The Bush-Gore Recount Is an Omen for 2020
Twenty years ago this fall, the United States was plunged into 36 days of turmoil as lawyers, judges, political operatives, and election workers grappled with the uncertain result of the presidential contest in Florida. Whoever won the state would win the presidency. In the end, after start-and-stop recounts and the intervention of courts at every level, Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, was declared the victor, edging out Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat.
The story of the 2000 Florida recount offers a reminder of just how chaotic the electoral process can become—and of how disarray in a single state can undermine faith in the democratic process nationwide. The U.S. Constitution gives individual states the responsibility for conducting elections. Rules and procedures vary widely. Today, at a time far more polarized than two decades ago, not just one but every state faces potential challenges to the integrity of its electoral process. In many states, the balloting technology is antiquated. And in many states, registering to vote has deliberately been made harder, especially for the poor and people of color. A continuing shift toward widespread voting by mail—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—seems likely to provoke lawsuits based on discredited claims that the practice spurs voting fraud.
A cause for truly legitimate concern is something else entirely: whether the U.S. Postal Service can handle the expected volume and return marked ballots to election officials in time for them to be counted in November’s national elections. On August 13, in an interview on Fox News, President Donald Trump declared his opposition to providing the financially troubled USPS with additional funding, giving as an explicit reason a desire to hamper mail-in voting, which he had previously said “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” The USPS has already announced plans for cutbacks in service across the board. On August 14, The Washington Post reported that the Postal Service had informed 46 states and the District of Columbia that it could not guarantee that mailed-in ballots could be delivered in time to be counted.
[Read: The postal service can handle the election—if it’s allowed to]
The account here, drawn from interviews with more than 40 people with firsthand experience of the Florida-recount saga, is both a history and a warning.
I. Election Night
As votes were counted on the night of November 7, 2000, Bush watched the returns at the governor’s mansion, in Austin. Gore watched the returns at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel, in Nashville. The weather in both cities was chilly and wet. By the end of the night, Gore held a lead over Bush in the national popular vote, which he would never lose, but the contest in the Electoral College was tight, and it all came down to Florida. The election, both campaigns understood, was far from over.
Leading up to the election, polls had indicated that the race between Bush and Gore would be close, with an especially slim margin in several key states. Potentially affecting the outcome were two other candidates: Ralph Nader, of the left-wing Green Party, and Pat Buchanan, of the right-wing Reform Party.
On Election Day, a number of counties in Florida reported problems. A confusing ballot—the so-called butterfly ballot—in Palm Beach County prompted thousands of voters to cast their ballot unwittingly for Buchanan. Ballots in Duval County also caused confusion; some 22,000 votes there were disqualified because voters chose more than one candidate. The punch-card apparatus used elsewhere in the state sometimes failed to punch out a hole completely, meaning that the machine would not record a ballot choice.
Ben Ginsberg (Bush campaign general counsel): On the Monday before the election, we had the luxury of being able to go out for lunch. Campaign operatives stop asking lawyers questions the closer it gets to Election Day—they know what the law is by that point. We were in our favorite dive Mexican restaurant in Austin. Somebody asked about recounts, and I said, “I’ve been doing a lot of recounts over the past 16 years, and there is no way we will ever have a presidential recount. The last one was in 1876. It will not happen again.”
[Norm Ornstein: The November election is going to be a mess]
Ron Klain (Gore recount committee general counsel): I got a call on Election Day from a lawyer named Lester Hyman, probably at 8 a.m., Nashville time. His daughter, Liz, had called him to say that people were coming out of the polling places in Palm Beach, and they were confused about who they had voted for. They thought they might have voted for Pat Buchanan by accident. I found [Gore adviser] Michael Whouley, reported this to him, and then frankly didn’t really think much about it. It was just one polling place in Palm Beach.
Nick Baldick (Gore operative in Florida): It was, like, 11 a.m. when we got our first call about the butterfly ballot. We knew it was creating huge anxiety and fear, and that we would lose some votes, and we knew that the election was going to be close.
Karl Koch (Gore aide): My phone was blowing up with calls, people saying, “Oh my God, something awful is happening in Palm Beach.” We tried to start communicating messages—“Make sure you’re paying attention to your ballot.” But at that point, we’re way past the halfway point of Election Day.
Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN projected that Gore would win Florida, putting him on track to gain the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The projection was premature. Polls were still open in western Florida, where the Bush vote was likely to be strong, and there were issues with the exit-poll and vote-tally information provided by the consortium Voter News Service, on which all of the networks relied.
Clay Roberts (director of the Florida Division of Elections): I had a TV on in my office, and I’m watching the national coverage. They called Florida while the polls were still open west of the Apalachicola River. I had sent a letter to all the networks making sure that they knew that Florida had two time zones, and that they weren’t to report Florida results until after 7 p.m. Central time.
We’re talking to [Tim]
