‘On This Day’ 2000: Following Politicized Supreme Court Ruling, Al Gore Concedes Stolen Election to George W. Bush

The “stolen” U.S. presidential election of 2000. Depending on your political affiliation, you may be rolling your eyes at the sight of those two words, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the particular details of what happened before, during and after that fateful election. I guarantee you won’t be rolling your eyes after you read this.

On November 8, 2000, the nation awoke to the unusual news that the winner of the previous days’ presidential election still could not be determined.  Al Gore had won the popular vote, but in the United States this did not matter since election outcomes are determined by the archaic electoral college system. It all came down to a real barn-burner of a race in Florida, where Texas governor George W. Bush was leading Vice President Al Gore by a mere 1,784 votes, a 0.03% lead. Florida law mandates a machine recount for any lead of less than 0.50%. Some counties set about recounting votes but others did not. This is the first major impropriety of the stolen election. After the machine recount, Bush still led the tally, but only by 357 votes. Thousands of ballots, however, did not register any vote,  mostly due to malfunctioning voting machines or highly confusing ballot designs. A shocking 175,000 ballots remained unread. That’s 175,000 people whose votes did not count.

Speaking of voter disenfranchisement, the greatest crime of the 2000 election may have been the purposeful exclusion of thousands of eligible black voters from the electoral rolls. Florida, after all, was governed by Jeb Bush, brother of the man who would soon be president. During his gubernatorial election campaign in 1994, Jeb was asked what he would do for black people. “Probably nothing,” he replied. Actually, it would be worse than nothing. He responded to a massive black voter registration drive (in response to his shocking disregard for the needs and rights of Florida’s black population) by strengthening a Confederate-era law banning anyone ever convicted of a felony from ever voting again, even decades after they’d paid their debt to society. Bush’s secretary of state Katherine Harris hired a private firm, Data Base Technologies, to compile a list of all the state’s ineligible voters. More than half the names on the list were black. This worked decidedly in Republicans’ favor since blacks vote overwhelmingly Democrat. By overwhelmingly I mean 90% plus.

But wait. One can take exception to the Florida law banning ex-felons from voting, but the law is the law. Problem is, this law was being deliberately broken by Harris and  her underling Emmett Mitchell, assistant general counsel in the state elections office. Mitchell ordered Data Base Technologies to make the no-vote list as lengthy as possible by not matching and verifying names on the list to names of actual felons. Dates of birth, middle names, “junior” and “senior” suffixes, even spellings were shockingly and purposely ignored in a deliberate effort to disenfranchise as many blacks, and by extension Democratic votes, as possible.  There were many conviction dates on the list that were in the future. As a result, orders were given to delete 4,000 of these erroneous dates.

Marlene Thorogood, a project manager at Data Base Technologies, caught these irregularities and notified Emmett Mitchell. “Programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives,” she wrote. “We want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches,” was Mitchell’s chilling reply. Later, Data Base Technologies vice president George Bruder testified before the US Commission on Civil Rights that Mitchell indeed wanted to the list to be “broad and encompassing” despite the high likelihood that many Floridians would be wrongly disenfranchised. People falsely listed on the no-vote registry were presumed guilty until they proved their innocence and in many counties officials never even sent letters to notify listees that they couldn’t vote. They would not find out until it was too late. At least 15% of the thousands of names on the list were there by mistake. George W. Bush would “win” the 2000 election by just 537 votes. Those wrongly disenfranchised ex-felons would have, without a doubt, swung the election to Al Gore.

That’s not the end of it. Thousands of ex-felons from other states who had their voting rights restored after paying their debt to society were again stripped of their vote when they moved to Florida. These ex-offenders had to ask Jeb Bush for permission to vote. What are the chances that a Republican governor who’s also the brother of the Republican candidate for President would grant them this right when it was a near complete certainty that they would vote Democrat? Nealy 3,000 potential voters were disenfranchised this way. Remember, Bush won by 537 votes.

Back to the recount and Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris. She was the chief elections official in a state governed by Jeb Bush, brother of George W. Bush, who now, if he collected enough votes, would become President of the United States. Not only was Harris in charge of the vote recount, she was also a Republican and co-chair of George W. Bush’s election campaign! The fate of the presidency rested in the hands of a woman who was a leading cheerleader for one of the candidates in dispute. The Democrats never had a chance.

When it was determined that voter intention could be discerned by manually inspecting each ballot, the Democrats pressed for a hand recount. “What is at stake is the integrity of our democracy,” Al Gore explained. But Gore was himself lacking in integrity. Instead of requesting a recount of all 175,000 unread ballots, he made a political calculation and only asked for ballots in four heavily Democratic counties to be re-examined. This would prove to be a fatal mistake.

As the recount unfolded with dramatics over dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads, butterfly and caterpillar ballots, write-in votes, overcounts, undercounts, and a bewildering barrage of strange new terms, the Republicans launched a campaign of misinformation in an attempt to discredit the recount procedure. They also sued in federal court. Meanwhile, Katherine Harris announced that there would be no extension of the deadline to certify the statewide results of the election, which was set at November 17, 2000. A Democratic request for such an extension was denied and the Harris eventually ordered Florida counties to halt their recounts. The Democrats appealed to the Florida Supreme Court which sided with them and ordered Harris to delay certification pending its ruling. The recount saga continued.

That’s when the next shocking crime of the stolen election occurred. Under Florida law, absentee ballots from overseas Americans– many of them on the hundreds of US military bases on foreign soil– must be signed, dated and postmarked on or before election day in order to be valid. Democrats wanted to follow the law and disqualify any absentee ballots that did not meet these requirements. But Republicans appealed to America’s love affair with our troops and vilified Democrats who just wanted to follow the letter of the law. As a result, canvassing boards counted thousands of illegal votes, 630 of which were included in the official Florida results as certified by Katherine Harris. Troops tend to vote Republican. Again, Bush “won” that election by 537 votes.

The Florida Supreme Court handed Democrats a minor victory when it delayed the certification deadline to November 26, 2000. The Republicans appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Angry mobs of political operatives, mostly Republican Congressional staffers, were flown into Florida to harass and intimidate officials who were still trying their best to recount all the contested ballots before the November 26th deadline. But on that day, Harris declared Bush the winner of the election even though some counties hadn’t finished their recounts. Not so fast, the Florida Supreme Court said, and ordered another recount. It began on November 29th, 2000. That’s when the United States Supreme Court stepped in and handed down an emergency stay to stop the Florida recount. Seventy-five years of Florida law in which voter intent trumped technicalities was ignored.

The final great crime of the stolen election occurred within the walls of the highest court in the land. In a 5-4 ruling, the United States Supreme Court handed the disputed  2000 election to George W. Bush. The justices also declared that their ruling applied only to the case at hand. To do otherwise would have invalidated countless other elections all across the nation. It was the first and only time in the 211 year history of the Supreme Court that a ruling applied to only the case at hand. Justice Antonin Scalia, who ruled in favor of Bush, had two sons who worked for a law firm which represented George W. Bush in the recount. One son was rewarded by President Bush with a high-level legal position in the Labor Department. Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife worked reviewing resumes for potential Bush appointees. Justice O’Connor wanted to retire from the Court but said she would not do so until a Republican President named her successor. Justices Thomas and O’Connor both also ruled in favor of Bush. Said Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissenting opinion: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

A spent yet stoic Al Gore finally conceded defeat on December 13, 2000.

Much of the story of what was indeed a stolen election; of what some would even call an American coup d’etat, has already been forgotten. Say the words “stolen election” and you’re bound to get an earful from irate conservatives. You’ll be called a sore loser;  even branded a conspiracy theorist. But this is no conspiracy theory. It is conspiracy fact. If you doubt the veracity of anything you’ve just read, I invite you– I implore you– to dig deeper into matters on your own. What really gets my goat is how the Bush administration, throughout its disastrous eight-year run, would repeatedly lecture “lesser” countries about how they needed to show a greater commitment to democratic principles and free and fair elections, when in reality the very Bush presidency was itself a total sham and a mockery of the democratic principles on which this great nation was purportedly built. But instead of angry crowds taking to the streets, Americans took to their couches to watch “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” They took out second mortgages on their homes and took the cash to pile into the peaking NASDAQ. Life was good in 2000; better than it had ever been. Historians may one day look back on the turn of the millennium as the high point of American civilization. If they do, the stolen election of 2000 will surely go down as one of the seminal events marking the beginning of the end of our prodigal way of life.

Tagged 2000 presidential election, 5-4 ruling, 537 votes, absentee ballots, Al Gore, Antonin Scalia, ballots, black voters, Bush v Gore, butterfly ballots, canvassing boards, caterpillar ballots, certification deadline, Clarence Thomas, convicted felons, Data Vase Technologies, Democrats, dimpled chads, disenfranchisement, ex-felons, Florida, Florida governor, Florida Supreme Court, George W. Bush, hanging chads, impoprieties, Jeb Bush, John Paul Stevens, Katherine Harris, military bases, overseas Americans, pregnant chads, recount, Republicans, Sandra Day O'Connor, Secretary of State, stolen election, US Supreme Court