Stuff You Should KnowWhen George W Bush and Al Gore ran against one another, most pundits predicted a tight race. Absolutely zero of them predicted the election would come down to a few hundred votes. Today, we still don’t know who won.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us again, which is fine because we're here to talk about the two thousand election. Jerry probably wouldn't want to hear about it anyway.
Can I tell the quickest story of my how this went down for me?
Sure?
I was moving to Los Angeles in November twenty twenty. H and I mean two thousand, what I say twenty twenty? Yeah, yeah, two thousand.
Weird that you had mentioned twenty twenty when you were talking about two thousand.
I know.
So I was in a big U haul.
I was towing my car, my seventy five Plymouth Valiant named Ta, behind me, and I was somewhere in Texas, West Texas.
When I spent the night and.
Then woke up the next morning, it was kind of freezing cold in West Texas, and I was documenting this whole trip via my high eight video camera, singing songs into it and kind of documenting the journey. I'm gonna get all these tapes digitized soon. That's one of my Christmas break projects this year. But I very distinctly. Remember when I turned on the camera and got in that truck. The next morning, I said, hey everyone, So or I don't think I said everyone, because I had no audience.
Spect Sure, so I think I said, hey me. It's weird.
I went to bed last night and the election had happened, and I woke up today and no one knows who won still, And this is weird because we always know who won. I guess I'll see what happens. And then I hit the road.
Yeah, and what thirty something days later it was finally decided.
By the Supreme Court of the United States.
Yeah, that was an interesting thing too that today you're like, yeah, I could see not knowing that that day, right, that seems a little a little quick, almost suspicious quick. Now. At the time, it was like, what do you mean, It's past midnight and we don't know who won. That's crazy. The two thousand election definitely started that whole thing. And the election, for those of you who don't know, was between Vice President Al Gore. He was vice president to Bill Clinton for both terms. He was looking to continue the Clinton legacy, I guess as president himself, and he was running against George W. Bush the son of George Bush, George H. W. Bush, and the brother of Jeb Bush. I think it's his older brother. And at the time, al Gore was viewed as this very wooden I think Jeb's younger okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, Jeb's the younger brother. And at the time, al Gore was viewed as wooden, unapproachable, very smart policy wonk who could not relate to the average person to save his life. And George Bush was viewed as just this complete dingus who was a part of a political legacy, whose family clearly viewed him having the presidency as his birthright. That was the selection that America had at the time. But this is all against the backdrop of the economy really doing nicely and there hadn't been any really big problems or wars for a while. I can't really think of any direct war that the United States would have been involved in since Vietnam. Oh, like you know, big time war. Yeah, yeah, I don't think that. I think Vietnam was the last war we were in during this election.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you were watching comedy shows, especially Saturday Night Live at the time, you would get two things. You would on one side you would get. I can't even remember who played him, but this is how al Gore was basically portrayed Aryl Hammond. Well, oh that's right. I don't know, I'm like Bill Clinton without the scandal that was Al Gore. And then of course, I guess was Will Ferrell the first and Bush, you know, through comedy and the media was you know that guy, and yeah, I don't even I don't even care about being president. Yeah, I just want to make Daddy happy. That was sort of the lay of the land pre nine to eleven, before you know, a lot of the country rallied around Bush and you know, like, like we said, Gore was trying to to get away from that Clinton stink such that he didn't even get Bill on the Canpayne trail with him that much. And it was also I mean, this was a landmark election in a lot of ways, but it was also sort of the first, the first big election where you had someone saying, hey, Gore is the big Washington insider and I'm just this guy from Texas. Like sort of rural versus urban power struggle.
Yeah, that's where it generally began. The Bush campaign really was doing what they could to kind of highlight that dividing line.
Yeah, so at the time Bush had been pretty far ahead in the polls. In the summer after the Democratic National Convention, Gore mounted a big comeback and by fall. By September, a couple of months before the election, these guys were basically deadlocked, and everybody was saying, this is going to be a really, really really close election.
Hold onto your hat.
Everybody knew that it would be close, but no one had any guess that it was it would turn out as close as it actually did. But just the polling, poll after poll after poll showed like Gores in the lead, Nope, Bushes in the league, Gores in the lead. Gallup found that the lead changed nine times just in the fall the fall, nine time exactly. And so election Day Tuesday, November seventh, a lot of people, including Tim Russert rest in Peace, had said, I think Florida is going to be the going to decide the outcome of this. I didn't see exactly why. I don't know if it was a gut feeling or what the deal was, but there were there were a few people who were already pointing to Florida. And at the time the news organizations NBC, ABC, CBS, FOXY, INN, and AP all subscribed to a company called the Voter News Service, which had been set up in nineteen ninety I think by the big networks to basically pool their resources to pay for people who did exit polling, and they would give that data directly to the networks, who would then use it to kind of like you know, read the tea leaves as best they could to forecast who won. Because in nineteen eighty NBC called Reagan at eight fifteen pm and set off this huge competition among the networks.
Oh yeah, like call for calling the election was a big, big deal for a network, And so you found that great article where they were like, you know, after that Reagan thing, all the networks started spending a lot of money in the next cycle, you know, on their own exit polling data, and it was like millions and millions of dollars. So when they got together basically and said, hey, why don't we all just hire this one service so we can all save a lot of money. The downside of that was they were all getting the same information, whether it was good or bad, and in this case it turned out the information was not great.
So Gore was doing pretty good, not just in the national vote but electorally too. We got Pennsylvania, got Michigan, and Florida was starting to come in, and apparently the numbers were up. The exit polling data for Gore was showing that he probably won Florida enough that NBC said, oh, we're doing it again, And at seven forty nine pm on election Day, NBC called Florida for Gore. They didn't go so far as to call the presidency for Gore, but the writing was on the wall. If Gore won Florida, that was that. And I guess about fifteen minutes later the rest of the news organizations had joined and said the same.
Thing, right, so everyone's calling Florida for Gore publicly. At this point that night, the VNS, that voter News service that was doing the exit polling for everybody, said, hey, news organizations, we've got some issues here with our data. Like, for example, in this one county in Florida, it was supposed to be four thy three hundred and two votes that we saw someone added a zero to that and it was forty three twenty votes. So maybe you should sort of hold off on calling this thing. And all the news organizations said, well, that's too late, We've already done that. And at just before ten pm, at nine to fifty five, CNN was the first to come on and say, hey, wait a minute, we jump the gun here. Everyone else of course followed suit, and then at two fifteen in the morning, Fox News comes on and says Bush is going to be the winner, not just to Florida, but the whole thing, and then everyone else followed suit and said and of course this is overnight, so you wake up in the morning thinking that George Bush had won.
Right, so well not quite.
Actually, well, if you were saying this, we'll see what happened between then and sunrise.
Yeah, and I think a lot of people were staying up glued to the TV still at this point. By the time Fox said that Bush was the winner, and the rest of the networks joined in with that. So that's three three times now that they have have made the projection. Because retracting a projection is a projection in and of it. It's like Rush said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. It's essentially the same thing. Yeah, and there's a quote from Donna Brazil the disgraced Democratic operative who was running Gore's campaign at the time. Get this. She texted Gore on his BlackBerry and I read the New York Times article about this. They felt compelled to explain that a BlackBerry was an instant messaging pager. That's how two thousand this thing was.
By the way, really quick.
I saw that movie, the BlackBerry Movie, on a plane flight recently, and it's actually very good.
Oh, I'm sure most I recommend it pretty good.
Now it's a movie movie.
Most movies are pretty.
Good anyway, recommended.
So she told she's running the campaign and told Gore like, don't give up yet. This is it's too weird. Essentially I'm paraphrasing here, yeah, which is true. But despite that, Gore was like, I don't I think we lost, And so he even went to the extent of waking as his wife, Tipper, who was not actually sleeping, she was under the blankets with a flashlight making a list of bands that she didn't like and their kids, and said, hey, I lost, essentially, and they kids started crying. So he started to get ready to do his concession speech. That's how close this came. He also called Bush called George Bush and said, hey, congratulations. You know you're the winner, obviously, And he got into a limo to go give a concession speech in Nashville to his supporters, and on the way, one of his operatives said, hey, I've been watching the Secretary of State site in Florida. And Bush's lead went from fifty thousand to six thousand. I don't think we should concede yet. And literally this happened in the caravan on the way for him to give his concession speech at like three point thirty in the morning.
Yeah, and so because there were still some precincts that had been unreported, so they were like.
Slow your role, Gore.
So Gore call up Bush again, could not have been a fun phone call, told them what was going on. Apparently there are people that heard these calls and said Bush said, uh, you know, are you really gonna withdraw your concession? And Gore responded, quote, well, you don't have to be sniffy about it. So Bush said, well, my brother's governor Florida, and he said that he said I won. And Gore said, well, let me explain something. Your younger brother's not the ultimate authority on.
This that I think the al Gore finally came around at the end. But George Bush, he sounded like a cross between Yosemite Sam and a member of Leonard Skinnard. That's about right, actually, now that you mentioned it, that's like dead on.
Yeah.
So it was, I mean between them interpersonally, it got a little sticky right at the beginning.
Yeah, I think George Bush even said you can't you can't retract. You're not allowed to do that. Essentially, daddy can he do that? So, yeah, that it was a really big deal. I don't think that this had actually happened before.
Not as far as I know. I think this was sort of the first thing.
Yeah, there were a lot of first things in this election.
Yeah, so by four o'clock the networks all retract their calls and basically this is what you know, Younger Chuck wakes up to in West Texas, which is we don't know who won. Tom Brokaw gets on NBC and says, quote, we don't just have egg on our face. Oh wait, that was al Gore. Light I'm getting all confused now.
I heard a little broke on there.
I used to do Brokall, we don't just have an egg on our face. We've gone humlet all over our suits at this point and our faces and everywhere else.
That was great. That was a great brocall.
And he always sounded like he was out of breath.
It wasn't that he got on, Chuck, this was four am. He was still on from when he got on at seven pm.
Oh this poor guy.
And Tim Russer at least just on NBC alone, are like just dying here. But they've never seen anything like it. And again, like, as you said, this is a big deal in that it was really embarrassing. It was a really big thing to call to be the network that called the presidency, so it was equally humiliating to be the network that had to retract it. And that happened to all the networks. But that also had a really big impact on public opinion. At first, they were like, well, Gore won, so that means that if you guys called this at before eight pm Eastern, there were still polls opened in the West Coast, And how many Bush voters did you discourage from turning out because you'd said Gore already won. And then the opposite of it was that when they said Bush won but then retracted it, people were like, no, Bush's the winner, which made it harder for Gore to get the public behind the recount that he was going. There was a lot of public opinion about this, a lot of opposition, some manufacture, some genuine as we'll see that that really makes a big deal. You think you think for a second, like, well, no, it just comes down to how many who got how many votes or who got how many electors from the electoral College. No, Like, the public opinion has a lot of sway in a situation like this, So everything that happened publicly was a really big deal.
Yeah. Absolutely, Olivia who helped us out with this and.
Did a bang up training, the fantastic job.
It was keen to point out that there were, you know, a few states that they didn't have the full results about anyway. Oregon has very famously long had a vote by mail system, so it took a while to get all those votes in. It eventually went Gor's way. New Mexico was no one knew about New Mexico until December first. That eventually went Gor's way as well, and the Republicans were like, should we get a recount going in New Mexico and Wisconsin and Iowa. But they basically because the margins were pretty low, not enough to trigger any kind of automatic recount, but they thought about contesting those, but they would have had to win all of the states that they were thinking about contesting. And the writing was on the wall that like, hey, listen, we're not going to win all of these, so we're not going to contest any of them. We'll just it's going to come down to Florida, and we're going to put all of our eggs in that basket.
Yeah, because Florida had twenty nine electoral votes and it could it would put either one of them in the White House. That's how close this race was that those twenty nine electoral votes going either way did it for them. So in Florida, if you have a margin of victory that's under point five percent the total tally of votes, then there has to be a recount, a machine recount where basically you run all the ballots through again and see what the count is. Right, that's just law. That's point five percent. This was point zero one percent difference out of six million votes casts in Florida in the two thousand general election. A few hundred votes, yeah, separated one candidate for president from another and again because whoever won Florida became president. A few hundred votes is what it came down to to determine who would become president that time.
Yeah, because of how it works in the United States. If you're not from the United States, you can go back and listen to our Electoral College episode. You want to get angry, I know, because no matter how you count the votes, Al Gore won the popular vote, just as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in America, it doesn't matter who gets the most votes because we have the EC in place.
But just a quick sketch of it. Though, if anybody doesn't actually feel it, go in and listen to the episode again. Chuck's right, It's it's worth listening to. But in the United States, in a state, whoever has the most votes gets usually all of the electors that that state has to offer. And so in reality, what you're really running for as president is electors. So you want to win states, and you can strategically win some states over the others and lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College and still become president because you got more electors. Even though more Americans voted for the other person. And that's the big controversy because it's super undemocratic because the general population doesn't actually decide. Basically, strategy decides. It doesn't always wash out to be the person who won.
The popular vote.
Well, since we're talking George Bush, should we say strategery again? You can go back and listen to that episode and we'll touch on that a little bit at the end. But that's either here there, because we do have the EC and Florida was very very close, and there were people in the I mean, we knew it was going to be a tough fight at that point because a Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida, George's brother. The Secretary of State in Florida, Catherine Harris at the time, was co chair of the Bush campaign there. And the state attorney general was a Gore guide, Bob Butterworth, so nuts was even the head of the Gore campaign. So this thing was just fraught from the jump.
Yeah, well, Chuck, I think with that it's a good place for a break.
What do you say, All right, let's do it. We'll get right back.
Okay.
All right, So here we are, it's November.
People don't know who the President of the United States is going to be yet things are starting to get pretty tense, and America is going to start learning some very specific terms and ins and outs. As far as to how Florida conducted their elections at the time, they used in a lot of the counties a punch card system where you had a little card puncher and you would look at the cannona's name and there was a little perforated square beside that, and you would use your little puncher to punch that thing out. The little square that gets removed is called.
A chad, and.
Depending on how punched out, this chad was determine whether or not your vote was counted. And there were a bunch of terms at the time that sort of had to define what this all meant. A dimpled or pregnant chad, which means you tried to punch it and it was indented but it was still fully attached. Was a dimpled or pregnant chad. You had the swinging door chad where two corners are attached, and then you had a hanging door chad, or what eventually became known as just a hanging chad where you punch all the way through except one little corner remains attached, and that's the situation that determines the leader of the free world. It's not right and weird.
But that was the situation under Florida law. If you are an elections board in a county during a recount, you have to try to determine what the intent was of the voter based on the ambiguous ballot they turned in, right.
Yeah, which is huge. Like, again, the Florida law says the intent of the voter is what matters.
Right, and that the election board during a recount has to determine with the intendants. But there's no rules. There's no statewide rules. There's really no rules unless a canvas board like adopts them themselves to determine what a voter meant based on all those different types of chads.
Right.
So they've made this up as they went along, or.
In some cases, counties already did have rules on the books as far as chads go, like Palm Beach County.
Yes, Palm Beach County is a good example because Palm Beach County arguably is where the entire election flipped. Yeah, but they had a policy that they'd had for ten years since nineteen ninety that said if you have a dimple or pregnant chad, it doesn't count. It's a spoiled ballot, and that vote doesn't count. But if you have any kind of partially detached head, a swinging door, a tri corner, a hanging chad, any of those, that counts as a vote, Like the person clearly meant to vote using that. They during the recount, they just abandoned that and they tried something instead called the light test, where you would and there's pictures of people doing this, where you would hold the ballot up to a light source to see if any light shone through, and if.
You get in the year two thousand, if you could.
See any light, then that counted. And they realized that actually that totally went against the rules, that you could have a type of hanging chad and lights still not come through, So then that means you don't count that ballot, and they just gave that up and went back to the original rules. This was the kind of catastrophe that was going on during the recount in Florida, and everyone was reporting about every single minute of it, and the entire country is like, what is going on? And the people in Florida, who were in charge of all the recounts, are for rereaking out because if you read about these boards, they're like, they're not made for this kind of stuff. They're not. This is all totally new, and all of a sudden, the New York Times and the Washer Post as standing over their shoulder watching them and reporting on it, and they're just flipping out. So they're doing just all sorts of goofy stuff that just doesn't make any sense because there's just like deer in headlights.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And these aren't huge boards like in one county it was like three people.
Yeah. I think that was Dade County where Miami is.
Yeah, which is just nuts. We should talk about the butterfly ballot for right.
I don't know if I can.
This was the ballot in Palm Beach County. You sent me a picture of what this ballot look like. I'm a reasonably intelligent adult human and I looked at this ballot and it confused me a little bit. You should just look it up. Look up a picture of the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot Bush Gore election.
But what it is.
It's candidates on two sides like butterfly wings all the way down and in the center between all those are the little punch holes with But here's the thing is those if you look at the two sides, they're they're not aligned all the straightaway across. One's a little higher on the left, one's a little lower on the right. And on the left, number one position is George Bush. Right under that is Al Gore. On the right, number one position is Pat Buchanan. But the way it aligns and there are little arrows that point at the holes, but it's it's confusing, and it's very it would be very easy to think, oh no, I don't want to vote for Bush, I want to go down one and vote for Gore. But down one was actually on the other side slightly lower is Pat Buchanan. And it was just a very confusing ballot. And they found that Pat Buchanan got about four times the vote in that county than he did nationwide. And that that alone, and I'm not saying no one knows what would have happened for sure, but it was a funky looking ballot. Pat Buchanan had a very highly skewed amount of votes, and those amount of votes would have firmly given Al Gore victory.
Yeah, And to make it even more confusing, the candidates were numbered. Didn't even start with one and two, It started with three, and then Buchanan was four, Gore was five, McReynolds was six, with Renald was a socialist. So there was one way that you could accidentally not vote for Bush. You would accidentally vote for Buchanan below him. There were two ways to accidentally not vote for Gore. You could accidentally vote for Buchanan above Gore or McReynolds below Gore. And like you said, Pat Buchanan is very instructive. The number of votes he got from the butterfly ballots. Even comparing other Palm Beach County voters who voted by mail absentee ballot that wasn't a butterfly ballot, his numbers were way less compared to the butterfly ballot votes. So suffice to say that a lot of people accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan who meant to vote for Al Gore or George Bush, but probably more al Gore because Palm Beach County is a strongly Democratic county in Florida, all.
Right, So in Miami Dade, which I think you said was the most populous Florida county. Initially, that three that three person canvassing board said they were going to manually recount six hundred and fifty thousand ballots. They realize that's overwhelming and probably impossible because there was a looming deadline. So they said, all right, why don't we just count the ten thousand, seven hundred and fifty ballots that the computer system rejected, because those are the ones that are in question, and we feel pretty good that the other votes had been you know, counted properly because they were fully punched, no chad issues. The GOP leaders said, hey, canvassing Board, you're trying to rig this in favor of Gore, And they tried to get all the local Cuban Americans riled up and saying like, hey, this kind of stuff that happens under Castro, like you need to come down here and stage a protest like this will not stand. And what ended up happening was what was called the Brooks Brothers Riot because it was not local Cubans. It was not, in fact, in most cases local Floridians that came to protest, but it was Washington DC political operatives and insiders that came down and they gave themselves away by the clothes that they wore. That's why it was called the Brooks Brothers riot. People at the time were saying like, and they were trying to deny it, saying they were like local Floridians, and they're like, well, you're certainly not dressed like somebody from Miami. You've got a Brooks Brother's suit code on, sport code on, in fact, most of you do. And they went down there and they were successful. They gathered in the plaza, they screamed voter fraud. They were banging on windows and handing out crying towels and saying you're a sore loser. And it worked. They succumbed to the pressure and stopped the recount.
Yeah. So, by the way, Ted Cruz was one of those operatives. He was in the who was in the riot? This state is essentially fake riot. Although if you read an interview there's a i think a Washington Post interview with Brad Blakeman, who is the guy who was responsible for staging this protest and organizing it, that he sounds like he genuinely believed that this canvassing board was trying to throw the election to Gore, and that that really fueled a lot of it. So it's difficult in that respect to fault him and his group for for protesting like that. On the other hand, it's very clear that this Brooks brother Brother's riot, they were accused of violence against election officials. They were at the very least very hostile and in your face. Again, these canvassing boards are not not cut out for this kind of life. They didn't know what the heck they were signing up for, and the Brooks Brothers rioters essentially intimidated them out of this very democratic process of recounting by hand ballots that had been rejected by the computer. There was no evidence whatsoever that the computer was selectively rejecting Gore ballots in order for him to come in and clinch the presidency in a very dramatic win in Miami Dade. It doesn't make any sense that would have favored Gore. What they were doing was trying to stop the recount in because Bus ahead, because Bush was ahead. That was the entire point. On November ninth, the Secretary of State, Catherine Harris was trying to certify the election because Bush had three hundred and twenty seven more votes than Gore. And so what these Republican operatives were doing in the Brooks Brothers right, was trying to stop the count right there, to keep George Bush's lead. That was their goal. So it seems like Blakeman's view that what they were doing was illegal may or may not be disingenuous.
I'm not sure, right, Yeah, So these recounts are happening, and the Secretary of State Harris, like you said, all of a sudden, the Florida State Supreme Court got involved and she wanted to certify, like you said on the fourteenth, but the Supreme Court said, no, you have to count all the votes. You can't certify the election. You need to count them all. You can't just throw out the votes that are in dispute. So there are four counties that you need to do a hand recount on. And over the next month, between November and December, there were more than fifty lawsuits being filed by all sides. Everyone all over the place is filing lawsuits about recounting and counting and deadlines and different various counties across Florida, and eventually on December eighth, the Florida Supreme Court came out and this is very important, and ruled four to three that you have to count what's called the under votes, meaning these votes that are unclear that the Bush campaign wanted to just throw out. You got to count all these votes, and if you haven't done that yet in these counties, you got to do it. The Bush campaign said, well, we don't want to count all the votes because we're ahead. The Gore campaign said, well, great, count all of the votes. That's a democracy at work. And so the Supreme Court of the United States gets involved, and all of a sudden, on December eleventh, you are getting oral arguments on the Supreme Court of the United States about how like basically a lot of things, chiefly one of which is should the federal government get involved when states are supposed to run their own elections.
Yeah, I say, we take a little break and just prepare ourselves for the catastrophe that is Bush v.
Gore.
What do you say, let's do it so Chuck like you said, The Florida Supreme Court said, no, you need to handcount all of those ballots that the computers rejected to figure out who who won. And the Bush campaign sued to get that stopped and got it picked up by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court on December ninth, issue to stay very strange. That is very unusual for the Supreme Court to get involved in a state court ruling. Federalism basically said, you don't do that.
Stop.
Yeah, state was stop the handcount, don't do that anymore. And then, even more unusual, without the Bush campaign petitioning for the Supreme Court to hear the case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and what they did was take this up.
It sounds confusing, yeah, but yeah.
No one in the Bush camp asked the Supreme Court to decide on the merits of the case. And yet the Supreme Court decided to decide on the merits of the case. And again, this is highly unusual. A state supreme court ruling for a state matter is pretty much sacricanct in Supreme Court, like US Supreme Court tradition, Supreme Court does not get involved in that kind of stuff. And they said, hey, let's get involved in this, this hornet's nest right now.
Yeah exactly.
So what we ended up with were a couple of rulings there was a seven to two ruling that it violated the equal Protection clause of the fourteenth Amendment, because the argument from the Bush side was, hey, listen, there isn't a codified statewide way that everyone has agreed to do these recounts, and so that violates the equal protection clause. And on the Gore side, he was saying, well, there is a codified way, maybe not in the way they do it, but the law is intent to vote and that's on the books.
So that's how we should decide, right.
And so the idea of applying the equal protection clause doesn't really make sense because in America every state has different ways of voting, not just among the states but among the counties. In an individual state, it's all over the place, Like it's up to the county to decide what kind of voting machines they want to use, how many to have, Like it's up to generally the county, if not the state. Right, So that's a really weird thing to say, no, this particular state is violating the equal protection clause. So we're going to say stop doing this handcount We're going to rule in favor of that because of the equal Protection clause, and then secondly, the other thing about the equal protection clause, Chuck, is what they were saying was everyone is not going to have their vote counted because it's because of the inequity and how you vote. So what we're gonna do is just make sure we don't count some people's votes to protect them and keep them equal. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Yeah, And on that first point, I believe it was either Briar or Suitor in the dissent said kind of pointed out what you were saying. Was saying like, well, hey, if that means that no state has a fair election, right, because every single state and every single county, like you said, has different like Josh Clark will one day say, he said, has different ways of doing things. So if you say that about this, then no state has a free election or a fair election or whatever. Everything is called into question and that can't be the case. The other concurring decision was even more important, and I think we said it was seven to two because Briar and Suitor actually, as quote unquote liberal justices sided with the quote unquote conservative side.
Which is so weird because it's such a bad legal argument.
I know, I don't know. Well, it's interesting. Maybe it wasn't Suitor or Brier then that said what I said.
It was probably John Paul Stevens.
Oh, I think it was Stevens. But the concurring and this is really the most important decision, which was a five to four ruling on you know, I know they're supposed to be impartial, but there were five conservative justices at the time for liberal justices, and it ended up a five to four concurrent ruling that not only can you not do the recount, but like, there's no time and because of what's called safe harbor, which is this date a deadline for states to resolve issues over the selection of their state electors, and that was approaching, whereas the liberal justices said, well, hold on, that doesn't mean that's not when they cast their vote at the Electoral College. There's still six days after that. There's plenty A there's plenty of time to do that. And B had you not issued a state to begin with, they would be done by now probably and we wouldn't have even been called on. So we ended up causing a problem with this stay that we are now ruling that we're now ruling on by instituting that stay.
They caused the problem. It's really just perfectly put. They caused the problem that they were saying was the problem, and the reason that they were saying, you have to stop the recount. It's too late. Isn't that nuts?
Yeah?
RBG and her very famously in her descent, usually say I respectfully descent, and she just said I dissent, which was doesn't sound like a big deal, but those words matter, and it was a big deal. And she was also like saying, hey, wait a minute, this contradicts all of our federalist principles that this is a state matter and.
That we shouldn't get involved with this to begin with. So it was.
A not only a landmark ruling, but one that was just fraught with upset on all sides, up and down the political spectrm into the citizens of the United States.
Even more suspiciously. There's a really great article from the Nevada Law Journal from twenty twelve written by Marcus Broden, and he points out there was a lot of books written about this afterward, and he said that at least three of the conservative justices had like personal what was it called when you're supposed to accuse yourself. I guess conflicts of.
Interest, Yeah, yeah.
One was that Scalia's Sons law firm was arguing the case in front of the Supreme Court for the Bush side. Another was that Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginny was looking for it was like accepting resumes on behalf of the Heritage Foundation to set up a Bush administration. And then thirdly, I think Sandrade.
O'Connor, Yeah, she was trying to retire.
I think, yes, she wanted to retire, so she didn't want Gore to win because she didn't want to have to stay on for four more years so that a Democrat wouldn't pick her replacement. So these three had like actual, like personal vested interests in the outcome of this election. Three of the five did, at least, and even putting that aside, the fact that the Supreme Court got involved in the first place was a terrible idea. The fact that they decided the election was a terrible idea. The legal idea that they ruled on was terrible. And then the idea that anybody had even an iota of personal interest in the outcome was a really big deal. And today the Supreme Court is definitely under question as far as political activism's concerned, and I'm sure it has been for a while, but it really feels like common knowledge these days. Yeah, in two thousand, that was really new. That was a really big deal. People thought very very differently about the Supreme Court in two thousand compared to how they think about them today.
Yeah, and on those a couple of things you mentioned Scale Son, who was part of the law firm that argued the Bush case. He very soon after the election was given a cabinet position, right right, And Sandrad O'Connor, this isn't just speculation that she wanted to retire, Like, wasn't she It was either on tape or like people that were with her when they called it initially for Gore like said she was like, all crap, basically, yeah, like this means I got to work another four years.
She said, this was this is this is terrible. And her husband explained that they had been planning on retiring but now she couldn't if Gore won.
All right, So just want to clear up that wasn't just like, you know, some opinion that we're living out there.
Right, and then sorry, there's one more legal thing that Gore camp really dropped the ball because legally, the Bush campaign had no legal standing in this matter. They weren't the injured party. The injured party was the potentially disenfranchised voters of Florida, not the Bush campaign. So the Bush campaign had no standing to bring this case to the Supreme Court in the first place. And the Gore team didn't even mention it. And that might have been the thing that put enough public pressure on the Supreme Court to just toss it and say, no, whatever the Florida Supreme Court said stays, and they just dropped the ball that hard.
Yeah, and this isn't a surmising because we're not smart enough legally speaking, Like multitudes of legal scholars have come out and said, like, why didn't they argue standing like that was what would have changed the outcome.
Yeah, it's crazy how many just small things would have changed the outcome. Let's talk about that.
Sure, So Libya appropriately caused this autopsy report because after something like this, they don't just go all right, well, that went as it should go, and everything was super smooth. I mean, regardless of who won or lost, if it would have been Gore, it would have been the same thing. It would have been like, boy, what a mess, right, This is not how elections are supposed to be decided in the United States. So afterward there were all kinds of studies, all kinds of people writing legal papers and just studying the data. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which is an independent organization, they did a review and they said, what we found out was that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore, but enough of them, like you know, mark their ballots inappropriately, and that not only that, but like each side would tried to do things that would have hurt their own camp Like I believe it was. Gore was trying to get these four counties hand recounted that actually would have ended up helping Bush. And at one point Bush was trying to make the detached at two Corners vote count that would have helped Gore. So it was just a big play to spaghetti as far as you know, the time, because they were all just sort of very quickly in real time, reacting to things that they never thought they would have to react to, and sometimes doing things that would have even hurt their chances at winning.
Yeah, And another study found that just in Palm Beach County alone, the over votes people who voted for more than one person where there were just two. The ones that went to that included Pat Buchanan. They decided about seventy five percent of those were because of ballot design. And I think two thousand votes would have gone to al Gore, which would have flipped the entire state because George Bush won Florida by five hundred and thirty seven votes. Right, So it's not one hundred percent clear what would have happened, because even if that recount would have gone on, other studies have shown like no, actually Bush might have still won based on the autopsy we conducted. So it's still in twenty twenty three not clear who actually won the two thousand election.
Yeah, and if you're asking yourself, like all right, Florida had a law in place about intent to vote, as like that's what matters. One way that you can measure intent is like to look at that chad and see, you know, was it clearly trying to be punched for a candidate. Another way you can do that is as a right to remedy. You can get in touch with people and say, all right, you got another chance, like it looks like you marked your ballot in an inconsistent way. Try again. And they did this in different counties in some counties in Florida, which it really helped. It led to an error rate of less than one percent. But in the only predominantly black county in the state of Florida at the time, Gadsden County, they did not allow them to remedy the ballots, and there was a twelve point four percent invalidated ballot rate compared to under one percent. So there's just hinky stuff going on all over the place.
Yeah, and Bush Fi Gore is like a toxic zombie legal case that won't die and should have never happened in the first place. But there is a really strange appendage to that that we've talked about before, I think in our Supreme Court President Judicial Precedent's episode, Yeah, I think so, where they said that it's limited to the present circumstances. And as that Mark Boden guy wrote in the Nevada Law Review, they basically attached like a warning sign, like warning, do not use this as precedent. Essentially, Supreme courts just deciding the president here and this doesn't apply to any other ruling because it shouldn't have happened anyway in the first place, right, and yet it's still cited as precedent all over the places cited by both sides actually, even though it shouldn't be whatsoever. And that's just one of this kind of afterlife of the two thousand election that's still going on.
Yeah, absolutely a lot of things have changed since then. Ralph Nader for the Green Party certainly did not win any friends on the left because he got close to one hundred thousand votes in Florida, you know, most of which probably would.
Have gone to al Gore.
And he ran again even though everyone was like, I love you, Nator, but stop screwing up the elections if you're a Democrat, and he was like, yeah, I don't care, you know, I believe in what I'm doing. And so he ran again in two thousand and four. You know, as far as mounting a third party bid, that it certainly put a damper on that. A lot of people say the two party system being so locked in stone is one of the big problems in this country. And another thing that happened was states immediately were like, oh boy, we can't do this again. Florida for sure, and other states were like these punch cards, like we got to get into the we got to get with the times here and have a more secure way of voting than just people punching a card like it's you know, eighteen seventy five, and you will see no more chads. All these changes sort of nationwide from state to state, culminated in the most recent twenty twenty election, where in Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security and Cybersecurity and Infra Structure Security Agency said was the most secure election in American history, with no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. So thankfully, so many changes were put in place to make sure something like this didn't happen again.
Yeah, and the electoral college is kind of this weird wonky thing that happened in the background in until two thousand and it really kind of brought to the flour like what a potent and also undemocratic institution this is. And so a lot of people are like, we need to get rid of this thing. And apparently, in a twenty twenty poll by the Pew Organization, fifty eight percent of American adults said they would support a constitutional amendment that said the electoral college is nil and void.
Well, you're never going to get that on a ballot.
I don't know, man, I don't know. I don't understand why it's not already. It is such an enormous problem.
Yeah, I wish there were more what do you call those referendums, Yeah, where they would just let human the or and public vote on things rather than people to decide the things.
Well, that's what's been going on with abortion access. They've been they've been strategically purposefully getting them on ballots that don't have other politicians right to get people to just vote on the one issue. Yes, yeah, and it is a great idea because then you actually see what the people actually think about it. You know, it's I think that's a great idea too, Chuck.
Yeah, however, way any of it goes, let people decide, because I think we've all seen that elected representatives, you know, they don't always necessarily reflect the will of their people, you know what I'm saying.
No, And another thing is, I mean pretty much everybody on both sides can point to Congress and be like, you guys, don't do enough these days. If voters voted on referenda, then you know, the voters could do the work that Congress is supposed to be doing passing laws.
Yeah.
Well, they don't want to do that because one of those first referenda would be term limits, and they're like.
Oh no, let's not do that.
You got anything else?
Oh?
Man, I got nothing else. Can't wait till next November. That's going me a lot of fun.
I don't know if I can do it. Chuck, Well, since Chuck has laughed at my pain, I think everybody it's time for listener, ma'am.
Oh, this one's a great one. This is from Dan Sheaflin and Dan Well, I'm just gonna read it. It's pretty amazing. I hope you saw this one. If not, you should go look it up. Okay, hey, guys, as I write you, I'm ensconced in the warm cab of a Caterpillar tractor, jostling along the snow covered Ross ice shelf on my way to the Eminson Scott South Pole station.
I did not see this.
This is cool.
He included a picture of this caravan five days ago when we left McMurdo station on Ross Island the starting point in the South Pole traverse. We were one thousand and thirty eight miles from the South Pole. My current ground speed is seven point one miles per hour, which is a pretty good pace. Our speed can be much slower at times, depending on snow and a variety of other conditions. There are fourteen of us who embarked on this twenty five to thirty day journey, each in our own tractor. Are hauling mostly fuel to resupply the South Pole station, but also cargo and the living modules where we eat and sleep and use the bathroom. Our toilet is called the in Sinnolette and you guessed it. It's a turd burning rig, fairy glamorous. So they're in these tractors just slow rolling it to the South Pole.
That's a make deliver supplies and fuel.
That's really amazing stuff.
He had a picture of this caravan is so cool as you can imagine. I have a lot of time sitting in this tractor, and quite a bit of that time as dedicated to listening to podcast yours included. I've been a faithful listener since twenty ten. We have a whiteboard inside our galley and a post I post daily a podcast recommendation and today I put up naked mole Rat. It's a face only a mother could love, because that one blew my mind. Guys, how can they be so interesting? And that's from Dan Shifflin, and he says big shout out to his wife Marcy as well as the guys on the traverse. So, man, you don't think about people out there doing these wacky jobs. But Dan and the gang out there on the on the slow train are doing it.
That's really cool. Thanks a lot, Dan. Shout out to Marcy for putting up with Dan driving around the South Pole on a slow train. Yeah, and thanks for the picture too, Dan, I'm looking for I can't find it right now, so send it to me, Chuck. I will if you want to be like Dan and just blow our minds with a picture of where you are or some info about what you do. We would love that you can blow our minds by wrapping that information up into an email and sending it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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