan in 1986), Antonin Scalia (appointed by President Reagan in 1986), Anthony M. Kennedy (appointed by President Reagan in 1988), Davis H. Souter (appointed by President G. H. W. Bush in 1990), and Clarence Thomas (appointed by President G. H. W. Bush in 1991); only 2 Associate Justices, Stephen G. Breyer (1994) and Ruth Baden Ginsburg (1994) were nominated by Democratic President Clinton ([http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members.aspx], retrieved July 7, 2015).
39David Margolick, “The Path to Florida,” Vanity Fair, October 2004.
40The 5 U.S. Supreme Court Justices who voted against the Florida hand recount (Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas) were all Republican appointees.
41[http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/future/landmark_bush.html], retrieved June 20, 2015.
42[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/14/uselections2000.usa14], retrieved July 1, 2015.
43[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/14/uselections2000.usa13], retrieved July 1, 2015.
44[http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/elections/election2000/HerronSekhon.pdf], retrieved June 30, 2015.
45Samantha Levine, “Hanging Chads: As the Florida Recount Implodes, the Supreme Court Decides Bush v. Gore,” U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 2008.
46Steny Hoyer, “10 Years After The Help America Vote Act, Voters Face New Challenges,” Huffington Post, 29 October 2012.
47[http://www.gallup.com/poll/150245/americans-swap-electoral-college-popular-vote.aspx], retrieved June 30, 2015.
48David Barstow & Don Van Natta, “Examining the Vote: How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote,” The New York Times, July 15, 2001.
49Ibid.; Geoff Dougherty, “Files Erased in Florida, Damaging Election Review,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 2001.
50[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/05/us/public-lives-katherine-harris-redux-no-longer-largerthan-life.html], retrieved July 7, 2015.
51Lisa Getter, “Jeb Bush’s Recount Role Examined.”
52Ibid.
53In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights heard more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965; see Margolick, op. cit.
54[http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/essayonbushvgore.pdf], p. 1, retrieved July 1, 2000.
55[http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/index.html], retrieved June 29, 2015.
Auteur
-
Bénédicte Sisto
Maître de conférences à l’université Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand 2)
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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