December 9, 2024 • 24 mins
An interview with Ralph Nader on his role as a “spoiler” in the 2000 election, and historian Mary Frances Berry, who led the 2001 commission looking into the impact that ballot box irregularities involving Black voters may have had on the outcome in Florida.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
You can't predict these things. You have to make your
decision on the best available knowledge. You know, once you
get into retroactive clairvoyance, is nobody left of anything.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
You had all of these different people calling from Florida
and leaving messages saying do something. Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hello, Fiasco listeners, it's Leon Vok. This is the fourth
in a series of bonus episodes we're dropping in this feed.
The goal is to showcase some of the best interviews
we did for Bush v. Gore, in which we covered
the ins and outs of the two thousand Florida recount.
In today's episode, we're looking at the two thousand campaign
as in the campaign itself, the thing that happened in
(01:08):
the months leading up to the recount, for all the
what ifs packed into the thirty days that followed election Day.
The campaign that preceded it was full of tiny turning
points that could have changed the outcome one way or another.
As you heard me say on the first episode of
the show, the Elian Gonzales saga and the environmental activism
around the Homestead Air Force Base were just two factors
(01:29):
that might have changed the razor thin margin on election day.
So today we have two interviews taking a deeper dive
into the what ifs that might have prevented or recount altogether.
First up, Ralph Nader. Nader has been America's most famous
(01:50):
consumer advocate since nineteen sixty five, when he published a
groundbreaking expose about the auto industry. Nader trained an entire
generation of activists. They called themselves Nator's Raiders, and he
deputized them to investigate all kinds of injustice, inefficiency, and corruption.
By two thousand was an icon, and he ran for
(02:11):
president as the Green Party candidate, railing against the two
party system and sold out arenas.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
What about poverty in the Land of the Free, Home
of the brave, booming economy. On the one hand, twenty
percent child poverty in the USA, richest country in the world.
There are countries in Western Europe that have abolished poverty.
They did it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
We interviewed Nator for the first episode of the season
because his candidacy is so often blamed for Gore's defeat
and we wanted to hear his perspective on it. Nator
mapped out why he thought he was a necessary alternative
and why he thought Gore struggled as a candidate.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Because he was the front runner, he was too cautious,
and because he was too cautious, he didn't take pioneering stands.
He thought he could just say to the public, Look,
I had eight years of experience in Washington's vice president,
I was senator, I was representative. I was a journalist
in Vietnam. And who's this guy, this bumbling governor from
(03:05):
Texas who couldn't put four sentences together and had a
horrible record on children's poverty to a corporate pollution.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
And when you when you looked at him and Bush
side by side on the campaign trail, and I realized,
you know, you're making distinction between the old al Gore
and the al Gore who was running for president. When
you looked at them side by side, what did you see?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Bush was horrible? I mean, one of the reasons I
ran was to push the Democrats into a more comprehensive
assault on Bush's record, because they weren't doing it, and
so I was saying to myself, well, you know, I
got to show them how to do it. Unfortunately, in
the two party duopoly, the press doesn't pay attention to
(03:44):
third party agendas. By and large.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
When you were on the trail, I know that you
sort of had a recurring argument that you would make
that these two guys are in many ways the same,
or that they were that they you could make distinctions
on certain policy areas, but that you saw them in
some ways as fundamentally the same. Can you elaborate on
that or explain it?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, on certain social safety nets, obviously, they're very different.
On things like child health, health and childcare and medicare
preservation and some of the more basic civil liberty, civil rights,
housing issues. The Democrats were of course better, I mean
nowhere near enough, but they were very distinctly better than
(04:26):
the Republicans. But on the biggest issue of AWE, which
is the corporate state, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, militarism, they
were increasingly alike.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Did that carry over into a sense among the electorate
that this election wasn't that important? Did you detect an
unusual level of disengagement due to these these pacific candidates.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Let's put it this way, it was not an exciting election.
You had boring candidates. Al Gore is very boring candidate.
George W. Bush was a boring candidate. They agreed with
each other incredible number of times on the debate. Somebody
counted once that Bush and Gore agreed with each other
over twenty times in one residential debate. And so the
(05:12):
attention of the activists was they would paint George W.
Bush as bad on the environment, which is true. But
then Gore, he allowed Bill Clinton to shut him down
on regulating auto pollution, fuel efficiency standards, and generally were
(05:32):
very unexciting in the area of environment, which is his
principal claim to fame. People saw that he wasn't authentic
when he said I'm for power for the people, not
the corporations. I'm not for the insured companies, I'm not
for the oil companies. People really didn't believe them. It
(05:53):
was too little, too light, and not specific enough. He
could have done a lot, but he was coasting because
he thought he had it in a bag.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
It's interesting to hear you say that he was cautious
because he thought he had it in the bag. I
feel like there's a competing narrative, or at least one
I've absorbed somehow that he was cautious because he didn't
know who he was.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Well, when I say he was cautious because he thought
he had it in a bag. That wasn't the only
reason he was cautious. He's a cautious politician to begin
with in his prior races, very very cautious. Finger to
the wind of the powers that be? That's Al Gore
fingers to the wind of the powers that be.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do you agree that there's this phrase that he didn't
know who he was? Is that something that you subscribe to?
Speaker 5 (06:42):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, definitely. If you look at the way he came
out for each debate, he was a different Al Gore.
One time he was aggressive, another time he was aloof
a third time he was like a boxer in a clinch.
I agree with Governor Bush. You know, over twenty times.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
In one debate you said you didn't do much campaigning
in Florida, that you'd just gone down for I think
you said two and a half days. Was that because
you didn't want to draw votes from Gore in a
battleground state as close as Florida.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
No, it was not the best management of my schedule.
I mean, I wasn't pulling that high in Florida. I
was pulling much higher in places like Massachusetts, California, Oregon,
Washington State, Illinois, and that's where I wanted to spend
a lot of time because I was looking for the
(07:39):
aggregate vote. I wasn't in the running for electoral college votes.
I was looking try to get five percent of the
total popular vote so we could qualify four years hence
for federal funds.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Were there gore people or people from the DNC who
begged you to not campaign in battleground states.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Well, in the last few weeks, they didn't beg me.
They opposed me. They literally took people like Lauria Steinem
and so on on a tour to turn again against
my candidacy. Some of them took out ads attacking me.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Were there any backchannel efforts to get you to not
go to those states like ay other Buchanan, for example,
like very deliberately did not go to battleground states. You
only can't because he was only also going for five percent.
He campaigned only in safe states that were safe for Bush.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah. I just thought of principle, I wouldn't listen to
that sort of thing because you have to respect the
voters in every state. You can't say I'm not going
to go to a state because it's a battleground state.
That's disrespecting potential voters and the interest of all voters
to have more voices and choices. That's why I rigorously
(08:50):
campaigned in every fifty states. No other candidate did that,
small candidate or major party candidate, because it was a
matter of principle with me.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Do you remember the emergence of the Nators raiders for Gore?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, very much. I was campaigning in Minnesota and got
their one or two days press. But you know, they
weren't in a position to adopt the principle I had.
They weren't running, Therefore, they didn't want to be obliged
to respect the voters. They just saw the winner take
(09:26):
all electoral college duopoly, culled the sac and had to
adjust to it.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Did you feel betrayed by them at all, that these
were your supporters who were going against this principle of
yours about respecting the voters. That it feel like, I like,
these guys don't really understand you.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Well, they were more numerous in two thousand and four.
Almost the entire progressive lineup of well known progressives dropped
their supported me in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Is that because they just felt so sad about the
fact that your votes in Florida could have been Gore votes,
and thus Gore could have been present.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It's like all smart people they were fact deprived and
they didn't realize that there were tens sena quantons, any
one of which, if change, would have won for Gore
and electoral college and three hundred thousand Democrat voters going
for Borsch's Supreme Court loss of Tennessee. They bought into
(10:29):
blaming the Greens and me for every other sena quantone,
giving us delusions of grandeur. It's amazing. It's almost a
intellectual tick. It doesn't matter how smart they are, how
savvy they are. All they look at is the difference
between the two major candidates and how many votes I got.
(10:50):
Every third party candidate in Florida got more than five
hundred and thirty five votes, by the way, But the
one thing you can look back on is that a
winner take all system electoral college determination is full of mischief,
(11:11):
all right.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
That was Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate in
two thousand. For many frustrated Gore supporters, Ralph Nader's candidacy
is one of the most enduring what ifs of the election.
But there's another election day question mark, one that received
much less attention during the recount that's coming up after
(11:32):
the break.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Some people said that they went down and they were
told they weren't on the registration rolls, and they couldn't
understand why they weren't on the roles because they'd been
voting before.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
This is Mary Francis Berry, a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania. She's referring to a population of largely African
American and Latino voters who said they were turned away
from the polls on election Day. In two thousand, Barry
was the chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights,
which was tasked with investigating complaints of disenfranchisement around the country.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
We had to set up a hot land before the
election so that if there were any complaints, we would
have a number out there that people could call. We
had done that in other elections, but in this one
you had all of these different people calling from Florida
and leaving messages saying do something, Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And so this was like an unusual volume of complaints
and they were specifically concentrated in Florida.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Absolutely, they were a volume higher than any I had
seen and all the time I'd been on the Commission,
and I was first appointed to the Commission in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
In early two thousand and one, the Commission on Civil
Rights investigated the large number of Florida voters who had
reported problems at polling sites that prevented them from voting.
Over the course of their investigation, Barry and her colleagues
her testimony from dozens of Florida voters and officials, including
Governor Jeb bush I.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Asked for a briefing on the alleged concern that felons
were voting and that non felons were not allowed to
vote because they were allegedly felons.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
One of the priorities of the investigation was to get
to the bottom of what's now known as Florida's felon purge.
In two thousand, it was illegal for anyone with a
felony conviction to vote in Florida, even after they had
served their time. So in two thousand, the state of
Florida commissioned a contractor to create a list of felons
living in the state and to ensure that they weren't
(13:34):
registered to vote. The list was deeply flawed and resulted
in more than a thousand legal voters being turned away
at the polls. The state office in charge of this
operation was one that you might be familiar with at
this point.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Catherine Harris, as Secretary of State, had direct responsibility under
the law for the elections, and she testified. I recall
her saying something like she was in a hurry and
didn't have much time because she was going to New
York on a shopping trip or some thing like that,
which I didn't understand why she told us that, but anyway,
(14:09):
she said that she had handed it over to her subordinates,
and we in particular asked her we had testimony from
a firm that her office had hired to purge clean
up the voting roles, to make sure that there were
in no extraneous names and it was all clear, and
(14:31):
to do it scientifically. And the head of this company,
which had many contracts with the government, testified that under
oath that they told her office that if they did
the procedure the way they had asked them to do it,
they would get a lot of false positives of people
(14:51):
who were actually registered, and asked if they should change
the procedure, and that Harris's office and her staff told
them to go ahead and do it the way they
had told them to do it, which they did, and
so the result was that there were people whose names
were confused with other people's names, people who had told
they weren't registered when they were. And one black minister
(15:16):
testified that when he went to vote and took his
family with him, he liked his kids to watch when
he went to vote, to get the experience of seeing
the polling place and all that. And he went in
and he'd voted before, and they told him in a
very loud voice where everyone could hear, that he was
a convicted felon. And he was outraged because he said,
(15:38):
not only aim, I'm not ever convicted of anything. I've
even been charged with anything, and the only time I've
been to the courthouse is when I served on a jury,
So I don't understand how I could be a convicted felon.
Could you call up somebody and find out, you know,
this is a mistake. And then they said they couldn't
get through to the office where they would check this,
(16:00):
so he ended up having to slink out of the
room with everybody looking at him as this convicted felon,
when in fact his name was on the roll and
he had been on the rolls. He said he felt
slingshotted back to slavery when they told him that he
was just and he was so disconsolate even by the
time he came to the hero and so it was
(16:21):
really sort of an outrageous sort of thing that happened.
Speaker 6 (16:25):
Was it your sense at that point that the fellon
purge list was the primary driver of the problems you
were getting reports on election day?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, it was our understanding, or it seemed to me
that that list, that process was a major problem, that
there were any number of people who were not on
the rolls. The other major problem that compounded it was
that we found out in one county that the election
(16:58):
office state election office made sure that there were cell
phones given to some of the precincts, but there weren't
any given to the precincts where there were Latino voters
or whether they were.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
Black voters, so that cell phones they could use to
the election.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
That the volunteers who were there or who were hired
to conduct the election, the people who sit there at
the tables, you know, during election checking the rolls and
so on could call up if they had some problem,
and they didn't give cell phones. In some district. They
were very particular about who had a cell phone and
who could call up and who could not. And it
(17:36):
just turned out that the ones who couldn't call up
were the district where there were the problems.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 6 (17:42):
Can you describe the reaction to your report and how
it worked politically, what its impact was politically.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Sometimes when you do reports in government agencies like the
Commission that are investigative and informative, the reports sort of
collect dust. You know, there might be a one day
half story about you did a report, but then after
that you know it served its purpose. It has been
(18:11):
a safety valve for people who want to talk about it,
to complain or do whatever, and you make your recommendations.
But I was determined when I was chair of the
Commission that we would only do reports that were important
and substantive, and that we would make sure that our
recommendations had some kind of teeth and were in conformity
with what we found, and that we would look toward
(18:35):
trying to get some kind of legislation help the Congress
and the President is trying to get some kind of
legislation to remedy whatever problems we found. Okay, so the
report came out, and it did not just gathered us
the Senate, thank Senator Dodd from Connecticut. Chris Dodd was
(18:55):
chair of the committee over there that considered it. I
remember Diane Feinstein was on the committee, a leading member
of it. That committee and its staff held hearings on
the report. We recommended that the federal government pass a
law which set up some kind of election commission and
(19:17):
in fact required the states to change and clean up
their procedures so that we wouldn't have this kind of
purge that took place from this company that ended up
calling people felons who weren't felons and all that sort
of stuff. And that the states looked to see that
polling places are accessible, and that the Congress and also
(19:41):
that discouraged the states from having police officers patrolling up
and down a highway patrolment on the roads leading to
the polling places, which sometimes intimidated people who wanted to
vote and didn't know what was happening. And that all
of these different problems ought to be addressed by legislation.
(20:02):
And I was pleased to see. The Congress passed some
legislation called Help America Vote Act up and the Election
Assistance Commission and appropriated a bunch of money. Sometimes Congress
authorizes things, but they don't appropriate any money to give
to the states in order for them to fix some
(20:23):
of these problems.
Speaker 6 (20:25):
How effective was that legislation and the formation of that organization?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Well after the law passed and the money came and
people's attention went elsewhere. The Election Assistance Commission had no teeth.
I knew that to begin with, because the Constitution in
Article one leaves the way elections are conducted to the
states unless there is discrimination under the fourteenth Amendment, and
(20:53):
then you can file a civil rights complaint, which is
what we had been looking at. But the normal election process,
that is, how do they handle the roles and where
the polling play. All that stuff is under the control
of the states. So the Election Assistance Commission was not
given the authority to force the states to do anything,
(21:15):
because Congress couldn't give them the authority to do that.
But they thought that if they gave them the money
and then monitored how they spent the money, then indeed
they might change some of these procedures, and some of
the states did a lot of them did. They used
the money to buy new equipment and so you wouldn't
have all those chad things again and to use paper ballots,
(21:38):
and they some of them put out policies where they
wouldn't have an overriding police presidence around the roads to elections.
I mean, there were some things actually that actually got
changed as a result.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
You sort of got up this with the answer you
just gave. But do you think there's the fact that
a federal national election is administered by the states in
the federal system that we have is inherently flawed. Do
you think it's possible for a national election to be
fair and fairly administered and equally administered across the country
when each state is in charge of their own operation.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Well, one answer to that question is that we've had
federal elections in which federal officials have involved in corrupt behavior.
So it doesn't necessarily mean that because they're state officials.
So that's one answer. Okay, I think that it's okay
(22:41):
to unless we amend the constitution, which is hard to do,
you can't change that procedure. I do think the answer
is for now for the Congress to give more powers
to the Election Assistance Commission to hold hearings which it
(23:02):
doesn't have, to call people in to monitor them, to
staff them, to show that some people weren't serious about it.
They didn't give their much staff to the commission that
commissioned it, didn't hardly had anybody to do anything. So
just putting some sunlight on what people were doing and
(23:23):
having enough staff to do that, I think would help
the process.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
In twenty eighteen, Florida voters passed an amendment to the
state constitution restoring voting rights to approximately one million Floridians
with felonies on their records. The following year, Republican legislators
passed a law stating that people with felonies cannot cast
a ballot until they've paid off their outstanding fines and
court fees. As a result, most of the one million
(23:54):
people who regained the right to vote back in twenty
eighteen still can't actually do it. Fiasco BUSHVII Gore is
produced by Prolog Projects and district bed by Pushkin Industries.
The show is produced by Madeline kaplan Ulla Culpa, Andrew
(24:15):
Parsons and me Leon nafak We. Had additional editorial support
from Lisa Chase and Daniel Riley. Thanks for listening, We'll
see you next week.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
You can't predict these things. You have to make your
decision on the best available knowledge. You know, once you
get into retroactive clairvoyance, is nobody left of anything.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
You had all of these different people calling from Florida
and leaving messages saying do something. Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hello, Fiasco listeners, it's Leon Vok. This is the fourth
in a series of bonus episodes we're dropping in this feed.
The goal is to showcase some of the best interviews
we did for Bush v. Gore, in which we covered
the ins and outs of the two thousand Florida recount.
In today's episode, we're looking at the two thousand campaign
as in the campaign itself, the thing that happened in
(01:08):
the months leading up to the recount, for all the
what ifs packed into the thirty days that followed election Day.
The campaign that preceded it was full of tiny turning
points that could have changed the outcome one way or another.
As you heard me say on the first episode of
the show, the Elian Gonzales saga and the environmental activism
around the Homestead Air Force Base were just two factors
(01:29):
that might have changed the razor thin margin on election day.
So today we have two interviews taking a deeper dive
into the what ifs that might have prevented or recount altogether.
First up, Ralph Nader. Nader has been America's most famous
(01:50):
consumer advocate since nineteen sixty five, when he published a
groundbreaking expose about the auto industry. Nader trained an entire
generation of activists. They called themselves Nator's Raiders, and he
deputized them to investigate all kinds of injustice, inefficiency, and corruption.
By two thousand was an icon, and he ran for
(02:11):
president as the Green Party candidate, railing against the two
party system and sold out arenas.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
What about poverty in the Land of the Free, Home
of the brave, booming economy. On the one hand, twenty
percent child poverty in the USA, richest country in the world.
There are countries in Western Europe that have abolished poverty.
They did it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
We interviewed Nator for the first episode of the season
because his candidacy is so often blamed for Gore's defeat
and we wanted to hear his perspective on it. Nator
mapped out why he thought he was a necessary alternative
and why he thought Gore struggled as a candidate.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Because he was the front runner, he was too cautious,
and because he was too cautious, he didn't take pioneering stands.
He thought he could just say to the public, Look,
I had eight years of experience in Washington's vice president,
I was senator, I was representative. I was a journalist
in Vietnam. And who's this guy, this bumbling governor from
(03:05):
Texas who couldn't put four sentences together and had a
horrible record on children's poverty to a corporate pollution.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
And when you when you looked at him and Bush
side by side on the campaign trail, and I realized,
you know, you're making distinction between the old al Gore
and the al Gore who was running for president. When
you looked at them side by side, what did you see?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Bush was horrible? I mean, one of the reasons I
ran was to push the Democrats into a more comprehensive
assault on Bush's record, because they weren't doing it, and
so I was saying to myself, well, you know, I
got to show them how to do it. Unfortunately, in
the two party duopoly, the press doesn't pay attention to
(03:44):
third party agendas. By and large.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
When you were on the trail, I know that you
sort of had a recurring argument that you would make
that these two guys are in many ways the same,
or that they were that they you could make distinctions
on certain policy areas, but that you saw them in
some ways as fundamentally the same. Can you elaborate on
that or explain it?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, on certain social safety nets, obviously, they're very different.
On things like child health, health and childcare and medicare
preservation and some of the more basic civil liberty, civil rights,
housing issues. The Democrats were of course better, I mean
nowhere near enough, but they were very distinctly better than
(04:26):
the Republicans. But on the biggest issue of AWE, which
is the corporate state, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, militarism, they
were increasingly alike.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Did that carry over into a sense among the electorate
that this election wasn't that important? Did you detect an
unusual level of disengagement due to these these pacific candidates.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Let's put it this way, it was not an exciting election.
You had boring candidates. Al Gore is very boring candidate.
George W. Bush was a boring candidate. They agreed with
each other incredible number of times on the debate. Somebody
counted once that Bush and Gore agreed with each other
over twenty times in one residential debate. And so the
(05:12):
attention of the activists was they would paint George W.
Bush as bad on the environment, which is true. But
then Gore, he allowed Bill Clinton to shut him down
on regulating auto pollution, fuel efficiency standards, and generally were
(05:32):
very unexciting in the area of environment, which is his
principal claim to fame. People saw that he wasn't authentic
when he said I'm for power for the people, not
the corporations. I'm not for the insured companies, I'm not
for the oil companies. People really didn't believe them. It
(05:53):
was too little, too light, and not specific enough. He
could have done a lot, but he was coasting because
he thought he had it in a bag.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
It's interesting to hear you say that he was cautious
because he thought he had it in the bag. I
feel like there's a competing narrative, or at least one
I've absorbed somehow that he was cautious because he didn't
know who he was.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Well, when I say he was cautious because he thought
he had it in a bag. That wasn't the only
reason he was cautious. He's a cautious politician to begin
with in his prior races, very very cautious. Finger to
the wind of the powers that be? That's Al Gore
fingers to the wind of the powers that be.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do you agree that there's this phrase that he didn't
know who he was? Is that something that you subscribe to?
Speaker 5 (06:42):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, definitely. If you look at the way he came
out for each debate, he was a different Al Gore.
One time he was aggressive, another time he was aloof
a third time he was like a boxer in a clinch.
I agree with Governor Bush. You know, over twenty times.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
In one debate you said you didn't do much campaigning
in Florida, that you'd just gone down for I think
you said two and a half days. Was that because
you didn't want to draw votes from Gore in a
battleground state as close as Florida.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
No, it was not the best management of my schedule.
I mean, I wasn't pulling that high in Florida. I
was pulling much higher in places like Massachusetts, California, Oregon,
Washington State, Illinois, and that's where I wanted to spend
a lot of time because I was looking for the
(07:39):
aggregate vote. I wasn't in the running for electoral college votes.
I was looking try to get five percent of the
total popular vote so we could qualify four years hence
for federal funds.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Were there gore people or people from the DNC who
begged you to not campaign in battleground states.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Well, in the last few weeks, they didn't beg me.
They opposed me. They literally took people like Lauria Steinem
and so on on a tour to turn again against
my candidacy. Some of them took out ads attacking me.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Were there any backchannel efforts to get you to not
go to those states like ay other Buchanan, for example,
like very deliberately did not go to battleground states. You
only can't because he was only also going for five percent.
He campaigned only in safe states that were safe for Bush.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah. I just thought of principle, I wouldn't listen to
that sort of thing because you have to respect the
voters in every state. You can't say I'm not going
to go to a state because it's a battleground state.
That's disrespecting potential voters and the interest of all voters
to have more voices and choices. That's why I rigorously
(08:50):
campaigned in every fifty states. No other candidate did that,
small candidate or major party candidate, because it was a
matter of principle with me.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Do you remember the emergence of the Nators raiders for Gore?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, very much. I was campaigning in Minnesota and got
their one or two days press. But you know, they
weren't in a position to adopt the principle I had.
They weren't running, Therefore, they didn't want to be obliged
to respect the voters. They just saw the winner take
(09:26):
all electoral college duopoly, culled the sac and had to
adjust to it.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Did you feel betrayed by them at all, that these
were your supporters who were going against this principle of
yours about respecting the voters. That it feel like, I like,
these guys don't really understand you.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Well, they were more numerous in two thousand and four.
Almost the entire progressive lineup of well known progressives dropped
their supported me in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Is that because they just felt so sad about the
fact that your votes in Florida could have been Gore votes,
and thus Gore could have been present.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It's like all smart people they were fact deprived and
they didn't realize that there were tens sena quantons, any
one of which, if change, would have won for Gore
and electoral college and three hundred thousand Democrat voters going
for Borsch's Supreme Court loss of Tennessee. They bought into
(10:29):
blaming the Greens and me for every other sena quantone,
giving us delusions of grandeur. It's amazing. It's almost a
intellectual tick. It doesn't matter how smart they are, how
savvy they are. All they look at is the difference
between the two major candidates and how many votes I got.
(10:50):
Every third party candidate in Florida got more than five
hundred and thirty five votes, by the way, But the
one thing you can look back on is that a
winner take all system electoral college determination is full of mischief,
(11:11):
all right.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
That was Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate in
two thousand. For many frustrated Gore supporters, Ralph Nader's candidacy
is one of the most enduring what ifs of the election.
But there's another election day question mark, one that received
much less attention during the recount that's coming up after
(11:32):
the break.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Some people said that they went down and they were
told they weren't on the registration rolls, and they couldn't
understand why they weren't on the roles because they'd been
voting before.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
This is Mary Francis Berry, a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania. She's referring to a population of largely African
American and Latino voters who said they were turned away
from the polls on election Day. In two thousand, Barry
was the chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights,
which was tasked with investigating complaints of disenfranchisement around the country.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
We had to set up a hot land before the
election so that if there were any complaints, we would
have a number out there that people could call. We
had done that in other elections, but in this one
you had all of these different people calling from Florida
and leaving messages saying do something, Why don't you do something?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And so this was like an unusual volume of complaints
and they were specifically concentrated in Florida.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Absolutely, they were a volume higher than any I had
seen and all the time I'd been on the Commission,
and I was first appointed to the Commission in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
In early two thousand and one, the Commission on Civil
Rights investigated the large number of Florida voters who had
reported problems at polling sites that prevented them from voting.
Over the course of their investigation, Barry and her colleagues
her testimony from dozens of Florida voters and officials, including
Governor Jeb bush I.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Asked for a briefing on the alleged concern that felons
were voting and that non felons were not allowed to
vote because they were allegedly felons.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
One of the priorities of the investigation was to get
to the bottom of what's now known as Florida's felon purge.
In two thousand, it was illegal for anyone with a
felony conviction to vote in Florida, even after they had
served their time. So in two thousand, the state of
Florida commissioned a contractor to create a list of felons
living in the state and to ensure that they weren't
(13:34):
registered to vote. The list was deeply flawed and resulted
in more than a thousand legal voters being turned away
at the polls. The state office in charge of this
operation was one that you might be familiar with at
this point.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Catherine Harris, as Secretary of State, had direct responsibility under
the law for the elections, and she testified. I recall
her saying something like she was in a hurry and
didn't have much time because she was going to New
York on a shopping trip or some thing like that,
which I didn't understand why she told us that, but anyway,
(14:09):
she said that she had handed it over to her subordinates,
and we in particular asked her we had testimony from
a firm that her office had hired to purge clean
up the voting roles, to make sure that there were
in no extraneous names and it was all clear, and
(14:31):
to do it scientifically. And the head of this company,
which had many contracts with the government, testified that under
oath that they told her office that if they did
the procedure the way they had asked them to do it,
they would get a lot of false positives of people
(14:51):
who were actually registered, and asked if they should change
the procedure, and that Harris's office and her staff told
them to go ahead and do it the way they
had told them to do it, which they did, and
so the result was that there were people whose names
were confused with other people's names, people who had told
they weren't registered when they were. And one black minister
(15:16):
testified that when he went to vote and took his
family with him, he liked his kids to watch when
he went to vote, to get the experience of seeing
the polling place and all that. And he went in
and he'd voted before, and they told him in a
very loud voice where everyone could hear, that he was
a convicted felon. And he was outraged because he said,
(15:38):
not only aim, I'm not ever convicted of anything. I've
even been charged with anything, and the only time I've
been to the courthouse is when I served on a jury,
So I don't understand how I could be a convicted felon.
Could you call up somebody and find out, you know,
this is a mistake. And then they said they couldn't
get through to the office where they would check this,
(16:00):
so he ended up having to slink out of the
room with everybody looking at him as this convicted felon,
when in fact his name was on the roll and
he had been on the rolls. He said he felt
slingshotted back to slavery when they told him that he
was just and he was so disconsolate even by the
time he came to the hero and so it was
(16:21):
really sort of an outrageous sort of thing that happened.
Speaker 6 (16:25):
Was it your sense at that point that the fellon
purge list was the primary driver of the problems you
were getting reports on election day?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, it was our understanding, or it seemed to me
that that list, that process was a major problem, that
there were any number of people who were not on
the rolls. The other major problem that compounded it was
that we found out in one county that the election
(16:58):
office state election office made sure that there were cell
phones given to some of the precincts, but there weren't
any given to the precincts where there were Latino voters
or whether they were.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
Black voters, so that cell phones they could use to
the election.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
That the volunteers who were there or who were hired
to conduct the election, the people who sit there at
the tables, you know, during election checking the rolls and
so on could call up if they had some problem,
and they didn't give cell phones. In some district. They
were very particular about who had a cell phone and
who could call up and who could not. And it
(17:36):
just turned out that the ones who couldn't call up
were the district where there were the problems.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 6 (17:42):
Can you describe the reaction to your report and how
it worked politically, what its impact was politically.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Sometimes when you do reports in government agencies like the
Commission that are investigative and informative, the reports sort of
collect dust. You know, there might be a one day
half story about you did a report, but then after
that you know it served its purpose. It has been
(18:11):
a safety valve for people who want to talk about it,
to complain or do whatever, and you make your recommendations.
But I was determined when I was chair of the
Commission that we would only do reports that were important
and substantive, and that we would make sure that our
recommendations had some kind of teeth and were in conformity
with what we found, and that we would look toward
(18:35):
trying to get some kind of legislation help the Congress
and the President is trying to get some kind of
legislation to remedy whatever problems we found. Okay, so the
report came out, and it did not just gathered us
the Senate, thank Senator Dodd from Connecticut. Chris Dodd was
(18:55):
chair of the committee over there that considered it. I
remember Diane Feinstein was on the committee, a leading member
of it. That committee and its staff held hearings on
the report. We recommended that the federal government pass a
law which set up some kind of election commission and
(19:17):
in fact required the states to change and clean up
their procedures so that we wouldn't have this kind of
purge that took place from this company that ended up
calling people felons who weren't felons and all that sort
of stuff. And that the states looked to see that
polling places are accessible, and that the Congress and also
(19:41):
that discouraged the states from having police officers patrolling up
and down a highway patrolment on the roads leading to
the polling places, which sometimes intimidated people who wanted to
vote and didn't know what was happening. And that all
of these different problems ought to be addressed by legislation.
(20:02):
And I was pleased to see. The Congress passed some
legislation called Help America Vote Act up and the Election
Assistance Commission and appropriated a bunch of money. Sometimes Congress
authorizes things, but they don't appropriate any money to give
to the states in order for them to fix some
(20:23):
of these problems.
Speaker 6 (20:25):
How effective was that legislation and the formation of that organization?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Well after the law passed and the money came and
people's attention went elsewhere. The Election Assistance Commission had no teeth.
I knew that to begin with, because the Constitution in
Article one leaves the way elections are conducted to the
states unless there is discrimination under the fourteenth Amendment, and
(20:53):
then you can file a civil rights complaint, which is
what we had been looking at. But the normal election process,
that is, how do they handle the roles and where
the polling play. All that stuff is under the control
of the states. So the Election Assistance Commission was not
given the authority to force the states to do anything,
(21:15):
because Congress couldn't give them the authority to do that.
But they thought that if they gave them the money
and then monitored how they spent the money, then indeed
they might change some of these procedures, and some of
the states did a lot of them did. They used
the money to buy new equipment and so you wouldn't
have all those chad things again and to use paper ballots,
(21:38):
and they some of them put out policies where they
wouldn't have an overriding police presidence around the roads to elections.
I mean, there were some things actually that actually got
changed as a result.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
You sort of got up this with the answer you
just gave. But do you think there's the fact that
a federal national election is administered by the states in
the federal system that we have is inherently flawed. Do
you think it's possible for a national election to be
fair and fairly administered and equally administered across the country
when each state is in charge of their own operation.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Well, one answer to that question is that we've had
federal elections in which federal officials have involved in corrupt behavior.
So it doesn't necessarily mean that because they're state officials.
So that's one answer. Okay, I think that it's okay
(22:41):
to unless we amend the constitution, which is hard to do,
you can't change that procedure. I do think the answer
is for now for the Congress to give more powers
to the Election Assistance Commission to hold hearings which it
(23:02):
doesn't have, to call people in to monitor them, to
staff them, to show that some people weren't serious about it.
They didn't give their much staff to the commission that
commissioned it, didn't hardly had anybody to do anything. So
just putting some sunlight on what people were doing and
(23:23):
having enough staff to do that, I think would help
the process.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
In twenty eighteen, Florida voters passed an amendment to the
state constitution restoring voting rights to approximately one million Floridians
with felonies on their records. The following year, Republican legislators
passed a law stating that people with felonies cannot cast
a ballot until they've paid off their outstanding fines and
court fees. As a result, most of the one million
(23:54):
people who regained the right to vote back in twenty
eighteen still can't actually do it. Fiasco BUSHVII Gore is
produced by Prolog Projects and district bed by Pushkin Industries.
The show is produced by Madeline kaplan Ulla Culpa, Andrew
(24:15):
Parsons and me Leon nafak We. Had additional editorial support
from Lisa Chase and Daniel Riley. Thanks for listening, We'll
see you next week.
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