heywood on 22/10/2016 at 15:44

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The first recount was mandatory because of the close vote. It was a machine recount, and took a couple days because absentee ballots had to be opened and counted too. He was still behind by ~1000 votes after the recount. So Gore protested the result and requested hand recounts in the 4 largest Democratic counties. The reason Gore did this is to try to get undervotes counted (a hole not punched or not fully punched) and overvotes counted (more than one hold punched in same race), which would not have been counted in the machine recount. That would increase the vote total, but only in these 4 overwhelmingly Democratic counties.

The second, selective recount caused all sorts of controversy. The main controversy was over the vote counting standards. The Gore side wanted to apply a "intent of the voter" standard where canvassing boards would visually inspect the soiled ballots and look at dimples and partially hanging chads and try to infer the intent of the voter, while the Republican Florida Secretary of State instructed them to apply the statutory rule which would reject most soiled ballots. This fight went to the Florida Supreme Court which ruled in favor of the "intent" standard. This resulted in differing subjective standards being applied in the 4 counties conducting a recount.

There was also a fight over whether to count soiled ballots that had a vote for Pat Buchanan as well as Bush or Gore. The basis for this fight was the alternating holes in the design of the "butterfly" ballot used in Palm Beach, that some considered to be a confusing design, reinforced by the fact that Buchanan's numbers seemed higher than expected in a heavily Democratic county.

Another big controversy was over counting absentee ballots, which leaned Republican. Democratic election officials in multiple counties were excluding absentee ballots on technical grounds. During the recount there was a memo from a Gore lawyer to Democratic election officials with instructions for protesting ballots received from overseas armed forces via military mail. When the Bush campaign obtained a copy they made it public and it turned public opinion. Of course, the Bush campaign then offered their own guidance on absentee ballot counting which they thought would be favorable to Bush. The fight over absentee ballots resulted in several court cases and I can't remember how they were all settled.

And then there was the deadline to finish the recount. By Florida law, the deadline for counties to file amended election returns was a week after the election. The process of examining soiled ballots was time consuming and when it looked like they might not meet the deadline, Gore + two counties sued the state to get the deadline extended. The Florida Supreme Court ruled in their favor and extended the deadline by two weeks to allow the hand recount to finish.

When the extended deadline was reached, the vote count was still in Bush's favor by ~500 votes. The Florida Secretary of State, a Republican, certified the election results and the state designated it's electors. Gore sued to contest the certified results, and asked for disputed ballots in 3 of the counties to be counted in the vote tally. This quickly made it's way up to the Florida Supreme Court, which I should point out consisted of 7 Democrats and no Republicans. The Florida Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to order a new, state wide, county by county hand recount of undervotes (which Gore hadn't even asked for). That was appealed up to the US Supreme Court which ruled 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court order was unconstitutional and the proposed recount would not meet the requirements for equal protection and due process due to the various subjective standards being applied and the lack of a statutory authority to oversee it all to ensure fairness and consistency. But then the court split 5-4 along partisan lines to allow Florida to certify its results rather than come up with a new, more constitutional recount process. And finally Gore conceded the next day.

Multiple studies conducted after the election concluded that if the disputed ballots were reconsidered per Gore's request, or if the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount of undervotes was completed, Bush still would have won. However, the different studies also considered various different scenarios and counting standards and found some scenarios in which Gore would have come out ahead. One thing that makes the results even murkier is that the punched paper ballots degrade with handling. The ballots had been run through counting machines twice, and multiple hand recounts, and therefore were not in the same state as the voter left them. So the only reasonable conclusion is that the margin of victory was less than the margin of error of the voting method.

Although Gore officially conceded the election after SCOTUS ruled, most Democrats considered the election result illegitimate. We spent the entire 8 years of Bush's term hearing Democrats whine about the 2000 election being "stolen". Even now, 16 years later, there are still people who can't let it go.

heywood on 22/10/2016 at 16:44

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Before the election, Gore was confident he was going to win.

heywood on 24/10/2016 at 17:23

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Yeah, it was going to be a problem no matter what.

The result in Florida was a statistical tie. The margin was just 0.009%, which is way under the error rate for any voting method. Most states, including Florida, have accepted a margin of error of 0.5%, below which a result triggers an automatic recount. Hand recounts are less accurate, with some studies I've read suggesting it can be as high as 1-2% ((https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120202151713.htm)).

What made it worse in Florida was that the disputed ballots were degrading over time with handling. They were trying to decide what the voter intended to do based on the number of corners a chad was hanging from, or whether it had a dimple in it. You have to consider that the counting process is going to become less accurate with every recount because some loose chads are going to become more loose with handling, and there are opportunities to inadvertently introduce dimples and other marks during handling.

There really is no counting process that could have produced a conclusive result for either candidate. I think that was affirmed by the studies done after the election which produced different results depending on the organization conducting the study and the counting method & criteria, with some scenarios resulting in a Bush victory and some resulting in a Gore victory. And so I thought Breyer & Souter's idea of asking the Florida Supreme Court to come up with a counting method that could be applied uniformly to a state-wide hand recount was a foolish opinion. I also thought there was something fundamentally unfair about making up election rules after the election.

I still can't think of any way to resolve the election that most people would have accepted as fair. And we're not any better now. Although the accuracy of our voting systems may have improved somewhat since 2000, it's not 99.991% accurate. And there's been no discussion about what to do in the event of a statistical tie.