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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Stealing of the 2000 Presidential Election
I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We intend to have it published prior to the November election, and hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. Ive drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback. Ill start with a portion of the first chapter:
THE STEALING OF THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Going into Election Day 2000, the Presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was judged to be very close. Three battleground states with early closing times Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were polling very close and held the key to victory. Pundits had been saying that if either candidate won all three of them, that would be the ball game.
Election Day 2000
Florida initially looked very promising for Gore. Turnout appeared to be very high, especially in African-American and other Democratic areas. Florida was called for Gore early in the evening, beginning at 7:52 p.m., less than an hour after their polls closed. Then the Pennsylvania polls closed, and the election there was said to be too close to call. Shortly after that, the Michigan polls closed and Michigan was immediately called for Gore. An hour or so later, Pennsylvania was called for Gore. With the polls yet to close in the western states, the election appeared to be virtually over, with a victory for Gore.
But then, in a very rare reversal of a network call, starting at 10:13 p.m., the networks took Florida out of the Gore column and called it too close to call. Not long after that, it became evident that the winner of Florida would win the election. Then, at 2:16 a.m. Wednesday morning, the networks began calling Florida for Bush. At 2:30 a.m. Gore phoned Bush to concede Florida and the national election. It was at that point that I went to bed.
At about 3:30 a.m. my wife woke me up to tell me that Florida and with that the whole election had been put back in the undecided column. I didnt believe her. The professionals surely wouldnt reverse their call on the same state twice in the same election! I went back to sleep.
I woke up later that morning to go to work, looked at the TV, and noticed that Florida was now colored white instead of red on the electoral map. What the hell was going on? I listened to the news reports and discovered that Bush was still ahead in the election by 1,784 votes about three hundredths of a percent lead. Because of the narrowness of the Bush lead, an automatic recount was proceeding, as required by Florida law. That recount, conducted by the same machines that produced the original vote count with Bush up by about 1,784 votes, ended on Friday, November 10, with Bush leading by about 327 votes according to the Associated Press, with all counties having reported their results. By that time, Gore had already requested a full hand recount of four Democratic counties.
Why couldnt the TV networks get it right?
The TV networks explained their two bad calls (calling Florida for Gore, reversing that, calling it for Bush, and then reversing that too) with the simple phrase, bad data. In other words, they hardly explained it at all. But a consideration of those two bad calls for Gore, and then for Bush is very important in providing an understanding of what went wrong in this election. Similarly, it is also very important to understand why the automatic machine recount reduced the Bush margin of victory by about 80%.
First bad call The butterfly ballot and exit polls deviating from the official vote count
First, lets consider the first bad call for Gore. Why was Florida called for Gore so early? The fact is that early election predictions and calls are based on a combination of exit polls and official vote counts. Exit polls measure who the voters think they voted for. Normally voters know who they voted for. But in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000, a butterfly ballot was used for voting for President. The butterfly ballot was very confusing, as Al Gores name was listed next to two third party candidates Patrick Buchanan and Socialist candidate David McReynolds on the adjacent page, making it difficult to tell which hole punches corresponded to which candidate. This undoubtedly caused many voters who intended to vote for Gore to vote for either Buchanan or McReynolds or one of those candidates plus Gore in which case the ballot would be rejected as an over-vote. As noted in The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage, page 15:
Even the far right wing fringe candidate Patrick Buchanan acknowledged as much, noting that of the 3,407 votes he received in Palm Beach County, only about ten percent of them were meant for him. The rest, Im quite sure, were Gore votes, he said.
Another line of evidence that supports the idea that Gore lost large numbers of votes due to ballot confusion is the fact that thousands of ballots were rejected as over-votes because they contained votes for more than one candidate. This could have happened when a voter felt that s/he had mistakenly voted for one candidate, so attempted to correct the error by voting for the originally intended candidate. With the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, there were 5,352 over-vote ballots marked for both Gore and Buchanan, in contrast to only 1,676 marked for both Bush and Buchanan (Another 2,864 voters voted for both Gore and McReynolds). All of these ballots were rejected in the final vote count. Making the logical assumption that the vast majority of Gore/Buchanan ballots were meant for Gore and the vast majority of Bush/Buchanan ballots were meant for Bush, Gore would have netted at least 1,500 additional votes in Palm Beach County had these voters voted as intended.
Finally, the most direct evidence of who the voter intended to vote for when an over-vote was produced would be the writing in of a candidates name at the bottom of the ballot. Voters wrote in Gores name on 2,182 over-votes, while they wrote in Bushs name on 1,309 over-votes. Many of these ballots involved two votes for Gore one next to his name and the other for the write-in candidate, where Gores name was added by the voter. All of these ballots were excluded from the vote count. Had these ballots on which the intent of the voter was clearly indicated been counted, Gore would have picked up 873 additional net votes, far more than he needed to win the election.
The bottom line of all this discussion with regard to the question of why the election in Florida was initially called for Gore is that many thousands of voters who thought they were voting for Gore actually voted for Buchanan or Reynolds or produced over-votes that were excluded. These voters would have responded to exit polls by saying they were voting for Gore hence the initial call for Gore. But as the official vote count became more and more complete, the exit polls became irrelevant to predicting the official election results. That is when the call for Gore was reversed. In other words, the bad data was the result of voters who intended to vote for Gore and thought they had voted for Gore, but whose vote, whether or not they wrote Gores name on the ballot, was never counted for Gore.
Second bad call due to an electronic glitch
The basis of the second bad call, which caused the networks to make the call for Bush as having won both Florida and the national election, at 2:16 a.m. on Wednesday, November 8, can be explained by the following report:
At 2:09 a.m. Volusia Countys erroneous numbers were added to Voter News Services tabulations, and less than ten minutes later Florida and the U.S. election were called for Bush. The error in Volusia County had cost Gore (temporarily) 16,021 votes. Another computer error in Brevard County reduced Gores vote total by another 4,000 votes.
After the call was made for Bush, as Jeffrey Toobin writes in his book, "Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 election":
The computer glitches in Volusia and Brevard Counties were discovered and corrected, and consequently the TV networks again reversed their call, taking Florida out of the Bush column and calling it too close to call, where it remained for several weeks.
The computer error in Volusia Counter was later publicly said to be due to a faulty memory card, with little or no further explanation. It was considered to be accidental, nobody was prosecuted for it, and it stirred up little national attention or concern. The bigger questions are: 1) Were these computer errors purposeful or accidental; and 2) How many other computer errors occurred that night that were not caught?
Probably few people will ever know the answers to these questions. After all, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the results produced by these electronic voting machines cannot be verified. So unless the errors are massive, as they were in Volusia County, there is little chance of catching them. At least one computer voting expert, Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, believes she has good evidence that the error was purposeful, though it didnt work exactly as planned.
Why did the automatic machine recount reduce Bushs lead by 80% from 1784 to 327?
In order to understand the 2000 Presidential election and its importance to future elections in our country, it is instructive to understand the reason why the machine recount reduced Bushs lead by 80%.
The reduction in Bushs lead following the machine recount was due almost entirely to the addition of Gore votes in counties that used punch card voting machines. As punch card machines get old they become less efficient at what they are supposed to do punch holes in ballots. Consequently, use of the older machines often results in failures to fully punch a hole in the card. In some cases the hole may be nearly complete, so that a piece of cardboard (called a chad) is barely hanging from the card, in other cases there may be just a small hole in the card, and in still other cases there may be no tear at all, but only a little dimple. The vote counting component of the machine can only count votes for hole punches that are complete, that is, where any remaining cardboard material is not covering the hole. Thus it is that failures to punch complete holes in the card reduce the vote count. But the act of running cards through the machine a second time tends to cause stray pieces of cardboard that are only loosely attached to the card to fall off, thus enabling the machine to read the ballots as votes where the hole is punched.
For a variety of political reasons, poor areas generally have to make do with older machines than wealthier areas. Consequently, poor areas are generally characterized by a much greater number of undervotes (ballots that register no vote because the hole is not complete) than wealthier areas. Since poor areas tend to vote Democratic, that means that Democratic candidates tend to suffer from this problem. Thus it was that as the cards were run through the machine a second time and many of the hanging chads broke off, the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, gained ground.
This is a problem that almost routinely occurs in almost all elections that use the Votomatic punch card voting machines, not just the 2000 Presidential election in Florida.
In my next post in this series Ill discuss the highly controversial 36 day Florida recount, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly ended the vote count and awarded the Florida and thereby the national election to George W. Bush in what many consider to be one of the three worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history.
russspeakeasy
(6,539 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)wasn't keeping up with the news, other than wondering why it was taking so long to declare a winner, who I was certain would be Gore.
Good luck with your book, it is a good time for it with what is going on in Florida right now.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)After the networks called Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania for Gore, it appeared to be over. It wasn't too long after that that 16 thousand votes for Bush showed up in Volusia County in a precinct with 600 voters and that the networks quickly jumped on that to call Florida and the national election for Bush. God only knows how many votes Bush accumulated in that way on a lesser scale which was never identified.
Good point about Florida. They appear to be trying to do the exact same thing that they did in 2000 and 2004. Their Republican Governor Charlie Crist wouldn't go along with that crap in 2008. You have to admire him for that. Too bad he lost his bid for the U.S. Senate.
bleever
(20,616 posts)I know it will be an excellent book, coming from one of DU's very best researchers and writers.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)I hope you like it.
indepat
(20,899 posts)the felonious five gets more feloniouser by the day. Anxiously await your book: hope you take no prisoners.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)The first time I wrote about the coup de tat by the felonious five (which was my first DU post ever --Lest we Forget -- posted under another name) I referred to them as the "supreme scumbuckets". I've toned it down a bit for the book, but maybe I shouldn't. I'd like to know what my publisher will think of that idea.
Rosa Luxemburg
(28,627 posts)FailureToCommunicate
(14,038 posts)have to be revolution'
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Gregorian
(23,867 posts)After watching every minute of the election process that was broadcast, I came away from the 2000 election thinking that it had followed the democratic process. Only years afterward on this forum did I realize how wrong I was. Now I'm not ignorant, but I might as well have been. And being more vigilant than many, and liberal, I know there are many who still don't realize the terrible injustice that was done to this country through that flawed election.
I can't praise you enough for doing this. For all you know it may be the thing that makes the difference.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)when I heard that bu$h's brother was governor of the key state and his campaign manager was counting the votes.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)election can be largely chalded up to woefully inadequate coverage of our communications media.
It would be really great if this book made a difference in that regard.
jillan
(39,451 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)Turbineguy
(37,427 posts)Since we are about to do it again....
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)Glad you are posting here. I have read part of your book and have a few comments. I am remiss in not getting back to you.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)patrice
(47,992 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)I'll post it tonight
solarman350
(136 posts)That way, you can sell 24/7/365 and your book will reach a larger audience.
--Hope that helps.
SolarMan350
Time for change
(13,718 posts)But I don't know if my publisher deals with that kind of stuff.
hay rick
(7,678 posts)Look forward to your future posts on this bitter subject and catastrophic turning point in American history.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Just think: If just the over-votes would have been counted we probably would have had no war with Iraq or Afghanistan; no 9/11; no major recession; we'd be well on our way to dealing with saving our planet for human habitation. Well, maybe I'm dreaming, but that's the way I see it.
crazyjoe
(1,191 posts)I look forward to reading the next in the series, that was the most stressful 36 days of my life!!
Will you have this published and available in time to the election? God, i hope so.
friggin votomatic machines!!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)was going on in Florida.
The plan is to have it availabe prior to the election.
I can't say for sure, I guess it depends on whether my publisher is satisfied with my product.
crazyjoe
(1,191 posts)they will be ecstatic!! In order to make a real impact, you need to get Rachel, the turks, big Ed, all talking about this book. Have you sent anything over to MSNBC?
Another idea would be to ask Keith Olberman to maybe write the forward for you?
Or even better, the man himself, Al Gore. That would lend legitimacy, and get publicity.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)of the US Supreme Court and said the ruling would make Bush the President was, "That's it! We're going to war!"
Overseas
(12,121 posts)on the part of the determined right wing, to solidify corporate control of our country.
You didn't mention the voter roll purging, conducted by Jeb's darling Secretary of State's office, perhaps because Greg Palast has already covered that very well. http://www.gregpalast.com/one-million-black-votes-didnt-count-in-the-2000-presidential-election-rnits-not-too-hard-to-get-your-vote-lost-if-some-politicians-want-it-to-be-lost/ and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1174115.stm But it is quite relevant today, with Republicans across the country trying to cull their voter rolls of likely Democrats. In Jeb's case they pretended to be eliminating felons from their rolls and cut those whose last names resembled those of felons. The data mining company even told them their cuts were too broad and they'd probably want the company to refine them and that company was told not to bother. Today Rick Scott I think is the one culling Hispanic surnames claiming to be trying to catch "illegals" on the voter rolls.
I remember when watching the hand recount, we were supposed to be thinking how ridiculous it all was-- ogling the hanging chads and such. How clumsy and cumbersome those dang paper ballots were! It now seems to have been designed to encourage people to accept the electronic voting systems-- even with proprietary software designed by supporters of the GOP! And the Brooks Brothers riots in the polling place were meant to add to the sense of how messy and unruly those darned paper ballots can be.
I feel funny thinking of how much seems pre-planned, and yet, I remember thinking, during the smarmy impeachment hearings of Clinton, with all the pundit commentary about what a drain this was on our country, that the whole show may have been designed to sour us all on pursuing impeachment ever again because the GOP had someone really bad in the wings. And they did. And our Nancy took impeachment off the table because it would be so divisive and draining for our country. That was really eerie. Because it would not have been divisive and draining-- it would have been an ultimate reality check. Instead, our country went on to have a snazzy new drama on Fox called "24" that made torture look cool.
Here and now, while we are understandably alarmed by right wing voter roll purging and voter ID restrictions aimed at reducing the number of eligible Democratic voters in 2012, and fighting against them, we are not eliminating electronic voting or changing it to eliminate proprietary secret software and require receipts and auditable paper trails. Even though those systems have been proven susceptible to manipulation time and again. I look forward to your descriptions of the live TV airing of the electronic voting systems being hacked and tallies flipped. And your references to the reports of software engineers on the lack of integrity in the electronic voting systems nationwide. And how John Conyers was relegated to a basement room when trying to hold hearings on election integrity.
Thank you for reminding me of all the twists and turns of election 2000.
I know I've jumped ahead to raise issues about subsequent elections when electronic vote flips in the wee hours led to final counts at quite significant disparity with exit polls.
It may be worthwhile including information about how often we have judged other countries' elections as fraudulent based on such disparities.
Because in the meantime, our pundits have come up with all kinds of ridiculous explanations about why we just can't trust those darn exit polls here in the USA.
Sadly, in addition to pouring billions into lobbying and campaign contributions to undermine our democracy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy our annoying right to vote.
And each of those mysterious vote flips were explained away by those awful right wing smear campaigns-- look at those horrible ads they ran against the war heroes, Max Cleland and John Kerry. Look at those deceptive robocalls and fliers misdirecting people about where they should vote.
While the electronic voting manipulations were being field tested, there were always old fashioned dirty tricks going on to divert our attention. And sober discussion about how the nation just preferred the Beer Guy Torturer to the Dusty Patrician War Hero. How the "regular folk" just had to have preferred the draft dodging Bush boy to the uptight geek who wanted to save the planet and put the social security funds into a damn lock box.
I'm still stunned, having stayed awake during the wee hours of the 2004 election and after reading so much about electronic voting, that here we are again, looking at GOP dirty tricks and shameless voter purging efforts and billionaires buying candidates with understandable alarm, without having addressed the integrity of our electronic voting systems in any substantial way.
We all seem to be pretending that we don't know what can and has been done. We are supposed to tell one another that nothing has been proven, when it has.
So thank you for taking it all on. I look forward to reading more and getting the book to remind me of what I have lived through, because we do try so hard to forget.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)So right on target.
I'll get to the 2000 Florida voter purges in post # 3 of this series. And the pending 2012 Florida voter purges later on.
There is so much to talk about.
Pelosi taking impeachment off of the table was indeed eerie. And so disappointing. I wish I knew why she did it. Was her life in danger? Or just her new job?
Yes indeed, "we are supposed to tell one another that nothing has been proven, when it has". Trying to explain the reasons for the national silence on this issue is perhaps the greatest challenge I'm trying to deal with.
AzDar
(14,023 posts)raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)mnhtnbb
(31,428 posts)Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)congratulations!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Hope it works.
Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)greytdemocrat
(3,299 posts)RevStPatrick
(2,208 posts)Haven't seen you around here in a while.
I always enjoyed your writing.
I remember going to bed on election night, thinking that Al Gore had won.
And then waking up the next morning, and Bush had won.
It was like waking up in a completely different world, and nothing has been the same ever since.
Frankly, I would probably never actually read this book, because I followed everything pretty closely back in the day, and have no desire to relive the horror that we went through back then! But I probably would buy this book, and maybe even multiple copies to give to people who still don't understand what happened.
Good luck!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)Ellipsis
(9,124 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)JustAnotherGen
(32,069 posts)Rec!
freedom fighter jh
(1,782 posts)Good to see you back.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)bvar22
(39,909 posts)...after the media announced that Gore had won Florida was ALL I needed to see.
The smugness, laughing, and unqualified statements that "No. We are gonna take Florida"
(wink, wink) were all the "Tells" necessary to lead me to KNOW that The FIX was IN.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)were incredulous that their plans had not worked out.
bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)Autumn
(45,120 posts)glass of ice water in the desert.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)The other post you're refering to is the one that got hidden, right?
Autumn
(45,120 posts)that are pretty damn awesome too. Thank you for the post that got hidden. I printed that one out and saved it.
nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)right back there, reliving it.
i believe we witnessed a coup in slow motion over those 36 days, and i've never felt quite as hopeless as the night gore conceded.
there was a caller to the diane rehm show this week who brought up gore's request that we "accept" the supreme court decision and not "riot in the streets." he was angry and said that democrats always concede and play nice for the good of the republic while the GOP doesn't hesitate to sink the country to get their way on much lesser issues.
the caller said his peace and hung up...but there's no peace there, and none here inside my own democratic soul. it's time that we "accept" that our acceptance of these things are NOT what the republic needs. the republic in fact demands our anger and demands that we fight from here on out.
so glad to be reading you again, TFC!!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Actually, it was probably the worst day of all of our lives, even the vast majority of those who voted for Bush -- they just didn't know it at the time, and probably still don't.
Uncle Joe
(58,596 posts)Thanks for the thread, Time for change.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Good to see someone who still has a Gore avatar.
nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)these crimes against democracy are in the DNA of this site (to speak of it in a meta way as if it's an entity), and it seems that over the years we've largely forgotten from whence we came.
I started reading and lurking here during this period, and finally started posting in 2004 after the second election was stolen. it's good to be reminded of this.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)We were "fooled" once in 2000 and then "fooled" again in 2004, how many times will the Democratic Party be fooled again?
NO ELECTRONIC VOTING. Bring back fair elections.
JHB
(37,166 posts)kitt6
(516 posts)and cried like a baby. Things haven't been right since.
davidwparker
(5,397 posts)who changed to a cheap grade of paper during that election. It demonstrates the rate in which that paper resulted in "hanging chads" and the more reliable rate of previously-used paper stock.
That cheaper grade paper sure cost the country plenty. Those who worked at that paper company knew what the problem was when they heard about the hanging chads.
Very interesting report.
On edit: The transcript is no doubt still available.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)And we got 8 years of hell for that.
CitizenK9
(22 posts)using the erroneous (but intentionally compiled) felon lists. How effective was that? I'm pretty sure it was never prosecuted.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)I'll be discussing that in a later post
SidDithers
(44,228 posts)Sid
Initech
(100,155 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)I don't doubt that they knew about it when they made the call.
The Wizard
(12,556 posts)will be paying for the Mediocre Court's theft of the election. It was flat out criminal.
kentuck
(111,111 posts)it is all very believable. It's like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime...
ElectoralReform
(2 posts)They were totally stolen, but I don't trust either party now to save our democracy....
http://electoralreformcoalition.wordpress.com
The two-party winner-take-all electoral system is not a great idea, and everyone knows it. It's divisive, simplistic, corruptible and undemocratic.
Vote for electoral reform this election, and you will never again have to vote for the 'lesser of two evils' at the risk of 'wasting your vote' on a party that truly represents you. End the two-party duopoly!
Who is to blame for our diminishing civil rights and power to control our government? The liberals, the conservatives, the president, the previous president, the Congress, the courts, the corporations, the terrorists, the U.N., the media, the Federal reserve, big banks, and money in politics?
With so many problems, it is important to focus on the root cause, where concentrated efforts can give rise to tangible, door-opening results. I contend that the first step for everyone, whether liberal, conservative, concerned about civil rights, war, abortion, immigration, gun control or any issue, lies in our electoral system.
Our winner-take-all electoral system allows only two parties. They become massive, corruptible, and broad in their rhetoric but minimal in their differences. Around the nation, most voters view their opposition party as tyrannical and evil, while their chosen party is simply the lesser of two evils. They do not vote for a third party, even one closer to their political ideology, because it is viewed as a wasted vote. That is not democracy.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Welcome to DU
MADem
(135,425 posts)Third party advocacy is not permitted here. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=termsofservice
duhneece
(4,129 posts)Available free online....somewhere...sorry.
rrHeretic
(52 posts)The very first thing you wrote about making 'Americans more vigilant'. Yeah, first you have to inject a brain in most of the voters and then try to get them to really give a crap. The fact that the war criminal Bush is walking around free makes intelligent people want to vomit. Why is he walking around? Because people care more about those insipid reality shows on TV than any election.
tallahasseedem
(6,716 posts)What a complete and utter nightmare.
I look forward to reading your book! Best of luck!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)live love laugh
(13,231 posts)Godhumor
(6,437 posts)She deserves no attention, especially on this issue.
annabanana
(52,791 posts)crazyjoe
(1,191 posts)bringing the BBV to light, along with Andy Stephenson.
Godhumor
(6,437 posts)Of someone tools me that Bev had discovered a sure proof immortality drug, my first question would be who she stole it from.