Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.
There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)
The butteryfly ballot was an approved but confusing ballot that almost certainly cost Gore the election. But what is the remedy? There's no other choice but to have a better ballot next time. "The voters were confused by a legal and approved ballot" can't be the basis to overturn an election or it'll never end.
Another good example of this is how Alaska adopted ranked choice voting. In 2022, the 2 Republican candidates got more combined votes than the Democrat who ultimately won [1]. Do you think That was the intent of the voters? Almost certainly not but the electorate just didn't understand RCV and enough people only ranked 1.
In 2024 there was only a single Republican on the ballot so it wasn't an issue [2].
With a margin that small, there's a good chance that Bush won the election because his name came before Gore's. I bet there's more than 500 people in the electorate who simply pick the first name on the list.
What's hilarious to me is that states recognize that ordering of names on the ballot actually makes a difference at the margins, and most states have rules for how to do it: https://ballotpedia.org/Rules_on_ballot_order_and_party_labe.... For example, in 13 states the order of the names on the ballot is decided at random. Given that, it seems foolish to me to pretend that an election with a margin of 500 votes or so produced a discernible winner. I don't know how you fix that in a workable way.
When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
We're not talking about what the Bush campaign wanted. The point is that not even the Gore campaign argued that the double votes should be counted. So they're irrelevant.
They are irrelevant in the sense that there is no legal means to correct them.
They are relevant to the question of who did the voters actually wanted to win, which while not a legally relevant question is interesting. The statistical reports I've seen say that around 2000 of the Buchanan votes were very likely intended as Gore votes.
It’s pretty crazy you want to take a dig at the Bush campaign.
I once did an experiment on my FB where I described Gore’s selective recount scheme but attributed it to Trump. And people jumped up and down talking about how it was voter suppression and cheating. But when I revealed it was Gore, it was just hemming and hawing. These are all smart, college educated people too. Truly, there is no hope for the republic.
I remember the poll that asked Republican voters about their relative approval of “Obamacare” versus “an Affordable Care Act” and got a nearly 20% differential.
And then the number one Google search on the last Election Day? “Did Biden drop out?”
We truly have one of the least informed electorates in the world. And one of the worst for considering political parties as sports teams to be rewarded with loyalty at all costs.
You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
CNN says exactly the opposite! “Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”
Counting undervotes isn't my theory. It was Gore's theory of which votes should be counted. Gore never argued overvotes--where a voter had marked multiple candidates--should be counted. The recount studies show that Gore would have lost under the only recount approach the Gore campaign actually pursued.
Of course, the whole thing was completely stupid. They should have stopped with the second machine recount. It was completely insane to entertain the idea that you should try and guess what voters meant when they didn't completely punch a ballot, or punched more than one candidate. The proper thing to do is exclude all ballots where the voter failed to fill out the ballot properly.
"The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all".
So it seems like he won the votes anyways. If your retort is "not if we count undervotes, while ignoring overvotes", that would be a different discussion altogether.
> there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
Gore did win that election, but SCOTUS illegally decided it instead of a fair ruling requiring Florida to recount ballots using the same methods in all districts. Americans should have done general strikes and rioting.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
The Supreme Court did require Florida recounts of ballots using the same methods in all districts, and remanded the case to Florida Courts to figure out if there was a legal way to extended the deadline for recounts, to get it done, but they never heard the case, because Gore conceded soon after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.