General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A short while ago on NPR, a guest was reviewing the Supreme Court's hand in [View all]GoreWon2000
(137 posts)As someone who actually spent 15 years volunteering on election campaigns (everything from local state legislative campaigns all the way to Presidential campaigns when I lived in Florida in one of the disputed counties), I'm long past tired of people blaming Al Gore for the Bush/Florida 2000 election theft because the actual facts of what really happened.clearly show that Bush and his election stealers are squarely to blame. Nader's big lie and the illegal butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county made it possible for Bush to get close enough in Florida to have his little brother and Florida campaign co-chair steal the election by flatly refusing to enforce Florida's clear election laws that required that every vote be counted. Here is a fraction of highlights of what the Bush campaign did to kill democracy in 2000 in Florida. Most of the uncounted votes are located in the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida. Most of the votes not counted were cast by voters of color, especially women of color. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who they voted for. The Bush campaign knew it would lose if all of the uncounted votes were counted. Let's also not forget the 1999/2000 "felon purge" by Jeb and Harris where more than 50,000 legally registered, mostly African American democrats were illegally removed from Florida's voting rolls by wrongly identifying them as felons in an illegal effort to reduce the number of democratic voters. Let's also not forget the 11/22/00 (Kennedy assassination anniversary) attack by Brooks Bothers suit wearing GOP operatives on Government Center in Miami, that was organized and paid for by the Bush campaign that stopped the legal vote count in Miami-Dade County. None of these rioters was ever prosecuted by the DOJ. It's a tragedy that there was no Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 2001 to launch a Congressional investigation to shame the DOJ into doing it's job as there was in 2021 Let's also not forget that all of this anti-democracy law breaking by the Bush campaign in Florida in 2000 was then rubberstamped by 5 unelected, anti-democracy GOP SCOTUS judges who stopped the legal Florida vote count and took away we the people's right to decide who occupies the White House. These anti-democracy tactics used by the Bush campaign in Florida in 2000 are the very same anti-democracy tactics now being used by Trump tp try to steal the 2020 election and will likely be used by Trump again in 2024. This is the real, ugly story of what really happened in Florida in 2000 and the blame belongs squarely with Bush and his election stealers.