January 4, 2024 • 53 mins
When 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Can I tell the quickest story of my how this
went down for me?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Weird that you had mentioned twenty twenty when you were
talking about two thousand.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I know.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
So I was in a big U haul.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I was towing my car, my seventy five Plymouth Valiant
named Ta, behind me, and I was somewhere in Texas,
West Texas.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
When I spent the night and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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.
(01:16):
The next morning, I said, hey everyone, So or I
don't think I said everyone, because I had no audience.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Spect Sure, so I think I said, hey me. It's weird.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, and what thirty something days later it was finally decided.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
By the Supreme Court of the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
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
(02:11):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:36):
think that. I think Vietnam was the last war we
were in during this election.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, that's where it generally began. The Bush campaign really
was doing what they could to kind of highlight that
dividing line.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
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
(05:33):
going to be a really, really really close election.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Hold onto your hat.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
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,
(06:01):
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,
(06:28):
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,
(06:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
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,
(07:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
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,
(08:01):
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
(08:21):
the same.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:45):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:26):
and said and of course this is overnight, so you
wake up in the morning thinking that George Bush had won.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Right, so well not quite.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Actually, well, if you were saying this, we'll see what
happened between then and sunrise.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
this thing was.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
By the way, really quick.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
I saw that movie, the BlackBerry Movie, on a plane
flight recently, and it's actually very good.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Oh, I'm sure most I recommend it pretty good.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Now it's a movie movie.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Most movies are pretty.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Good anyway, recommended.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
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
(11:04):
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,
(11:25):
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
(11:48):
on the way for him to give his concession speech
at like three point thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, and so because there were still some precincts that
had been unreported, so they were like.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Slow your role, Gore.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So it was, I mean between them interpersonally, it got
a little sticky right at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Not as far as I know. I think this was
sort of the first thing.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, there were a lot of first things in this election.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
I heard a little broke on there.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
That was great. That was a great brocall.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
And he always sounded like he was out of breath.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It wasn't that he got on, Chuck, this was four am.
He was still on from when he got on at
seven pm.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Oh this poor guy.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
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
(14:16):
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
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
happened publicly was a really big deal.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah. Absolutely, Olivia who helped us out with this and.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Did a bang up training, the fantastic job.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
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.
(15:54):
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
(16:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
it came down to to determine who would become president
that time.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
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
(17:55):
doesn't matter who gets the most votes because we have
the EC in place.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:45):
doesn't always wash out to be the person who won.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
The popular vote.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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
(19:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, well, Chuck, I think with that it's a good
place for a break.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
What do you say, All right, let's do it. We'll
get right back.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
All right, So here we are, it's November.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
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
(20:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
A chad, and.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:32):
and weird.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, which is huge. Like, again, the Florida law says
the intent of the voter is what matters.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
So they've made this up as they went along, or.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
In some cases, counties already did have rules on the
books as far as chads go, like Palm Beach County.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
the ballot up to a light source to see if
any light shone through, and if.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
You get in the year two thousand, if you could.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
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
(23:36):
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
(23:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And these aren't huge boards like in
one county it was like three people.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah. I think that was Dade County where Miami is.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Yeah, which is just nuts. We should talk about the
butterfly ballot for right.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I don't know if I can.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
But what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
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.
(25:12):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
(26:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:49):
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
(28:11):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:52):
crying towels and saying you're a sore loser. And it worked.
They succumbed to the pressure and stopped the recount.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
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
(29:22):
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
(29:47):
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
(30:07):
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
(30:27):
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
(30:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
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
(31:21):
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
(31:42):
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
(32:05):
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,
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, I say, we take a little break and just
prepare ourselves for the catastrophe that is Bush v.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Gore.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
What do you say, let's do it so Chuck like
(33:22):
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
(33:46):
the Supreme Court to get involved in a state court ruling.
Federalism basically said, you don't do that.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
It sounds confusing, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
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
(34:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
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
(35:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
So that's how we should decide, right.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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,
(35:41):
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
(36:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
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,
(36:37):
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
(37:00):
conservative side.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Which is so weird because it's such a bad legal argument.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I know, I don't know. Well, it's interesting. Maybe it
wasn't Suitor or Brier then that said what I said.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
It was probably John Paul Stevens.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
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
(37:32):
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.
(37:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (38:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
That we shouldn't get involved with this to begin with.
So it was.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
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
(39:25):
it called when you're supposed to accuse yourself. I guess
conflicts of.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Interest, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
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,
(39:52):
I think Sandrade.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
O'Connor, Yeah, she was trying to retire.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
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
(40:15):
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
(40:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
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
(41:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
All right, So just want to clear up that wasn't
just like, you know, some opinion that we're living out there.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
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
(42:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Yeah, it's crazy how many just small things would have
changed the outcome. Let's talk about that.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:16):
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
(43:36):
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
(43:59):
would have to react to, and sometimes doing things that
would have even hurt their chances at winning.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
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
(44:24):
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
(44:48):
in twenty twenty three not clear who actually won the
two thousand election.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
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
(46:11):
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,
(46:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
Have gone to al Gore.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
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
(47:18):
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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
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
(48:40):
that said the electoral college is nil and void.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Well, you're never going to get that on a ballot.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
I don't know, man, I don't know. I don't understand
why it's not already. It is such an enormous problem.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Well, they don't want to do that because one of
those first referenda would be term limits, and they're like.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
Oh no, let's not do that.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (50:05):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Man, I got nothing else. Can't wait till next November.
That's going me a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
I did not see this.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
This is cool.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
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
(51:07):
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
(51:30):
a turd burning rig, fairy glamorous. So they're in these
tractors just slow rolling it to the South Pole.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
That's a make deliver supplies and fuel.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
That's really amazing stuff.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
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
(52:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
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
(52:43):
you can blow our minds by wrapping that information up
into an email and sending it off to Stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Can I tell the quickest story of my how this
went down for me?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Weird that you had mentioned twenty twenty when you were
talking about two thousand.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I know.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
So I was in a big U haul.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I was towing my car, my seventy five Plymouth Valiant
named Ta, behind me, and I was somewhere in Texas,
West Texas.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
When I spent the night and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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.
(01:16):
The next morning, I said, hey everyone, So or I
don't think I said everyone, because I had no audience.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Spect Sure, so I think I said, hey me. It's weird.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, and what thirty something days later it was finally decided.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
By the Supreme Court of the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
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
(02:11):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:36):
think that. I think Vietnam was the last war we
were in during this election.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, that's where it generally began. The Bush campaign really
was doing what they could to kind of highlight that
dividing line.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
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
(05:33):
going to be a really, really really close election.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Hold onto your hat.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
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,
(06:01):
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,
(06:28):
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,
(06:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
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,
(07:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
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,
(08:01):
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
(08:21):
the same.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:45):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:26):
and said and of course this is overnight, so you
wake up in the morning thinking that George Bush had won.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Right, so well not quite.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Actually, well, if you were saying this, we'll see what
happened between then and sunrise.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
this thing was.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
By the way, really quick.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
I saw that movie, the BlackBerry Movie, on a plane
flight recently, and it's actually very good.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Oh, I'm sure most I recommend it pretty good.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Now it's a movie movie.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Most movies are pretty.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Good anyway, recommended.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
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
(11:04):
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,
(11:25):
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
(11:48):
on the way for him to give his concession speech
at like three point thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, and so because there were still some precincts that
had been unreported, so they were like.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Slow your role, Gore.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So it was, I mean between them interpersonally, it got
a little sticky right at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Not as far as I know. I think this was
sort of the first thing.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, there were a lot of first things in this election.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
I heard a little broke on there.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
That was great. That was a great brocall.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
And he always sounded like he was out of breath.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It wasn't that he got on, Chuck, this was four am.
He was still on from when he got on at
seven pm.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Oh this poor guy.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
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
(14:16):
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
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
happened publicly was a really big deal.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah. Absolutely, Olivia who helped us out with this and.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Did a bang up training, the fantastic job.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
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.
(15:54):
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
(16:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
it came down to to determine who would become president
that time.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
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
(17:55):
doesn't matter who gets the most votes because we have
the EC in place.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:45):
doesn't always wash out to be the person who won.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
The popular vote.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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
(19:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, well, Chuck, I think with that it's a good
place for a break.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
What do you say, All right, let's do it. We'll
get right back.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
All right, So here we are, it's November.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
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
(20:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
A chad, and.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:32):
and weird.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, which is huge. Like, again, the Florida law says
the intent of the voter is what matters.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
So they've made this up as they went along, or.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
In some cases, counties already did have rules on the
books as far as chads go, like Palm Beach County.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
the ballot up to a light source to see if
any light shone through, and if.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
You get in the year two thousand, if you could.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
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
(23:36):
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
(23:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And these aren't huge boards like in
one county it was like three people.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah. I think that was Dade County where Miami is.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Yeah, which is just nuts. We should talk about the
butterfly ballot for right.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I don't know if I can.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
But what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
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.
(25:12):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
(26:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:49):
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
(28:11):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:52):
crying towels and saying you're a sore loser. And it worked.
They succumbed to the pressure and stopped the recount.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
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
(29:22):
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
(29:47):
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
(30:07):
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
(30:27):
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
(30:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
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
(31:21):
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
(31:42):
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
(32:05):
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,
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, I say, we take a little break and just
prepare ourselves for the catastrophe that is Bush v.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Gore.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
What do you say, let's do it so Chuck like
(33:22):
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
(33:46):
the Supreme Court to get involved in a state court ruling.
Federalism basically said, you don't do that.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
It sounds confusing, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
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
(34:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
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
(35:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
So that's how we should decide, right.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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,
(35:41):
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
(36:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
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,
(36:37):
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
(37:00):
conservative side.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Which is so weird because it's such a bad legal argument.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I know, I don't know. Well, it's interesting. Maybe it
wasn't Suitor or Brier then that said what I said.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
It was probably John Paul Stevens.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
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
(37:32):
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.
(37:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (38:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
That we shouldn't get involved with this to begin with.
So it was.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
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
(39:25):
it called when you're supposed to accuse yourself. I guess
conflicts of.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Interest, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
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,
(39:52):
I think Sandrade.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
O'Connor, Yeah, she was trying to retire.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
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
(40:15):
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
(40:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
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
(41:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
All right, So just want to clear up that wasn't
just like, you know, some opinion that we're living out there.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
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
(42:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Yeah, it's crazy how many just small things would have
changed the outcome. Let's talk about that.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:16):
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
(43:36):
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
(43:59):
would have to react to, and sometimes doing things that
would have even hurt their chances at winning.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
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
(44:24):
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
(44:48):
in twenty twenty three not clear who actually won the
two thousand election.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
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
(46:11):
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,
(46:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
Have gone to al Gore.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
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
(47:18):
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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
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
(48:40):
that said the electoral college is nil and void.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Well, you're never going to get that on a ballot.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
I don't know, man, I don't know. I don't understand
why it's not already. It is such an enormous problem.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Well, they don't want to do that because one of
those first referenda would be term limits, and they're like.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
Oh no, let's not do that.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (50:05):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Man, I got nothing else. Can't wait till next November.
That's going me a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
I did not see this.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
This is cool.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
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
(51:07):
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
(51:30):
a turd burning rig, fairy glamorous. So they're in these
tractors just slow rolling it to the South Pole.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
That's a make deliver supplies and fuel.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
That's really amazing stuff.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
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
(52:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
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
(52:43):
you can blow our minds by wrapping that information up
into an email and sending it off to Stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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