Front Burner - Lessons from Bush v. Gore election debacle

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

By the end of election night in 2000, the new president of the United States was not clear. The crucial state of Florida was finally deemed too close to call for either George W. Bush or Al Gore. What followed was 36 days of battles in the courts over ballots, whether or not to recount them and how. In 2020, court battles over the U.S. election have already begun. Today, Fiasco host and Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh on the 2000 U.S. election, and what we can learn from it today.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Happy 2000! So cast your mind back, if you can, to the year 2000.

Santana has not won but two songs in the top ten on the Billboard charts. American Beauty wins Best Picture at the Oscars. Remember that plastic bag? This bag was just dancing with me, like a little kid begging me to play with it. 52 million people tune into the season finale of a new reality show called Survivor. I'm going to tally the votes.

The winner of the first Survivor competition, Rich. Congratulations, Rich. In the headlines. Here in Canada, the death of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his 28-year-old son Justin's eulogy. We knew that we were the luckiest kids in the world that we would have to spend the rest of our lives to work very hard to live up to. Across the border, a little boy from Cuba, Elian Gonzalez, whose months-long international custody battle sparked diplomatic

tensions. He was seized before dawn this morning by federal marshals. I was screaming in English, help me, help me. My God, America, what did you do to this boy? 17 sailors killed in a suicide bombing carried out by al-Qaeda on the USS Cole at port in Yemen. We will find out who was

responsible and hold them accountable. And of course, a U.S. presidential election. Today, America is again forging its future by choosing the man to lead it into the 21st century. After eight years as VP under Bill Clinton, Al Gore was running for the top job for the Democrats. George W. Bush, Texas Governor's son of former President George H.W. Bush, was a Republican candidate. SNL summed up the presidential hopefuls like this, in a sketch mocking one of the debates. Boring.

In his plan, the wealthiest 1% of Americans would receive nearly 50% of the benefits. That's Daryl Hammond as Gore. And stupid. I don't know what that was all about. But I will tell you this. Don't mess with Texas. Will Ferrell as George Bush.

The race was close. The uncounted votes in Broward and Palm Beach counties could allow a change of the lead in the Florida vote. Hello, 911, cardiac arrest unit, please. So close, in fact, that election night 2000 kicked off an unprecedented legal tug of war over the recounting of votes in the state of Florida, a fight that made it all the way to the highest court in the country. This year, the polls show Joe Biden with a pretty good national lead over Donald Trump. According to New York Times and Siena College Poll, Biden is also leading in four key battleground swing states. But the races there are much tighter, especially in Florida, where Biden holds a slim three-point lead. So today,

the fight in Florida, Bush versus Gore, and what happens when the courts decide an election. versus Gore and what happens when the courts decide an election. Because while the 2020 voting isn't done, the race so far has already been intensely litigated, with dozens of court cases fought across the United States. I'm joined by Leon Nafok. His podcast, Fiasco, focused its first season on the Bush versus Gore battle. I'm Jamie Poisson. This is Frontburner. Okay, Leon, so if you happen to be watching American news networks nearly 20 years ago, the night of November 7th, 2000, tell me about the roller coaster ride you would have witnessed. So it was back and forth, back and forth. It was a close election. Everyone knew it was going to be a close election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. This is the kind of election those of us who love politics have been living

for. If you've ever longed for those nights when that you've heard about when people waited late to find out who their leader was, pull up a chair, this may be it. However, it got so close that there were projections being made by the news networks that said initially that Gore was going to win. It turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper. This is a roadblock the size of a boulder to George W. Bush's path to the White House. And then they had to undo that call and basically take it back and say, sorry, it's too close to call. And then they got confident again,

thinking that Bush had won. And so then they called it for Bush. George Walker Bush, the new president of the United States. Bush wins. Florida goes Bush. The presidency is Bush. That's it.

The sun also rises. And then they uncalled that because it seemed, once again, too close to call. We put Florida back in the undecided category. We don't just have egg in our face. We've got omelet all over our suits. Suffice it to say that it all came down to Florida. Florida, which had, you know, a bounty of electoral college votes and was therefore a decisive state for both candidates, college votes and was therefore a decisive state for both candidates.

It could have given either of them the victory, was just so surgically and statistically tied that the networks couldn't make heads or tails of it. And so what you had was a night that never ended. You had people going to bed thinking that, well, I guess I'll find out tomorrow. And then when they woke up the next day, they found out that there was no new president yet. Good evening. Yes, we're still here. And it's still too close to call. I have been to goat ropings and space shots.

And I've covered presidential elections since the 1950s. And I have never seen anything like this. I wouldn't be surprised at this point, if an unidentified spacecraft landed in Nashville and an alien got out and made some speech to Al Gore. It's been that kind of a night. I can't even imagine this. I wasn't really staying up that late to watch US election coverage at the time in 2000. But, you know, I can imagine as a viewer, this is so crazy, right? Like to not know who the president is on election night, to have these two false alarms, like Tom Brokaw is telling you this guy's the president, no, this guy's the president. Right. And I imagine it was so crazy for the candidates too, right? You know, in your podcast, you describe reports that Jeb Bush, George Bush's little brother,

who was governor of Florida at the time, had tears in his eyes when the TV networks called the state for Gore. You just mentioned how important Florida was. And then when the tide had turned and Florida was recalled for Bush, Gore fully called Bush and conceded. Right. And now we know that the vice president plans on making a very similar but brief public statement here. Reports that the vice president is putting some final touches on those remarks. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like it's not like, you know, just the folks at home were misled. I mean, the campaigns were getting, you know, information saying that Bush was after all the winner. And for

the Gore side, obviously, this was a really bitter pill to swallow, because earlier in the evening, they had thought they had brought it home, they thought that they'd won Florida, and it was going their way. And then, as you say, Gore actually called George W. Bush and conceded and said, you know, I'm on my way to give a speech. And he was indeed, you know, in a car, in a motorcade when various people on his team, you know, realized that, in fact, the numbers were not what they had seemed. And they needed to get him off of whatever stage he was about to go up on and make sure he did not publicly concede. Because I think, you know, it was bad enough that he had already made this phone call that had been reported in the news. It would have been so much worse in terms of sort of the next stage of this fight if he had actually gone out, you know, in front of his supporters and said,

I'm sorry, I've lost and I'm going to concede the election to my opponent. So at the end of election night, the race is so close in Florida that by Florida law, there's got to be this automatic statewide recount done by machine. Bush's lead going into that recount is already fewer than 2,000 votes at nearly 6 million cast. This is such a small margin. But then, after the initial machine recount, Bush's lead shrinks to just 327 votes. And so we're into these 36 days of crazy technical, legal, and political wrangling, with the Gore team suing to try to get these manual recounts done, and the

Bush team trying to stop them. This is dominating the headlines. It's being lampooned on late night television. Wanda, how you doing, Wanda? How you think I'm doing? I've been up for 72 hours straight looking at this f***ing map. Regular people, hand-counting ballots, a process rife with fraud, and democratic voodoo mind-reading. Flora, you have to pick one, Fillmore or Ike.

I don't know. Oh, great. Flora's undecided. Now it's time for our in-depth coverage of the Canadian election crisis. Here we go. Yesterday, Liberal incumbent Jean Chrétien won the election for prime minister by a landslide. And today, according to latest reports, he is still the winner of that election. Gorskamp goes to court saying, We want these four districts that seem to have irregularities recounted by hand.

And this is how we learn terms like hanging chads and pregnant chads. The punch hole is called a chad. It is attached to the ballot by four threads. If it had been detached by only one thread, it would not be counted as a vote. Two detachments, maybe. And also perhaps less well-remembered butterfly ballots. And so I asked Leon to look back at what these butterfly ballots were and how basically just really, really bad design came to play a role in this recap.

It's a really extraordinary story. I mean, the important thing to remember about this election is that it was so close in Florida. As you said, it was like a couple hundred votes. You know, overall, it was like basically neck and neck, which meant that every little thing mattered. And so the local election official in Palm Beach County, who was in charge of, you know, commissioning and designing the local ballots that the people in that county were going to use when they went in to vote, she wanted to make sure that the older folks in her in her county could see every name, and there were a lot of names, and so she wanted to make them really big. And the move that she settled on to sort of satisfy

the desire for, you know, the large type was to have what was called a butterfly design, where there were sort of two flaps, you know, some candidates on the left and some candidates on the right. And there were holes in the middle, in between. Many Gore voters say they thought they should punch the hole right below the hole for Bush, but they didn't look to the right. I was looking at Democratic. I saw a hole opposite the Democratic. I did not look for number five and the arrow.

And of course, that is my mistake. However, my vote was stolen. And just, you know, it was badly designed. And so it was really easy for a lot of these older voters who wanted to vote for Al Gore to accidentally punch a ballot, not for Al Gore, who they were intending to vote for, but for Pat Buchanan, who was a third party candidate, you know, not someone who a lot of, you know, older Jewish voters wanted to vote for. He had been, you know, considered

not their candidate. He had, you know, made comments about Jews that they had perceived as anti-Semitic, not a candidate who expected to do well in Palm Beach County. And then come election day, it turns out that Pat Buchanan is cleaning up in Palm Beach County and no one can understand why. And it's because people were accidentally voting for him. Incidentally, Pat Buchanan, the man many of these people revile

and inadvertently voted for, he too says the election was flawed. He believes most of his votes here should have gone to Al Gore. He says the whole thing was inept. This was so wild when I was listening to you tell the story in the podcast. You had all of these great voices of people who at the time were so confused or so upset. These retired Palm Beachers who felt like they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan.

You also found this guy who's an actual rocket scientist and he couldn't even figure out the ballot. Meet Jim Pesce. Yes, he designs rockets. Let me get this straight. You're a rocket scientist, literally, and you had problems. Yeah, I think that was a good old piece of archival tape

from like contemporary coverage because yeah, I mean, people were, people were talking about this at the time. Here's kind of a sad story. I get a call today from my mom. She's all upset. She accidentally voted for Pat Sajak. And the Democrats initially wanted to make an issue out of it,

but they couldn't because there was nothing to be done. I mean, how do you undo something like that? And it was just, I think, really heartbreaking for them because they knew the margin was so razor thin. And if that ballot had been a little bit different, Gore could have won that night, possibly. Now, my wife, she was more upset than I. She was in tears when she came out. She felt she had been disenfranchised. We had people coming here in tears,

saying, I just voted for Pat Buchanan. The results are not the results of the people in Florida. Everybody had a chance to vote. That ballot was out. It was in the papers. They were awesome. I saw it. My 10- to vote. That ballot was out. It was in the papers. They were awesome. Look at the ballot up there. I saw it. My 10-year-old can figure it out. It's so crazy to think about all those little tiny things that could have gone one way or the other. And so I know that there's this back and forth over the recount as it unfolds in Florida.

And, you know, even though we have the example of Palm Beach, which you would think that the Gore side, you know, could get outraged over, it's the Bush side that manages to conjure the rhetoric of outrage, of political urgency. And I think that's pretty well embodied in the so-called Brooks Brothers riot. And can you tell me about what happened there? Absolutely. I mean, and your point is exactly right. I mean, the narrative sort of around what was happening was almost as important as the vote count. I mean, this was like a 36-day marathon where each campaign was trying to shift, you know, public opinion, not because public opinion was going to win the race, but because public opinion made a difference in terms of various court decisions that were being handed down and various, you know, decisions being made by the local election officials who were susceptible to public opinion in the same way all of us, you know, would be in

their situation. And the Brooks Brothers riot, which you just referred to, is definitely the most sort of dramatic example of a PR victory for the Republicans, where they really just came out in full force and channeled outrage essentially to get the outcome they wanted. Stop the fraud! Stop the count! Stop the fraud! Stop the count! What was happening was in Miami-Dade County, there were questions about whether the ballots that had been initially put through a machine had been counted properly, and the Gore team wanted the Miami-Dade votes to be recounted by hand. And so that task, you know, a gargantuan task, fell to the local canvassing board,

which is the technical term for the three-member panel of local officials who are in charge of administering the election. And so these canvassing board members were sitting there counting ballots one by one, examining ballots where maybe it was a little ambiguous, or maybe, like, the hole wasn't punched in all the way through is, you know, a pregnant chat or a hanging chat, as you referred to earlier. And so they're counting and the Republicans are unhappy about it. They know that, you know, Gore is going to do better in Miami if these extra ballots

keep being counted. And so they basically were able to stage a demonstration. extra ballots keep being counted. And so they basically were able to stage a demonstration. You know, there had been like an amassing of activists and sort of protesters outside the building where that recount was taking place. Are we going to have to go and steal this election? No!

It's America! My home sweet home! Go fight! And kind of organically, kind of by design, My home sweet home. Go, Bucks! And kind of organically, kind of by design, the protesters started filtering into the building itself, you know, chanting, saying, I forget the exact slogans now, but it was, you know, in the spirit of stop the vote count, stop the recount, this is a fraud, you know,

elections being stolen by these bureaucrats, you know, hiding behind closed doors. Selective entrance! Selective counting! There were dozens of them, if not hundreds, and they're beating on the glass, they're yelling, and the canvassing board members who are in there counting the votes are getting quite nervous. Republicans even accused a Democrat of stealing a ballot. He put it in his pocket and I started yelling, this guy's got a ballot. This guy's got a ballot. Police escorted Joe Geller from the building for his own protection over what turned

out to be a training ballot. And they end up shutting down the count and saying, you know, we need to take a break here. And in the end, they didn't start up again. And so what ended up happening was they just ended up not doing the manual recount. They went with the original vote totals. And so what you had was, you know, a protest that essentially changed the vote tally. The world is watching. The world is watching. The world is watching. And these are like Republican guys in like collared shirts and braided belts. And they succeed in stopping this recount. It would work.

That's exactly right. And I should have, you know, I should have explained why it was called the Brooks Brothers Riot. It's because, you know, these were by and large people who had flown into Florida from Washington, D.C. A lot of them were like Congress, you know, staffers, people who worked, you know, in the government and came down to sort of be the face of the opposition to this ongoing recount. And yeah, I mean, as one person we talked to put it, you know, who was covering the event, he said, these guys didn't really look like they'd ever been to a protest before.

They were sort of like channeling, you know, the tactics they'd seen in old civil rights documentaries, but that you could tell they weren't quite comfortable with it. Yeah, you know, it was... In my khaki pants. Exactly, exactly, yeah. The press is in! The press is in! Let us in! Let us in! Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's so striking hearing the difference in approaches, right? So you have like the Brooks Brothers riot on one side, and then there are some people who are protesting on behalf of the Gore side. But, you know, for example, when the civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson,

tried to organize protests rallying behind the Democratic cause. At this point, we do not know who won the election because all votes have not been counted. Gore asks him to stop. And so why does he do that? asks him to stop. And so why does he do that? There was like a consistent and I would say persistent feeling on the gore side that, you know, we need to stay calm and we need to call for civility and we need to, you know, treat this as a serious matter, not as a game and not as a, you know, as a political sort of street fight. Like they wanted to be, I think, respectful of the process in a way that probably ultimately didn't do them any favors in

terms of winning the election. And, you know, and I think some of the Gore staffers, like Ron Klain, who was sort of his main man on the recount that now is working with the Biden campaign, would, I think, contest that and say, no, we like fought as hard as we could. And I think that both could be true. I think they did fight as hard as they could. But at the same time, they were sort of bound by some rules, I think, that they felt obligated to abide by, that maybe the Republicans didn't, you know, think were as, you know, high a priority when what they wanted was to win. they wanted was to win. You know, of course, this fight that had been playing out in the lower courts in Florida, it makes its way to the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. And

these judges who are supposed to be above politics are asked to make a final call on the recount, whether or not it can happen. And that will, in essence, decide the US presidential election and their decision. To be fair, it doesn't exactly radiate that apolitical ideal of the court, hey? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, people point to the Bush v. Gore decision, which, you know, favored Bush five to four, which was the, you know, the breakdown on the court at the time, as you know, as a turning point in a way, because it laid bare sort of the court's fundamentally political nature. There's no way to separate, you know, your legal reasoning from

politics, or so it's so it would seem, you know, based on this decision and many others. It was just like a wake upup call. And I think it showed that when there's political power at stake, it's very hard to separate ideological kinship from, you know, what one thinks is the right thing. You know, the Bush v. Gore decision is just like one of the most widely criticized decisions in Supreme Court history, not because it was, not because the conclusion was wrong, but because the legal reasoning was so sort of undercooked. You know, there was, there's a sense that like, the arguments that the conservative majority made didn't really hold water, and that if they had just stayed out of it, and had let the recount that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered

complete and play out, everything, you know, would have been fine. But the Supreme Court, you know, made the argument that this, you know, statewide recount that the again, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered had to stop. They have said that the state Supreme Court ratified the uneven treatment of voters, the standards for what chat, what what ballots count and what ballots don't count were inconsistent between counties. And it's just, you know, it's just that it's a tough decision to explain in a legal, in terms of legal reasoning. It's just, it's a tricky one.

And the big tell, I think, that people point to is that in the decision, the court said, like, this is not precedent. We don't want this decision to be considered precedent, which kind of tells you, like, they didn't really think it was legally all that sound. I was really struck. You had this interview with Justice Stevens, one of the justices about the decision to stop the recount, the manual recount. And he wrote this really scathing dissent in it, and he read part of it to you. Time will one day heal the wound to that conference that will be inflicted by today's decision.

One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. I respectfully dissent. lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups.

One of the reasons we were so interested in looking back at the 2000 U.S. election is because now, 20 years on, tomorrow's election may be one of the most litigated in American history. There have been fights in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over the cutoff date for counting mail ballots, in Ohio over ballot drop boxes, in North Carolina over witness requirements. Some of this election litigation, it could continue to play out after Tuesday. And so I asked Leon to reflect on this moment. Well, it's so hard to predict what will happen. I mean, I think that as I've kind of been trying to process the news through the prism of my reporting and research on the 2000 election,

what I am scared of is that we will see a Florida situation in more than just Florida. You know, we could see these gnarled legal bureaucratic fights unfold in multiple states at the same time. And one of the things that struck me about the Florida story, the Florida recount story, is that it was really hard to follow in real time. I mean, for just regular voters, you know, following from home, it was a really complicated story. And it was nearly impossible to sort of stay on top of it and understand the intricacies of it. And that's just one state. I mean, if you see close vote totals in multiple states where there are plausible arguments to be made in court by one or the other candidate, you could see, you know, Florida times two or times five or times 10. And it's just

going to be impossible to make heads or tails of it as it's happening. And I think whenever that's the case, there's a danger of people getting away with stuff and just bad decisions being made that people aren't held accountable for. And it really, you know, it scares me that we could have a situation where both campaigns are not only looking at 2000 as a blueprint, but, you know, they've been preparing for potential litigation for months now. They know that this could come down to the wire and could require lawsuits and another 36-day battle or longer. One of the, I think, defining features of the 2000 fight was that neither side was all that prepared. Like, they were just kind of

improvising as they went along. The idea of both sides, you know, going in planning, you know, this kind of litigation, planning these kind of contingency strategies, it could just get really ugly, I think. Right, right. You talk about in your podcast in the 2000s, like, they're all just scrambling to get on a plane. They're taking like anybody who's a lawyer, throwing them on a plane and sending them to Florida to try fight this. And yeah, you know, these guys now they're already in court, like the US Supreme Court just ruled that mail-in ballots will be counted if they're received within three days of the election, even if they don't have a legible postmark, which was, you know, a loss for state Republicans who wanted only ballots received by election day. So

they're already fighting this out in court. What lessons do you think can be learned from the 2000 election that each side might take away from how the fight unfolded? I mean, I think it kind of comes down to like, how badly do you want to win? And you know, how much of a stomach do you have for being accused of like hypocrisy, for example, like one thing that really struck me in the 2000 story was that, you know, in some cases, the Republicans would take the position that you have to follow the letter of the law. So like, if someone doesn't sign their name on a ballot, or if someone doesn't punch a hole all the way through, like, sorry, that's, that's just not a legitimate vote. And you can't count it. That's what the law says. But then like,

when it came to ballots, you know, that maybe they thought were more likely to go for their candidate, they were willing to take the opposite position and say, you know, for example, with military overseas absentee ballots, they would take the opposite position and say, sorry, like, you know, these are ballots from our, from our men and women, you know, fighting for us overseas, like, so what if they didn't sign in the right place? Like, it's a vote. And women, you know, fighting for us overseas, like, so what if they didn't sign in the right place? Like, it's a vote. And so, you know, they were able to kind of play both sides in different courtrooms in different counties. And that worked to their advantage. And I think I don't want to sort of give like strategic advice, because it's not at all my role. But I think in terms of trying to understand what happens, like as consumers of the

news, as people watching from home, I think we should expect both sides to be opportunists and do whatever they can to win. I think like even the Democrats, I think chastened by the 2000 experience will be sort of like armed to the teeth, let's say, legally speaking, and ready kind of to do whatever it takes. Regardless, you know, you mentioned before the idea that in 2000, the Supreme Court bigfooted the state here. It is possible that that could happen again, right? Like these kind of debates could be heading to the Supreme Court after this election. Trump has explicitly

said that he's appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's replacement now before the election because he thinks... This scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam. This scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation. If you get that, I don't know that you'd get that. I think it should be 8-0 or 9-0. So, you know, three of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices actually worked on the Bush-Gore legal battle on Bush's side. And how would you compare this present- day Supreme Court to the one, you know, making the big call in 2000? What's different or maybe the same today? Unfortunately, I think that the Supreme Court doesn't have the same stature that it did before

2000 as a, you know, institution that's above politics. I don't think people really see it that way anymore. I think after the, you know, Merrick Garland seat was held open by the Republicans during, you know, the last few months of Obama's term, and even actually, honestly, after Bush v. Gore, like, I think people just sort of gave up on the idea of the Supreme Court as this neutral arbiter that's going to make the right decision regardless of politics. I think back in 2000, maybe there was was more of a naive expectation that the Supreme Court could be counted on to adjudicate a highly partisan fight like this in a fair way. But I just think we're beyond that now. I think we're all more cynical. And if it comes down to the Supreme

Court, I just with a 6-3 majority for the Republicans, I just don't think anyone's gonna even bat an eye when it goes their way, even if the legal, you know, arguments aren't necessarily there. I just don't think it'll be that much of a shock, unfortunately. And before we go today, I just want to ask you one last question, one last comparison between 2000 and today. So of course, there was the so called Brooks Brothers riot that we talked about. And there were big protests at Bush's inauguration back then. But, you know, it does strike me that the United States is a far more polarized environment now than it was even just 20 years ago. And so I wonder how you think the American people are

going to react if they find themselves in a similar situation here, if it ends up looking like another election is going to be, in essence, decided by the courts. the 2000 election happened. And I remember walking down the hall and saying to my math teacher, like, we were just making small talk. And I said something like, I just want to know who the president is. I don't even care which one wins. I just want to know. I want this to be over. And I sort of remember this feeling of like fatigue that everyone had, like, I just want this to be over and have an answer. You're not going to have that this time. I think people are going to be really, really invested in the outcome of this race. It feels so high stakes. And I just don't think people are going to allow themselves to kind of disengage in that way. You know, the emotions I think are going to run really high. And I think fear and suspicion is going to be running really high about operatives trying to

stage unfair interventions in specific counties to swing the vote total. I mean, it's just like the paranoia is going to be off the charts. And maybe for good reason, you know, I don't know. But I just think it's going to be a really tumultuous period. If we have 36 days like we had in 2000, it's not going to be that sort of like post-90s, like feeling like, ah, it'll be fine either way. I think the stakes just are so much higher with this race than they were back then, or than it seemed back then, I suppose I should say. It turned out they were pretty damn high even then.

But, you know, at the time it felt like it was kind of okay either way. And I just don't think people are going to feel that way this year. Okay. Leon, Naphak, thank you so much for this really fascinating conversation and for coming on to the podcast. We're really appreciative. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. All right, so some disturbing news from Canada

before we say goodbye today. A 24-year-old man has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder after allegedly attacking seven people with a sword in Quebec City while dressed in a medieval outfit on Halloween night. At a press conference on Sunday, Quebec City police said the stabbing suspect attacked victims at random. Police also said the suspect is not associated with any terrorist organization. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.