It Could Happen Here - How to Steal An Election

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Mia walks through how George Bush stole the 2000 electionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Naked Affid here. It's the last episode that I'm recording this year. Yeah, I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to tell you a story of the Republican Party using extensive political violence in an attempt to manipulate an election to install their unelected presidential candidate as dictator of the United States. And by this, of course, I am referring not to the 2020 election, but to the election of 2000.

but to the election of 2000. Okay, so for those of you who do not remember this story, and this is, okay, I was like three when this was happening, but weirdly, I have a very, very, this is legitimately one of my first memories, is just I have the words engraved into my mind hanging chads. And so we will get to what exactly that is but the 2000 election was one of the most chaotic elections in in the history of the united states now the u.s has a long history of really really weird elections i mean you know from from the

perspective of sort of like is the u. representative of democracy, I think there's a pretty good argument that no election until like after the Civil Rights Act is even sort of a legitimate election. But insofar as you consider elections to be legitimate, which – okay. But the US is no stranger to someone i winning an election than not taking office there are in fact there are if you go back into american history there are two different elections that are called the corrupt bargain um there's uh john quincy adams in i think it was yes in 1824 makes this really really weird alliance with uh the original american political sleazeball henry clay to get himself installed as president although that that that's an election that's like truly an election where there are no heroes where it's it's john

quincy adams uh henry clay uh allying to bring down Andrew fucking Jackson. So, you know, no, no heroes there. their president in office after a truly genuinely wild set of voting results happens where like all of the votes are in a box and the two parties are fighting over like who's going to count the votes because the guy who counts the votes from like the box is the person who's going to determine who wins the election and so there's this whole negotiated thing where the the 1800s like racist southern democrats are like okay it will give you'll give you this election if you promise to pull troops out of the South. So, okay, American elections have always been sort of more fraudulent than people give them credit for. But the 2000 election, even by the standards of an American election, is some bullshit.

So let's go back to the origin of the story. election is some bullshit. So let's go back. Let's go back to the origin of the story. The year is 2000. For the last time in human history, humanity has taken collective action to stop an impending catastrophe, having by the heart-rending labor of a bunch of sysadmins, including a guy that I knew growing up who spent fucking New Year, who literally spent New Year's Eve until the bell ring, like basically in a closet with a bunch of computers at his job trying to make sure White UK wouldn't happen. But, you know, we did it, actually. We actually did it. There was human collective action to stop a major catastrophe from happening. And Al Gore,

a Democrat who claims to have invented the internet, is running against Harvard educated Harvard and actually Yale educated oil man cosplaying as a cowboy whose name is George Bush. And I, God, I don't know. I don't I feel like people have kind of forgotten how. Really, genuinely sleazy George Bush was like he has this he has this sort of public, like, you know, one of the reasons he wins elections is he has his public images, like the guy who, you know, like everyone, like he, he, he's the presidential candidate who you'd want to have a beer with. But again, like literally everything from he's like public mannerisms down to like the minutia of his accent to like the stupid cowboy hat that he wears.

All of this, this is bullshit, right? This is a fucking Harvard guy. And all of this is, you know, completely and intricately manufactured by a set of like very, very, very like sleazy, but incredibly ruthless and efficient Republican political operatives. Now, George Bush's father is George H.W. Bush, who was the first and only director of the CIA to become president. So, yeah, Bush is running on this sort of neoconservative alliance of Texas oil men, evangelical hardliners, and weapons contractors um the weapons contractors part uh winds up being incredibly relevant when 9-11 happens and both bush and dick his co uh what's it called vice presidential uh i guess candidate at the time but his vice presidential selection dick cheney who is like dick cheney like saying that he's like the physical human embodiment of the military industrial complex is underselling how closely tied Dick Cheney is to the military industrial complex.

And, you know, like this is this is part of the reason why the war in Iraq happens, because, again, like this entire coalition is just like it is. It is the it is is the sort of height of the, the, the military petrodollar coalition, just a, a, a coalition of pure evil, like fueled by war profits and homophobia. And, but, you know, part, part of, part of what's been happening in, in this entire period is this is, this is the year after the battle of Seattle. The anti-globalization movement hasn't been smashed. But again, this other thing is this is pre-911, right? This is a very, very short period of time where, like, in between the Battle of Seattle and 9-11, where American politics are very, very, very weird,

and you get another thing that we don't really have now, but from the 90s until about 9-11 kind of existed, which was that there was a election if he hadn't just like given up. But yeah, you know, one of the sort of products of this is that the Green Party is actually a real thing in 2000 in a way that they're kind of not right. And this has been this sort of enfolding of a bunch of left wing social movements into a just absolutely disastrous attempt to enter party politics. But they pull, you know, and this is the thing that no one has ever heard the end of, but they pull a bunch of votes into Ralph Nader in Florida, which winds up being a big deal. But the product of this is that this election

is on a knife's edge. Both sides of this election are unbelievably close. The entire election comes down to Florida. Now, the problem with the entire election coming down to Florida is that the American electoral system is a fucking joke. It is a disaster.

It is a genuine embarrassment. The United States is a country that has more resources than, like, it has enough resources that, like like Genghis Khan would weep. Like it has a genuinely unfathomable amounts of resources. And it's election system is basically run by a bunch of weird dipshit, like party, if like local, like a weird patchwork of like completely underfunded and overworked local government officials who never have real budgets

and who just spends like two months not sleeping with their like three co-workers trying to make the elections work and this is really weird because like most places on earth that have elections um there's like you know a national thing that sort of does the elections in the u.s like no no it relies heavily on volunteers it's just like this weird patchwork quilt of stuff and florida being florida a bunch of stuff goes very wrong very quickly um there there's two very famous ballot problems the most famous of which is hanging chads so okay okay what what for what is a hanging chat for people who've forgotten or people who you know weren't alive then which i realize is i man the fact that the fact that i have co-workers who are not alive for hanging chads is a really really disturbing thought but okay so what is a hanging chat um the answer is

that in florida the way this ballot works is that you have to physically punch holes in your ballot and you know you punch a hole in the place like it okay so today right when you fill out a ballot you'll have to like fill in a square with a pencil. In Florida, you have to hole punch that square. This is maybe the worst ballot design I can possibly imagine. And it goes terribly wrong. A bunch of these hole punches, basically, don't actually remove all the paper. And there are so many ways ways so many ways that this gets

fucked up the the hanging chad is the most famous one that hanging so the a chad basically it's the piece of paper that when you punch the thing with like the hole punch it's supposed to like it's the paper that comes out of the hole right a hanging A hanging Chad is when you do the hole punch thing, but the Chad is still connected to the piece of paper by like one corner. But, but, but again, less, lest you think there's only one way that these ballots get fucked up. No, no, no, no, no. There's, there are like,

there are an unfathomable number of ways that these ballots don't punch correctly. There are swinging door chads, there's tri-chads, there's dimple chads, there's pregnant chads. It's unbelievable. And a bunch of people's votes just don't get counted because these ballots, the reason they're doing these whole bunch of ballots is that these are, you know, this is supposed to be like the fancy new voting technology, right?

And the new voting technology is these voting machines. And the way the voting machine works is basically the voting machine can check if if if there's a hole there and if there's a hole in the paper then it counts you as it counts it as the vote but if the entire chat hasn't been punched out it won't count your vote this is a problem and there's another problem uh and and that problem is the butterfly ballot so the butterfly ballot was origin is this ballot they're using in florida that was originally designed to help elderly voters um it's supposed to be the the the goal of the ballot is to have larger font sizes to make it more accessible for people which this is good right like okay i i i support i support accessible

design it's pretty accessible design for voting The problem is this ballot is designed like shit. The way it works is there's a two-page ballot with like a crease in the middle, right? It's kind of like a book, right? It's like you unfold a book in the middle of the ballot, you know, and on both of these pages, there are like the different candidate names and parties. The problem is in order to pick a candidate,

you have to punch one of these sort of circles, but these circles are in a line down the middle of the crease of the ballot, right? So you have candidates on both. You should Google what these look like because it's kind of hard to explain. But basically what's happening is that there are different party names on each

side of the ballot but then in order to pick which party you're voting for you have to pick for a specific hole that's supposed to be next to the like the candidate you supported in the in the middle of the page the problem is these are all in a line right they're all in a straight line which means that two candidates can be like across across each other on the same page or on opposite pages. And then there's two holes that are like right next because because the holes are both in the middle of the ballot. Right. So you have these situations where, for example, for and this is the one that's important inside of that, there's like two lines. And then there's like it says Al Gore and Lieberman in it. Right. And inside of those two lines in the middle of the page,

there are two holes. And one of these holes votes for Gore. But the other one of those holes is for the candidate on the other side of the page, which is Reform Party candidate, crypto-fascist ghoul, Pat Buchanan. And the result of this is as people start looking through these things, cannon and the result of this is as people start looking through these things uh pat buchanan has a bunch of voters from democratic party strongholds and like also particularly like a bunch of like democratic catholic voters vote for buchanan and buchanan himself is like there's no way this is

real like buchanan's like you know he he's he's a figure we'll probably, like, one day do a, like a, we'll probably talk about more on this podcast. Yeah, there's a Behind the Bastards episode about him. He is a fucking Nazi. He sucks ass. But he's also, so he's from a kind of evangelical who, like, really, really, really fucking hates Catholics. And, you know, so there's a bunch of these Catholic, like, Democratic voters who voted for this guy, and everyone's like, what the fuck happened here?

The thing that happened here is all these people got confused. And, yeah, so this is a disaster on 100 million levels. And when we come back from ads, we will talk about the product of all of this, which is not good welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So on election night, the media starts to call Florida for Gore based on exit polling. But they start getting calls from Republican political operatives saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. It's actually too close to call. And the initial count from Florida

has the Republican Party ahead. But when I say the Republican Party is ahead, they're ahead by like 1,600 votes. and so this triggers a mandatory recount but and this this is another problem with this right we we've gone through at length all of the problems with these ballots right the recall that they do is a recall using the voting machines and those voting machines are uh guess what the ones that are if, if you rerun a fucked up Chad ballot through the same voting machine, it's going to get a fucked up result. So, okay, so they run this again,

and the difference in votes comes down to like 500 votes. And at this point, Gore's campaign requests a manual recount. They want people to look at the ballots by hand and figure out who people actually voted for because these machines are a fucking shit show. But in any kind of sort of like, you know, an even remotely competent or sane, like democratic political system, there would be a bunch of people doing this like they're you know like when when an election happens there would be just a very very large number of people mobilized to make sure that it runs smoothly there's not there's like a bunch of like unbelievably overworked and underpaid some of you are people who also people who are just fucking volunteers

like a bunch of just random, like unbelievably exhausted, like local election officials who have to do this recount. And this is where the Bush campaign sees their chance to steal the election. So the election happens on November 7th. And on November 11th, the Bush campaign sues to stop the recount. Now, we talked on a previous episode a while back about the Democrats, how they have this line in the 2000s about how they're part of the, quote, reality-based community and how this is a reflection of – if you look at the whole quote, which is from a Republican political strategist, what they're saying here is that what's happening is that the Democrats observe reality while the Republicans set out to define reality. And this is the moment, this election, is where we get to see how the dynamic – we get to really first see these principles in action. I'm going to read from the Washington Post here. I'm going to read from the Washington Post here. Unlike the Gore campaign, which focused on filing motions in Florida courts to keep the recount going in key counties like Miami-Dade,

the Bush campaign waged a broader, costlier effort on multiple fronts, Blakeman said. It was a three-pronged effort, he said. It was a court battle, it was a recount organization, and it was also a PR effort. Because, although the voting effort ended, the campaign never did until there was a definitive winner so what happens here is republicans start this massive media blitz to convince people that bush actually won the election and this this is a really really important moment in sort of american history because it's one of the things that solidifies um it's one of the things that solidifies sort of like owning the libs, for example, is like a major point in – is like one of the key focal points of Republican politics. And this is eventually going to consume like all of their politics, right, until we – when we get to sort of like now, right, where that's like owning the libs is the only thing this is about.

like owning the libs is the only thing this is about. You know, this, this had owning the libs is kind of like, it's, it's been a part of Republican politics for a long time, but this is where we really start to see a sort of consuming everything. And okay.

If you look at their, like, like what they're saying by modern standards, it is incredibly weak shit, right? This is like, this is a culture that is just emerged from the 1990s. Nobody has invented real posting yet,

but it is real on the lib stuff like they have this whole campaign where they call the goy liberman campaign sore loser man and everyone has like sore loser man hats and like they have all these like printed signs and like t-shirts and they're selling merch and you know and so you know they're running basically an op and they're running an op to convince everyone that like, no, actually, we've legitimately won this election and it's over. And the recounts just people being butthurt. They lost. And this is where things get really, really weird.

So in Miami Dodd, where there's a manual recount going on. A bunch of protesters in fancy suits show up and start screaming at election workers. Now, if this was the old Democratic Party machine, like LBJ would have personally pushed six of these guys out a window and the recount would have been run by like 60 of the burliest dudes in the entire Chicago mob. But this is the incredibly decrepit 2000 Democratic Party who have replaced all their mob guys with consultants. And these people legitimately, like, you know, they believe in the rules and the norms and the process. And the result of this is that Bush literally destroys the entire United States and I think in like irrevocably damaged, like the entirety of the of, you know, like whatever is left of the American Democratic system. So how this is achieved.

Back in Miami-Dade, this Democratic Party operative is seen walking around the recount area with a ballot. Now, this is a blank ballot, right? This guy is going to see, he's going with an election official to go see if he can replicate how the Hayden Chaz stuff happens to prove that this is what's going on. But the Republicans see this guy and they immediately start screaming

about how the Democrats are stealing the election. And they beat the shit out of this guy. And just a full-on riot starts in this government building. And it works. The recount stops. The election workers are terrified. The recount, yeah, like everything stopped for the day.

They can't do anything. And the next day, the recount is fully stopped. It never resumes. And the Republicans are stunned by this. They assume that, like, you know, the political operatives doing the rioting, we the rioting were going to face some opposition to the Democrats on the ground for literally assaulting and intimidating a bunch of election workers in order to stop votes from being counted. nothing. There's no resistance at all. Here's a quote from Douglas Hay, who is a Republican political operative. He's one of the organizers of the Brooks Brothers riot, who he tried to do a redemption arc in the media in 2020 to sort of like be like, oh, I was part of the Brooks Brothers riot, but even I think the stop the steal stuff is bad, which like, I think my man doth protest too much. Here's the quote.

I still don't understand how it was that we completely outmatched the Democrats, Hayes says. And this is how Bush wins the election. The Supreme Court, which again, it should also be known the Supreme Court is staffed by a bunch of George H.W. Bush appointees, eventually hears the case and decides that the constitution says that the winner the winner has to be declared by a certain time so there's no time for a recount and they have the election to bush and this is achieved and this is possible because of the brooks brothers riot and the brooks brothers right is what this whole sort of republican opera thing comes to be known because they're all wearing brooks brothers. Now, okay, there are a lot of

people involved in this riot who are at the core of modern Republican politics. Yeah, Neil Gorrich and Amy Coleman Barrett, and I think there's actually one other person the Republicans have elevated to senior office. There are multiple people on the Supreme Court today who were on the Bush legal team when they were doing this. And there's also the question of the extent to which roger stone is involved if you ask roger stone he claims to have organized literally this entire thing um now other people who were involved with it claimed that roger stone was like fucked off at a hotel somewhere else and didn't was just sort of around and didn't actually organize it but either way this set a precedent for how you can rig an election which is if you if you can seize a majority on the supreme court with sort of like you know you can put your sort

of loyal minions there and then you can have an initial count of an election that look that that that looks like it's favoring you even if that's not actually true if you then have a an initial count of an election that says that you win and then you can stop and then you were able to stop votes from being counted uh from november until january you will win the election. That is the precedence that was installed by the 2000 election. And if you look at the Stop the Steal campaign, this is exactly what Trump is trying to do. And literally,

Roger Stone is also trying to do this, right? This is what Stop the Steal is. You can find Trump talking about this months before the election, right? This is why he was trying to do his whole thing about the mail-in ballots, because he and Roger Stone and sort of all the political operatives who are involved in the circles were like, okay, so we know that a bunch of Democrats are going to do mail-in ballots because of COVID, because they don't want to be there at the ballots. They know that the initial count is going to favor them. And I think people have forgotten this, but if you remember the night of the election in 2020, I remember like even a bunch of my friends

who were like people who were, you know, like fairly serious, like, I don't know, politics, no words, people who were really deeply invested in politics, like thought that Trump had won the election because what would have been counted on that night was just the sort of initial, it wasn't counting the mail-in ballots.

And so yeah, the plan was just to delegitimate mail-in ballots in the eyes of sort of the, well, mostly the Republican base, but like sort of the American populace as a whole and then have a bunch of people physically assault these centers to get them to stop, the places where these votes assault these centers to get them to stop.

The places where these votes are being counted, to get them to stop the count. And it doesn't work. And it doesn't work, I think, partially because... Yeah, there's a few things. One of the things is that... You know, you can't... If you're going to do a play play like this you have to run it like you it it you you are relying on the sort of physical intimidation of the court workers but mostly what you need to

do is make sure that it's stuck in a court fight and the problem is that like the the sort of modern like trump based people like they don't have any competent lawyers so ruda giuliani is like trying to do this shit or whatever but like that guy i don't know that guy may have known what a law was in like 1973 but his brain has been just melted by like inhaling cigar smoke and truly copious amount of drugs so you know they're not they're not really able to sort of pull this off but bush is and the result of this is the american reaction to 9-11 is the war in Iraq is basically the sort of complete annihilation of. Like the con like this is slightly an exaggeration, but like the concept of freedom in the US, like the ability for you not to be constantly surveilled, the ability for you to like you know live live in a society in which there's like every single thing you do isn't being monitored by a thousand different kinds of police stations who are all sharing your tweets so they can fucking grab people out off of the road and fucking unmarked vans

right like that's all stuff that is a specific product of the sort of kind of fascism that the bush administration deploys and they're able to do this because they just straight up stole an election. And now we all sort of just live in the permanent afterlife of the Brooks Brothers riot. This is what January 6th was. This is what Stop the Steal is. And it's what the modern Republican Party is. So yeah, happy holidays, everyone. I hope you have a good new year and inshallah we will destroy these fascist Republican bastards and make sure that none of them ever get to do this again. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.