You're Wrong About - The 2000 Election

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

Mike tells Sarah how a close election and an even closer Supreme Court decision established the political template we're still living with today. Digressions include quarks, Ouija Boards and (sorry) moral philosophy. The "lemonade theory" turns out to be less fun than it sounds.  Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I don't want to drink with my politicians. I don't want to have fun politicians. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we talk about the stories that were confusing all of the grownups back when you were a kid. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. My name is Sarah Marshall and I am a writer and residence at the Black Mountain Institute. Although when this episode comes out, I will be doing a semi-professional dog sitting gig in Nova Scotia because that is my other profession. Double dipping. I'm a triple threat. I'm a podcaster, a lyric essayist, and a dog sitter.

And today we're talking about the 2000 election and the protracted aftermath. Are we going to call this recount 2000 because I think that we should call it something 2000? Because remember how in the year 2000 everything was called something 2000? Yeah. 2000 was like the late 90s version of a go-go in the 60s, I think. And in the 60s it would have been recount a go-go because it just went on forever. I was 12 years old when this happened and it was the first election that I was really cognizant of. We lived in Honolulu at the time, my family, and there was a guy in our neighborhood. He had a wall around his house and he had spray painted on it. Gore concede already and I was like, this is weird. This is like

grown-ups are tagging their own walls with political, not hate messages, but like things are getting a little bit escaped from New York is what I remember feeling about all that. That's what I remember too, just how it felt very banana republic. Okay, here's what I remember. It was election night. Al Gore thought he had won and I remember watching the returns coming in. It came down to Florida in some way and I remember that they were recounting the votes by hand and that there were a ton of jokes about chads. All anyone talked about was chads and hanging chads and the different kinds of chads because they were like the corks of this election. He can have like a charm cork and a up, down, charm, strange, top,

bottom. Yeah, and I remember specifically Gore at some point did the gentlemanly thing when he really shouldn't have and was like, I can see it. I give up. I'm a human being and maybe if I act honorably, I will inspire the other side to do so. And then I also remember there being obviously a lot of conversation about to what degree Ralph Nader was culpable in all this. Oh God, yeah. I want to skip all that. Okay. We can do Ralph Nader in the future. It'll be our least listened to episode ever. We're finally going to have a less popular one than Exxon Valves. Yeah, it just, I mean, I think it's the beginning. It's like the first time we really had that debate, right? Because presidential elections typically are not that close. You could make

the argument that we had no idea that 600 votes were going to be the deciding factor. But okay, but take us back because why was the section close race? And I remember the rhetoric around it being that like the great Al Gore burn, I can't remember who said this, but it was quoted in a David Foster Wallace piece, someone called him amazingly lifelike. I mean, like every election, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking of this one. And there's a lot of theories of what Gore should have done differently. The other thing to know about this election is that Florida was not the only race that was close. There were five states where the margin of error was less than 1%. There were actually recounts in Oregon and

Wisconsin as well as Florida. Wow. One of the things that Gore gets criticized for quite a bit is that he lost his home state of Tennessee. And that's kind of seen as this humiliating loss. He was a senator for Tennessee for 16 years and was pretty well liked. And then he ends up losing the state. What that really shows is not necessarily that he was such a bad campaigner. It's really the fact that Democrats cannot compete in the South. This election is the culmination of the Republican Party becoming the party of Southern whites, essentially. Right. But that this was like a crucial interval, right? Because Clinton was able to win as a Southern Democrat and Carter was able to win as a Southern Democrat. And that that essentially

doesn't exist the way it once did. All of the cleavages that we see now, this is maybe their first appearance because one of the things that shows up in the political science literature from after this election is that lots of these gaps were showing up. So this was the first election in which the poor and the rich had a 14 point difference in voting behavior. Churchgoers and non-churchgoers had a 25% gap. The country had really shifted underneath this very popular Democratic president. Once that was gone and we had a not that charismatic Republican and a not that charismatic Democrat, it really was like, what are the parties going to look like in the future? And this race established that template. Yeah. And it's like

there was this big crack up and we're all standing on these different ice flows culturally and they started drifting apart from each other and they've been drifting farther and farther. And now we're kind of shouting distance away and we're like, hey, I hate you. Yeah, basically. Also Gore made a series of mistakes, pretty big mistakes. They say, first of all, Bill Clinton at the time had an over 60% approval rating and Gore deliberately didn't bring Clinton out on the trail with him. He wanted to distance himself. He also identified Joe Lieberman as his vice president and Joe Lieberman at the time was the most famous for being one of the first Democrats to criticize Bill Clinton. So Gore was doing this whole thing that he wanted

to appeal to the center. He wanted to appeal to the Al nearby right wing. So his entire campaign was built around kind of convincing Republicans to come back to him. Also everyone hated Joe Lieberman. They call him in the political science literature, the only person in American politics less charismatic than Al Gore. Right. Al Gore is like, I have the charisma of a paper clip. Who can I choose as a running mate? Someone with the charisma of a staple. I love reading the academic literature on this versus like the Newsweek stories in that the academic literature also notes that Bush ran a pretty shitty campaign too. I mean, he was terrible in the debates. I mean, he named Dick Cheney as his vice president, who's also not exactly exuding charisma. So

we tend to look back at elections through the lens of who won them. You know, we find genius things that the winner did and blunders that the loser did, but it looks actually like both campaigns were pretty mediocre. I mean, it's very familiar, right? We're forced to choose between two things that we don't really want. Yes. You know, if every day someone's like, you can have a $14 tuna sandwich or a $15 chicken sandwich, you're on Amtrak and you have to buy one of these two sandwiches. Eventually you're just like, fine, fine, tuna. Yeah. So our story begins on election night because what we need to know is it's neck and neck. Another weird thing that this election invented was blue Democrats and red Republicans. Those were not the case

before then. Really? Yeah. But the network started doing these, you know, there's like live HD screens and touch screens and stuff that they do now. Yeah. This was the first election where they had the technology to do that, like this live reporting and real time and exit polls and all this. So this is the beginning of a lot of our media election night or a boros? Yes, totally. This becomes decisive because around 9pm, the networks call Florida for Gore and then they pull back Gore's victory. So the state becomes blue and then it goes back to gray and then it's gray for a couple hours as the votes are coming in. And then there's somebody working at Fox News who's like a political chief, whatever guy called John Ellis, who is, you know, calling local

election officials. He essentially makes the judgment call at 216am to call Florida for Bush. It turns out later, and this sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, but like it's in New Yorker stories and Jeffrey Tubin's book and everything else. He's George Bush's cousin who happens to be working at Fox News at this time. Oh, and so it's because of a media call and not because of a poll call that Florida gets called for Bush. I mean, this is the thing. Yeah. So everything in journalism is a judgment call, right? What you put on the front page, when you call an election. These are all adult human beings making these calls. And so this guy, John Ellis, within Fox News decides that the evidence in Florida is good enough to call Bush as the winner. So Fox News announces that Bush is

the winner. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN all say that Bush is the winner of Florida. Yikes. It just shows the extent to which they're not really doing their own analysis. They're just kind of following each other. Well, listen, the conspiracy theorists do have a point. That makes me want to be like, yeah, they're all lemmings because they are. Yeah. After Florida is called for Bush, Gore calls Bush to concede the election. They have a little chat. He's in the car on the way to his rally location to give his concession speech. This is like three in the morning. When one of his aides says, hang on a second, results from Florida are still coming in and the lead is actually narrowing. So one of the weird things about this is on the night of the

election, one of the counties in Florida has some sort of glitch in their system and they're reporting negative 16,000 votes for alcohol. So somehow this glitch causes 16,000 of his votes to disappear and makes it look closer than it is. So again, on his way to concede publicly and give his concession speech, he then calls Bush again and says, sorry, I'm not conceding anymore. Oh, you can unconcede. I didn't know that. I thought it was like a ceremonial thing where once you do it, you can't undo it. I mean, this is basically what Bush says to him. Bush says no mulligans. This is according to a Vanity Fair article that comes out like two years later. Gore calls Bush and says, circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you.

It sounds like the state of Florida is too close to call. Such an Al Gore thing to say. And then Bush says, are you saying what I think you're saying? Are you calling back to retract your concession? And then Gore says famously, he says, you don't have to be snippy about it. He said that. I love that. That's like so see more skinner, isn't it? Then Bush says, well, you know, the network's called Florida for me. And you know, my brother, who's the governor of Florida, also says that I'm leading in the state. And Gore says your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this. Click. That's good. So it's now the next morning. It's the morning after election day. The whole country wakes up finds that Al Gore has a half million vote lead in the popular vote. Bush has

won 246 electoral votes. Gore has won 250. So it's 246 to 250. 270 is needed to win. Yeah. I remember being like, oh my God, we're almost there. Like it's like another one more little push. And then we're going to have a president who can pronounce the word nuclear. So Wisconsin and Oregon are also too close to call at this point. But of course, Florida has way more electoral votes. So what we're all really focused on is Florida. So the entire focus of the next 36 days moves to Florida. Yeah, it's like it's not a recount. It's a Florida recount. So the first thing to realize about the insanity of the Florida recount is that 6 million votes are cast in Florida. Eventually, the winner of Florida receives

537 more votes than the loser. A 1% margin of victory would have been 60,000 votes. 100 votes is a .001% margin of victory. And so one of the problems with this that they point out immediately is that the media has already declared Bush the winner. When for a margin that narrow, when we're talking about literally .001%, it isn't really fair to call anybody the winner, right? Because we've got 6 million votes cast. We've got 175,000 votes were thrown out. And then we've got a winner by less than 600 votes. So essentially, one of the first mistakes that gets made is that Florida should have been gray. Right. But we don't like saying that in the media ever about anything. Yeah. And it also because they had already called the state for Bush,

it locks in this idea that Bush won and now we're doing this recount as opposed to we don't know who won and we're doing this recount. This is the classic media thing that I and also with, you know, if you're delivering testimony before Congress, if you're saying who won a state in an election, if you're describing how a crime took place, like really what seems to be the best way to get people to buy your story is to get their first. It's not about accuracy. It's about being the first person to like solidify events into a narrative. And then like any subsequent narrative is going to be less powerful than the first one. And of course, Bush's team is very good at solidifying this narrative, right? That they talk about stealing and they talk about

recounting. They, you know, the language that they use is all about this win being taken away from them and gore being kind of a sore loser. Right. So the biggest thing and what the fight then becomes is we've got 6 million votes and we've got 175,000 thrown out votes, votes that were not counted. So in most elections, you have some number of votes that get thrown out, but it doesn't really matter if somebody had won Florida by a million votes. Well, who cares about 175,000 thrown out votes, right? But because the margin of victory is so small, every single tiny thing gets poured over by dozens of people. So the entire fight then becomes what do we do about these 175,000 votes? So are they votes that were automatically disqualified

in some way on election night and then they have to re go over them? Okay. And why were they disqualified initially? They're in the discard pile. It's basically these are votes that we haven't counted because they have errors. There are two reasons that these votes have been thrown out, undervotes and overvotes. Overvote means you voted for more than one person. So overvotes, most of those are on what is called optiscans, which is basically, you know, like when you do the SATs and you fill in a little circle with a pencil, that's how most of the counties in Florida are voting. So the vast majority of Florida voters have filled out a little SAT form and some small percentage of people for reasons that 99 times out of 100 do not matter,

people just fill out extra bubbles. Some people will just vote for Bush and Gore, or some people are just ding dongs who vote for every single bubble because they like filling out bubbles. You're getting into like 0.1% of the population. So all of the human behavior in this is totally inexplicable. So there's 113,000 overvotes of those 75,000 chose Gore and somebody else. So they think it's like a ranked choice voting thing or something. So they choose Gore and Nader. Oh, right. That makes sense. A smaller percentage of those 29,000 choose Bush and somebody else. So they choose Bush and Buchanan or Bush and somebody else. So the legal standard in Florida for counting votes like this is can you determine the intent

of the voter? So if somebody's filling out Bush and Gore on their little scantron, who knows? Like we can't count those because we have no idea. However, a lot of people fill in Gore and then they also fill in the bubble for write-in candidate and then they write Gore. In that case, they've essentially voted for Gore twice because they don't understand how these forms work. We can determine the intent of the voter. They clearly very want Al Gore because they voted for him twice, essentially. And some people do that for Bush as well and some people do that for Nader and some people write in Celine Dion and then they also vote for Gore. That's who we should have chosen, actually. There's also people that circle a name of somebody

or they put an X through the circle rather than filling in the bubble and those people are also thrown out. So it's kind of this thing where as soon as something is weird on the ballot, it just gets thrown out automatically and then if a recount is called, then we go back to it. There are a lot of ballots in there where somebody is filled in the bubble for Gore or Bush and circled their name or they filled in the bubble but then they crossed it out and they've crossed out the name of Gore and then they've circled Bush, right? So it actually shows two bubbles filled in but it's very clear from that ballot that they intended to vote for Bush, right? So this is why you have to have a human recount is because machines just simply cannot

deal with telling the intent of a voter what they actually wanted to fill out. Take that, machines. Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine that the debate gets spectacularly granular about all of this and about how to qualify a voter intent. And then where it gets really tedious is the undervotes. So about one third of the counties in Florida are still using punch cards. Right. That's how the chads happened, right? This is how that this is where we get into the chads because the way that it works is like there's a template on the actual voting booth and your punch card is blank. You put your punch card behind the template. The template has holes in it, kind of like a stencil. The template has

the names and like little holes in the template where you can punch through and then you punch through and then you take your piece of paper out and then your little piece of paper has all the punches on it. I found law review articles from 1977 pointing out how terrible the system is. It seems really weird. People were pointing this out that this is just a dumb way to vote from like day one. One of the things is that when you punch out your card and then you pull it out of the machine, it doesn't have the names of the candidates on it. So you can't actually look at your ballot and see, oh, I voted for this person. All you have is a blank piece of paper with a bunch of poked holes on it. And the biggest thing is this issue of pregnant chads and hanging chads.

Oh, pregnant chads. Yeah. The chads get pregnant. The little rectangular piece of paper that you punch out of the paper is called a chad. And so if you don't press it hard enough, you would have a dimpled chad or a pregnant chad where it would show there's like an indent. Dimpled and pregnant like I'm like my ladies. Again, it's all about the voter intent, right? So if one of them has been punched but not punched hard enough to go through the paper, can we say that somebody has intended to vote but didn't press hard enough? Or did they think about voting and then they just didn't? Oh, I see. So you can have a dimpled chad somewhere on the ballot, but then a second candidate who has the chad all the way taken out. Exactly. Or you have no

dimpled chads, but you have a dimpled chad for Al Gore. Maybe that person meant to vote for Al Gore, but maybe that person sort of did it and then they were like, you know what, I don't want to vote for anybody. Right. This is like such a great illustration of how America just, how no one planned for this at all. Like it seems like this method of voting is like, well, we started doing during the revolution and we just never changed it. And it's like, do you realize like you have people in a state with millions of votes in a country with hundreds of millions of people and like figuring out who is going to be in charge of it comes down to people scrutinizing the little indentations in pieces of paper. That's ridiculous. Like America, you know, we're not the best at

anything, but we might be the funniest country that's ever existed. Like that's funny. Well, I mean, another thing that happens with these, and this is pointed out in the 1977 law review article I read that when you run punch cards through these counting machines, you get a different count every time because there's something called a hanging chad where you punch through the paper and two corners of the rectangle fall off, kind of like a Christmas advent calendar. Right. Sometimes if you wipe your hand across the paper, that little chad will just go right back into where it was, or it can fall off. Oh, yeah, this technology is terrible. One in 200 of the SAT ballots, one in 200 of those gets thrown out for punch card ballots, one in 25 gets thrown out. It's why you

don't use a 1960s computer for election 2000. I know this is again, like another one of these things that everyone knew it was bad, but no one thought an election would ever be this close. Right. Because once again, having a plan that's basically everything will always be fine. Like it turns out that's not a great plan. So the vast majority of the thrown out ballots are overvotes. Those are the ones where people fill in more than one bubble. As someone who takes graphic design very seriously, the one that really drives me nuts about this is the butterfly votes. The butterfly, where when some butterflies voted, I know if you heard about this, but it was in Palm Beach County used a ballot called a butterfly ballot, sometimes called a caterpillar ballot. Well,

that sounds nice. What could go wrong? They have the bubbles down the middle and then the names of the candidates alternate left and right on either side of the bubbles, right? So it goes one, three, five, seven, nine down the left hand side and two, four, six, eight, 10 down the right hand side. Okay. So if you're looking at it, Bush is the first name, Gore is the second name, but Gore is the third bubble. Okay. Pat Buchanan, and he's another one of these random third party weirdos, is the second candidate. I mean, it's not that hard. I will post a photo of this ballot with this episode. For us young people, there's lots of arrows telling you to vote, but again, we're talking about 1% of the population, right? So Pat Buchanan, who is listed as the second bubble,

but I think maybe the eighth candidate, gets more votes as a percentage of the population in Palm Beach County, Florida than anywhere else in the country. Basically, because lots and lots and lots and lots of people are reading this ballot as I am voting for Gore, when in fact, they are voting for Pat Buchanan. Yes. And who lives in Palm Beach County? People who perhaps are easily confused by things being different than they were. This is like the most tragic thing about this. So Pat Buchanan wins 3,400 votes in Palm Beach. That's 2,600 more than he got in any other county in Florida, including Miami-Dade County, which has six times more people. So Buchanan gets far more votes in this one random-ass county. And the saddest thing,

Palm Beach County does a really high Jewish population. And Pat Buchanan isn't quite a Holocaust denier, but he's like a Holocaust shrugger. He's one of those people that's kind of all genocides matter, right? He's like, well, you know, it's bad to happen to Jewish people, but like also there were like other genocides in history and political prisoners were also killed and like the idea that in a heavily Jewish county, when the first ever Jewish vice presidential candidate is on the ballot, the idea that a bunch of people in this county are voting for Buchanan and not Gore Lieberman. No, that sounds completely legit. I don't know what you're talking about. So of course, Pat Buchanan himself, I mean, he's an odious monster. The one good thing he's done

in his entire life, he said on the Today Show, these are mistakes. It's obvious people didn't aim. Like I'm bad, but I'm not stupid. It's clear people did not mean to vote for me. However, Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who's still around, he identifies Palm Beach County. He says, well, it's a Buchanan stronghold. Up is down, left is right. The fate of the nation depends on Florida to be fair. It is a bizarro time generally. There's still the question of what to do. I mean, you can't throw away 3400 people's votes and just say, oh, it doesn't seem like you would have voted for this person. Right? I mean, that's that's a terrible precedent. Yeah. And so you can't really rerun the election because there's no time. And so what everybody just kind of decides to do

is just let's just move on. Huh. So basically, what we have is this Palm Beach County thing, there's essentially nothing to do about it. And then with the overvotes and the undervotes, we have 175,000 votes that just aren't being counted. So everything from now on becomes how and when and whether to count these 175,000 votes. So right after the election, because it's less than 0.5% margin of error, there's an automatic recount. So the first thing that happens is they just feed all the ballots through the machines again. They don't do anything with 175,000 thrown out ballots. But the ballots that have already been cast, they just run them again, standard procedure, and then they come up with Bush winning by 327 votes. That's the count

as it stands when we start fighting over these 175,000 votes. Okay. So Gore has 72 hours to challenge these results. But according to Florida law, he can only ask for recounts on a county by county level. Huh. This is one of the catch 22s. You're not allowed to ask for a statewide manual recount until the count is certified. So the count has to be final. Then you can ask for a statewide recount. Huh. So Gore demands a recount in the counties that have the most problems. But those are also the counties with the highest percentage of democratic voters. So what this does is it essentially gives Bush's team an opening to say, well, Gore is politicizing this process. How dare he politicize an election? Yeah. It gives them this gift that then anything partisan that they do

is just retaliatory. Yeah. And it's, it just gets put into this frame of politicians or politicians and both sides are fighting for partisan advantage and everyone, you know, these politicians are just so venal and corrupt. So everything that's put into this frame because it's like Bush and Gore, it seems, are both just pushing for partisan advantage. So Gore's entire strategy is to get more votes counted. And Bush's entire strategy is to stop any more votes from being counted because he's already won. Huh. Right. So if you're winning, you want the whole thing, the whole process to just stop in its tracks. That's what you want. And if you're losing, you're like, count these extra votes. This is like interesting. And, you know, it's like in treat, there's all this intrigue and

all these little wrinkles and everything. It's fascinating. But at the same time, you look at this and you're like, this is like two frat presidents trying to get like more points and some sort of intramural, intrafrat competition. It's so stupid and petty. And just, it's like, it's so silly. It's also just a terrible way to structure this in that you have two partisan actors running it where if you just had clear election laws that said, look, if it's less than 5% margin of victory, let's do a manual recount statewide. Boom. Right. None of this like overvote, undervote, shenanigans, not just every single ballot recount it statewide, recertify it, right? Because there's 36 days before the votes need to be sent to the electoral college, right? There's a 36-day period.

And one of the things that you find in a lot of the political science literature on this is that recounting votes doesn't actually take that long. So a recount in Florida's most populous county, Miami-Dade, takes about a week. And that's like manual by hand. You have three people look at each ballot and then they have to agree on, is this pregnant? Is this hanging? What is the intent of the voter? Do we throw it out? Which is actually a pretty good process. And so if you want to do that, you can do that in about a week. But what happens is what takes much longer than actually recounting is all of the fighting. So all the legal battles of what do pregnant chads count as, what do hanging chads count as? Let's start the vote and not do the vote. I mean,

all of these legal emotions drain in a clock. And of course, this is a Bush team strategy, because if you run out of the clock, there's a hard deadline. December 12th, the votes have to be sent to the Electoral College. So the closer you can get to that deadline, you can say, oh, we couldn't possibly count the votes in time. We couldn't possibly count the votes. Oh my god. So that's essentially the strategy. Gore wants to count the votes and Bush doesn't. Right. Also, another weird strategic error that Gore's team makes. Gore only wants to count the under votes, which is weird because there's way fewer under votes than there are over votes. Like someone on his team at some point made the decision that the over votes would lean toward

Bush. I guess. I don't understand that strategic decision. Huh. So then what happens is, do you remember Catherine Harris? No, I have no idea who that is. So we've been doing this whole series on the unfairly maligned women of the 90s. Catherine Harris is a fairly maligned woman of the early 2000s. She is the Secretary of State of Florida at the time. And this is one of the things that emerges as another huge problem about American electoral administration, is that she is administering the election. She is in charge of certifying the results. She is in charge of making sure it's a fair and democratic process. She is also the co-chair of George W. Bush's Florida campaign. Si. So she is overseeing the election. She is a referee, and she's also

working for one of the candidates. Why do we do this? Like, is it so hard to just have bipartisan leadership within the infrastructure of an election recount? Like, is that, I don't, am I asking for the moon here? Well, I mean, this is one of the things, again, like this, this happens so rarely. This isn't a problem until you have an election decided by .001 percent of voters. And then it's a huge problem. We're a country way too focused on the narrative of, you know, things will basically go fine and we don't have to come up with measures to anticipate things going differently than we expect. Yeah. Every election feels like a reenactment of Titanic now because everyone's like, oh my god, we had no, no idea that such a thing could occur.

And it's like, really, when you're on a boat on the water with the icebergs and you're trying to have an election with the Americans and they punch holes in a piece of paper, like you didn't think it could get complicated. And so she has exactly the same incentives as Bush as one of the candidates. She doesn't want these ones to be counted. So Al Gore says, let's recount in these four counties. She says, no. Yeah. And she says, we can only do a manual recount if they are broken, if the machines are physically unplugged like the Zoltar machine or something. We can't do it if they're working as intended, which isn't, you know, there's no particular legal standard that she's standing on there. But so we're running out the clock now, right? So he wants it. She says, you

can't. It ends up going to a judge. The judge says, yes, you can do a manual recount, but only of the undervotes. So this whole TikTok thing is happening. So finally after, I mean, everyone's just sitting on their hands. Finally, once the judge says this can begin and Harris says this can begin, they start recounting. So then they start recounting the votes by hand. They do this whole thing with the three people look at it. There's also election officials in the room that will throw out individual ballots. So like a bush dude and a gore dude will be standing behind recounters as they're doing the recount. And they'll be like, no, not that one. No, I want that one thrown out. And they'll literally fight minute by minute to

throw out individual ballots. So it's like jury selection, but with a million pieces of paper. Yeah. This is also where we have what's called the Brooks Brothers riot. What? I'm so excited for this. Let me just take a moment to savor my anticipation of that phrase. I imagine it's about a bunch of white guy Ivy League campaign workers getting really childishly upset about something. This is exactly what it is. So they move the recount from one floor of a building to another floor of the building or some little technical thing. All of these, quote, unquote, ordinary Florida voters stand outside the room chanting, stop the vote, stop the vote, and essentially creating chaos so that people cannot continue

these manual recounts. What we find out later is that those ordinary Florida voters were campaign staffers. They were the interns. They were the assistants. All of these people, there was a, there was a where are they now thing in the Washington Post where they look at all of the, protestors at that time and they're all, you know, they're working for the Koch Foundation and they're at the Cato Institute and they work for this senator. And to think that they were just everyday Floridian voters only 18 years ago and now they all work for billion dollar hedge fund and think tanks. It's amazing. This just becomes chaos and this ends up taking really long time. And what's amazing is that the end of these four counties doing manual recounts because of all

this back and forth, it's taking too long. So Palm Beach asks for a two hour extension so that they can get the results certified. Catherine Harris says no. She's no, you just have to certify what you've got. Catherine. Yes. And the same thing happens in Miami. They ask for an extension because it's taking so long. Catherine Harris says sorry. And they just certified the results that they now know are wrong because they've been recounting these votes manually and the totals are changing. So essentially, because of all these logistical stops, of the four counties that gore challenges, only one of them, Volusia County, a small county, ends up completing the recount. All of the rest of them just certify the same machine recount from the day after the

election. And that's it. What? The only difference between the machine recount and what actually gets sent to the Electoral College eventually is absentee ballots. So at the same time that there's all these recount stuff going on, absentee ballots are coming in and that's a different legal process because it's not a recount, it's a count. So as we know from this most recent election, absentee ballots need to be postmarked on or before election day or else they're not valid. But a lot of the overseas ballots in Florida are for military bases. So Bush's team, which of course statewide is saying stop the count, stop the count, stop the count. When it comes to the overseas ballots, it's like let's make sure we count everybody. I know this is a crazy idea, but what

if everyone was just honest, you know, only for a day? Like what would happen? And so gore doesn't want to challenge these because it sounds like he's going against the troops. So after Bush's team starts accusing gore of not loving the troops enough or whatever, Lieberman then goes on all of the morning shows to say no, no, we care about the troops. We want to count every single military vote. We're going to use the most expansive standard to count as many votes as we possibly can. Yeah, Joe Lieberman can charm the armed forces of our great nation. There's no one a marine loves more than Joe Lieberman. Nobody really wants to push back on this and nobody wants to actually not count the votes that come in super late. So one of the things that's interesting about this,

just like the butterfly ballots are just graphic design total incompetence, 27 of Florida's 61 counties close to half of Florida's counties don't have a place on the absentee ballot to write a date. Come on, guys. They just have a signature, but no line for the date. And of course the date is extremely crucial. Yeah, it's fairly relevant, right? Whether you voted before or after election, the cutoff. The way that it's supposed to work is you have the signature, but then you look at the postmark on the letter, like on the stamp to see, okay, does this count? Was it before election day or not? But postmarks get smudged. I mean, a lot of these are coming overseas from Kuwait and from like random places where the postmark, they have different postmarks there

in different languages. So oftentimes they can't actually determine when the ballots were sent. You can't know oftentimes. And if you're organizing an election, you should be able, you should have to do a bake sale first. And then you can do an election. So eventually, they're defining these votes as widely as possible and just accepting all of them. Bush's total goes up by about 200. And so a couple years later, The New York Times actually gets its hands on all of the absentee ballots and finds that it's about 680 questionable votes were counted during this period. Interesting. Questionable how? Without postmarks or with postmarks after the election day or whatever.

So that's all later. At this point, we've got the machine recount where Bush is winning by 327. We've got about 200 absentee ballots. So the results are final at Bush winning the state by 537 votes. And this is where the Supreme Court gets involved. There is an earlier thing where the Supreme Court jumps in and says, you can't do a recount, but it was actually after the recount was already done. So pedants always love to point out that there are three interventions by the Supreme Court, only two of which are referred to as Bush v. Gore, but it's boring and I'm not going to get into it. Biggest jump in briefly, and then it's about a relatively indecisive matter. Yeah, they're basically saying, don't do this thing that has already happened.

I feel like the Supreme Court's vibe is like, your dad who works all weekend who you're not supposed to bother. And sometimes there's this big crash downstairs and you hear your dad yell down the stairs like, hey, that doesn't sound like geometry. But he never actually comes downstairs. And you're just like, I just need someone to help me with my geometry and not yell down the stairs occasionally. But this is the dad I have. This Vanity Fair article goes back and interviews a lot of the law clerks for the Supreme Court. Ooh, they know all the good shit. Oh yeah. And what begins to dawn on them around early December is that the court is really divided. So even in that first technical boring, whatever footnote of a decision, it's essentially five

to four. And the clerks are like, oh shit, you know, most of the big decisions in American life, Brown v. Board of Education, the Nixon tapes, those were unanimous decisions. Really? And it's really important for the court as an institution to try to hold itself above partisanship. And the way that you do that as a court is to give unanimous decisions to say, look, this isn't a partisan thing. The president is subject to the rule of law. All nine of us agree about that. God, it's so foreign to me that the Supreme Court used to do that. And we're just like, wow. So it didn't used to be just like an endless cage match between basic decency and the side of American law that's become completely captive to bloodthirsty capitalism. How bizarre. Well, this is one of the things that

after the results are certified, the Florida Supreme Court says, actually, you know what, we're going to have a manual recount. We're going to count all of the undervotes. So this is one of the court's mistakes that instead of just saying we're going to manually recount all of the extra votes, we're only going to count the undervotes. And we're not really going to give a standard for hanging chad, pregnant, dimpled. We're not going to weigh in on that. All you guys just count whatever standards you have, but count everything. We won't tell you how to do it, but do it and leave us alone. So the Florida Supreme Court says, let's recount all the undercount. Three hours later, the Supreme Court steps in and says, no, we're halting the recount. Oh, and there's this extremely

sad behind the scenes detail of Gore telling his staff being like, thank God, it's going to go to the Supreme Court. And you're like, oh, even at this point, you think it's going to be better if the Supreme Court touches it? And what's important is that this is December 8th. The votes have to be in by December 12th, and it takes about a week to count them. There should be a Hallmark movie about like a busy recount worker who realizes that love was right around the corner, you know, because anything would like a Christmas-y deadline. That's like, that's classic Hallmark fodder. Okay, so they halted four days before the deadline at the point where like every minute counts essentially. It's basically over at that point, right? Because

the court is insisting on this deadline. The recounts, there's not enough time and the court says, well, now we have to hear arguments. Now we have to write our opinion, blah, blah, blah. It's going to take a couple of days. Courts love deadlines. It's fascinating. You're like, well, what if we had an extinction and you could review this evidence and not execute someone who turns out to be innocent? And they're like, but we put it on the calendar. It's like your worst type A acquaintance who like, you know, you're like driving somewhere. And she's like, and at one, we're going to stop at Panera. And then it's like, no one really wants to go to Panera. And she's like, no, I envision going to Panera. We're going to Panera. Like our legal system is being run by like a lot of Karen's,

I really feel. You're also going to love this too, that Justice Scalia, Antonin Scalia writes the opinion, stopping the count. Oh, yes, my favorite justice. Your favorite person. It includes the phrase, the counting of votes that are of questionable legality, in my view, threatens irreparable harm to George W. Bush and to the country by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. What? No. So we're very concerned with doing irreparable harm to George W. Bush personally. Yes. And the irreparable harm to voters whose votes aren't going to count the irreparable harm to Gore who might not win an election in which more people voted for him. The only irreparable harm we're concerned with is that of the petitioner who

happens to be George W. Bush, who's been certified as the winner. Well, God knows, whenever anyone petitions the Supreme Court, they like take a special interest in that person as opposed to everyone else in the situation. But this to me, like in a nutshell is really a lot of the like, ignorant white men protecting ignorant white men circle jerk that we call government in this country where he's like, if the truth were to be spoken about this cricket campaign, everyone would know it was a cricket campaign. And it would be irreparably damaged by people all seeing it for the thing that it in fact is. This is the thing that is so counterfeit about this entire decision. Another thing that they do is they maintain this deadline that everyone points out later. They're

like, you realize this is a fake deadline, right? So December 12th, it's the end of the quote, unquote safe harbor provision. What? They just named it that because they wanted like a nice name for people to latch on to and be like, but if we extend for eight hours, the harbor will be less safe than the metaphor that we're saying for some reason. It's like the Electoral College, right? Where it's this vestige of a previous time 200 years ago and they were writing the constitution. They didn't think any of this stuff would happen. And everyone was dying of syphilis and treating other diseases with mercury. And I'm sure no one thought they were making decisions that people would uphold 200 years later. And if they did, then that was the worst kind of arrogance.

And uphold as if they're life or death, right? Where so many people point out after this that this is an optional deadline. What it basically means is this is the last date on which Congress cannot challenge the result. It's not the day that the Electoral College votes. It's not the day the president is sworn in. It's just a procedural intermediate step. There's a really good quote about this in one of the Law Review articles I read. The court elected Bush by insisting on the importance of December 12th, a date that is significant only because the 18th century arrangements to create a stately series of certifications, meetings and pronouncements that are now only charades. It makes no sense to demand that a breathtakingly close election be

decided by any magic date in December in order that a new president be chosen by January 20th. So to declare fealty to this essentially random date six weeks before the inauguration, everyone is just like, what? Why? I mean, once again, it's shitty dad behavior, right? It's like, I'd love to come to your softball game, but, you know, moderate traffic. Some imaginary reason that exists only to be a reason. So I have a degree in political philosophy that is relevant to my life like once every seven years. I don't, I have no idea how many degrees you have. It's amazing. You're just every so often. It's like another scarf that you put. You're like, oh, science.

One of the things I remember them telling us on essentially the first day of school was this principle that you cannot promise to do anything immoral because the only thing binding you to a promise is morality. Oh, that's interesting. If I promise to kill your child, the immorality of breaking my promise to you is less bad than the immorality of killing your child, obviously, right? And it seems like the same thing is going on here where the court is essentially saying we have to maintain this deadline to protect the integrity of the election. The date is so important or else no one's going to trust elections anymore. But what does it do to the institution of elections to not count everyone's votes? Right? Like,

that's a much bigger problem for the legitimacy of elections than missing a random deadline. Everyone wakes up in the morning thinking, I hope that our most specific and irrelevant procedural laws remain enshrined forever or else I won't feel comfortable in this country. It's similar to like old school law and order was like, well, we have to have a death penalty, so people will know that there are consequences. People need to know that there's someone in charge that daddy's upstairs. You really like that metaphor? I do. No, a lot of my beliefs about American government and our ideas about authority is that we all have daddy issues. I don't think you're wrong. No, thank you.

You know, and with like December 12th, it's like, people have to believe that if the government says a thing, we have to do it no matter what that like rules are rules like, you know, law and order society, like it does feel like arbitrarily upholding something that isn't helping anyone and is actually invalidating the processes of democracy that like maintaining belief in that authority is a value in its own right. Yeah. And as if anyone is going to say, oh, they didn't count my vote, but they were on time. So this is one reason for their decision. The other reason the court finds is that because the Florida Supreme Court said all of the under votes have to be counted, but they didn't describe the standard by which the counties would count the

under votes. The Florida Supreme Court didn't say pregnant chads count, hanging chads don't. They didn't define it at that level. So the Supreme Court's argument is essentially because different counties will have different standards for counting under votes. They shouldn't count them at all. That counts as discrimination because some voters votes will count and some voters votes will not count. So they're essentially making kind of like a discrimination argument. And what's weird is it's actually one of my old professors from my philosophy department, which is what reminded me of this whole thing, writes for the New York Review of Books, a lot of his names Ronald Borkin. One of the things that he points out is that the entire purpose of the

Equal Protection Clause is to protect classes of voters. So one of the things they shut down like 100 years ago, I think, was a poll tax. You have to pay two bucks to vote. Well, that's not fair because it penalizes the poor because they are a class of voters. Whereas here, and this is pointed out by Ginsburg and this is pointed out in all the dissents, there's no class of voters that are being harmed by one county counting pregnant chads and another county not counting pregnant chads. Oh yeah. You can't say the poor will be affected by this or... Like Latinas are more likely to have a pregnant chad vote because it's completely random. Yeah. Exactly. You get how, you know, it is sort of weird that there's different standards throughout the state, but

it's not clear that that's going to systematically disenfranchise any particular group. Also, what Souter and Stevens both mentioned in their dissents is, guys, we are the Supreme Courts. If we want Florida to have a standard for counting the votes, let's give them a standard. I know we don't normally do that kind of thing, but we could though. Yeah, could just say, well, pregnancy don't count, hangings do. Boom. That's very grim statement out of context. So it's like, this is how courts work, right, is when a law is really imprecise, the court steps in and says, you know what, this is too imprecise. Here's the precision that you need. The Supreme Court here is just saying, we're going to stop counting. It's a weird conclusion

to come to from that equal protection thing. Another super dark chapter of this is that the only Supreme Court justice to mention race in any of this is Ginsburg. Ginsburg writes an opinion that includes a footnote that says, look, if we want to talk about the Equal Protection Clause, we have some pretty credible accusations of voter suppression among African Americans, and she puts that in her draft. Scalia refers to it as the Al Sharpton footnote. Oh, come on. This is according to the clerk. What? According to them, it's called, he calls it the Al Sharpton footnote and says, why are you bringing race into this? Because she values her relationship with Scalia, right? Like they, right, because they go to the opera together. Yes, this is the whole

thing. And she wants to make it seem like there's this bipartisan relationship. She removes the footnote. What? Yeah. So there's no reference to race or the ways in which there might actually be voter suppression going on. Ruth, he's not your friend. I mean, another thing that my former professor mentions is the court had never shown any interest in voting procedures before. Really? How do they manage to avoid that the entire 200 years? Well, that's the thing is they, they haven't weighed in on how much voting procedures can actually disenfranchise groups systematically. What do these people do with their time? What is the Supreme Court doing all day? This idea that punch card votes are thrown out far more than SAT scantron votes.

The court has never shown any interest in this. So one of the things that my old professor mentions is even in the best of circumstances, voting procedures are riddled with inconsistencies beginning with the use of wildly varying reliability, such as punch cards and optoscan machines in different jurisdictions. Voters often poor or black in counties with older machines were far less likely to have their votes counted than those in wealthier jurisdictions. And nobody ever heard a peep from the Supreme Court about unconstitutionality. So they're essentially putting forth this thing like, hey, everybody voting really matters. And some people might be getting disenfranchised in their vote counts less for the first time. This is the first

time. Yes, because when something happens to white people, they're like, oh, shit, have you guys heard of this? One of the great tells in this argument is that the actual main opinion of the Supreme Court includes the language. Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities. Oh my god. So many Supreme Court decisions use the same language as half-assed term papers I have read as a teacher. It's truly alarming. I mean, to say equal protection is such a big deal here that we can't count people's votes. But it's such a small deal that no other state can use the same standard to regulate its voting procedures. That's essentially the argument that they're making.

Ask your mother. This is from a law review article like three years later. The court invented a principle that had never been used before and would never be used again for the sole purpose of making George W. Bush president. This is Rick Hassan, a guy who's a lot of his work. I read about this because he talks about the legacy and he refers to this decision as a one day only ticket to assure the choice of Bush over Gore. And that's what it is. The president can only be a guy who loves the Astros. I mean, the last like sad and disturbing thing about this decision to mention is there is no conservative principle at stake. Except the principle of this is our guy, right? Yeah. I mean, people are looking through this for, you know, conservatives tend to

favor states rights. They tend to favor individual liberty. We know from other cases what this Supreme Court believes in and the arguments they find convincing and that they don't. And there's no conservative thing at stake here. And they don't, they don't even really use conservative reasoning. This is also from Rick Hassan. The conservatives decision to reverse a state Supreme Court's ruling on matters of state law did not reflect any established conservative position on any general constitutional question. On the contrary, conservatives have been at least as zealous as liberals in protecting the right of state courts to interpret state legislation without second guessing by federal courts. And on the whole, they've been less ready than liberals

to appeal to the 14th Amendment to reverse state decisions. So we've got just like the dad upstairs, we've got the Supreme Court coming down and saying, no, Florida State Supreme Court, you are interpreting Florida law wrong. So they're stepping in to this arena that is kind of weird for them to be stepping into and that they don't seem to have any principled position on just so that they can overturn it. It's like your dad is like, ask your mother, ask your mother, I don't care, ask your mother, ask your mother. And one day that backfires because you're like, mom, can I take ballet? And your mom is like, yeah, you can take ballet. And then your dad finds out and he's like, my son is not taking ballet. He goes into the kitchen and you're like,

I've never seen him in the kitchen before. And he's like, no, this is not a ballet household. And then he stomps back upstairs. And you're like, wow, like a one day special specifically to keep me out of ballet. And so that's basically it. Should they say, you know, we have to meet this deadline. There's no time. The recount is happening. And then they're like, no, you just have to halt it and go back to the original vote. It doesn't matter. Yeah, what? They've remanded it back to the Florida Supreme Court. And they say you have to meet this deadline. And you can't order the counting of all the undervotes because you didn't provide a standard. So they're essentially vacating one of its decisions. And they're saying you have to meet this deadline. But they hand down their

decision on December 12. So they're essentially saying, today, you have to certify the results and move on. So it's just fuck you. Yeah, essentially. And the Florida Supreme Court is like, well, we can't do anything with this, right? You've told us that we were wrong. And you've told us we have to meet a deadline, which is today. So thanks, everybody. Good night. Oh, you can take our Sunday ballet class. But if you pay for it yourself by the end of this afternoon. So this is the crazy thing. The result of the Florida election is the machine recount, the thing they did the day after, plus this one tiny county that actually completed its recount. So Gore gets 98 extra votes from that and the total of the absentee ballots. That's it. That's the

whole recount. Okay, so I truly spent the last 20 years believing that, like, that a recount happened. And I feel like the big year wrong about here is that there essentially was no recount. Like, there tried to be a recount, but the Supreme Court gets karate chopped into death. And Harris. I mean, Harris karate chopped it and the Supreme Court did. So the twist in recount 2000 is that there is no recount. There is only 2000. Yes, there is no recount. Star asterisk. Shit. So this is really going to bum you out.

A year after all this, I don't understand how journalists do stuff like this, but eight news organizations got together and somehow got all of the ballots that had been thrown out and actually did the recount themselves, which is just like a badass thing to do. It is. They basically found out and this, I think, turns out to be Gore's biggest mistake. If you counted only the undervotes, Bush still would have won. The totals would have changed, but Bush still would have won. If, however, you counted the overvotes and the undervotes, Gore would have won. You know, that just makes sense to me because I just feel like there would be more soft-hearted

morons voting for Gore and being like, I just want everyone to win. I'm going to vote for Al Gore and then also for Ralph Nader. Like, I would do that if I wasn't sure how voting worked. So Gore would have won if they had actually counted every vote. If they'd done a full manual recount of all of the extra votes over and under, including the overvotes that he didn't want counted. Yes. But what's really interesting is I still cannot fathom this. All of the recount scenarios would have reduced the margin of winning. So if you only counted the undervotes, right, as the court had ruled, Bush would have won by 493 votes, which is an even smaller margin than 537.

If you counted the overs and the unders, Gore would have won by 107. Oh my God. Unbelievable. 107. We have more true crime channels than that in this country. And again, the person who gets the story out first, that's the story that sticks. And the reality just becomes Bush is president and therefore he must deserve to be president, right? This is the part that's really going to piss you off. Oh my God. This is the part? All right. The other big aftermath thing is it's called the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. It's part of the

government. They do an investigation in 2002 and 2003 of voter suppression among African Americans. And what they conclude, again, all of this stuff sounds like nuts conspiracy theory stuff, but again, this is a government body that interviews 117 witnesses. They come to the conclusion that if white votes and black votes had been rejected at the same rates, black people would have cast 50,000 more votes. They go through this whole thing. One of the ways that this works, and I think this is so important about this equal protection stuff, is that, remember how I mentioned earlier, those scantron opto scan things where you fill in little bubbles? The way it works is you fill it in and then you feed it into the counting machine.

There's a little ATM thing next to where you fill out the bubbles. You put it into the little ATM counting machine and it says, you voted for Gore and Senate and whatever. It gives you a little screen that says, here's how we're counting your vote. And so in that little ATM machine, it will actually tell you we are throwing out your vote because you filled in two bubbles and you can correct it. Yes. However, that costs money. So what happens in poorer counties, they don't have the little ATM machine for you to confirm your vote. What happens there is you just fill out little bubbles, put it in a box, the box goes to a central database where it is then counted. So guess which counties don't have

the money to do that. So what happens is the vast majority of the overvotes, people that filled in two bubbles or filled in Gore and then wrote in Gore of these, 54% are of Black people. Because they weren't checked. Because they weren't checked. They didn't actually show it to you and say, hey, this is how you voted. White people got that chance. Black people in general didn't. So what we've got is one in 10 votes from Black people in Florida are thrown out. One in 50 of white people are thrown out. One in 10. One in 10, dude. And what's super fucked up about this and super conspiracy theory-ish but appears to be true is that far fewer Hispanic votes are thrown out than African American votes. And one of the theories about that is in the year 2000,

in Florida, Hispanics mostly voted Republican. So somehow these machines, the whole electoral system is designed around throwing out African American votes and keeping white and Hispanic votes. And it's just amazing how fractally discrimination works. All of the features of the macrocosm feel present in the microcosm. It's like, you know, white people and people who live in wealthier communities, they can make mistakes. That's fine. You know, whatever you fuck up your vote, the machine's like, bloop. And you're a citizen and you have your say. And if you live in a poorer county or if you're more likely a voter of color, then you're not allowed to make mistakes. Fuck you. You put your pencil in the wrong place and that's it. It's all over. You can't wait four more years

and then you can maybe pick a president. I mean, that's the thing. It turns out there's Republican officials on this US commission on civil rights. So what happens is the Republican officials say, look, it's not about race. It's about black people are more likely to be first time voters. They're more likely to be poor. They're more likely to not be high school graduates. And so those are the things that are really explaining this. I found an article from 2003 where someone's like, hang on, you guys didn't run the numbers on that. You're just saying that where he found the best predictor of your vote being thrown out is being black. Like first time voters that are white, their votes didn't get thrown out. People with no high school education that are white,

their votes weren't thrown out. Black people with like college educations, their votes are thrown out. So it has nothing to do with any of these other factors. So what do we know about how this could have happened or who could have helped it to happen? I mean, part of it is one of the things that there's a Washington Post investigation of this in 2003 that mentions that even predominantly black counties often have white Republican election administrators. So the county in Florida with the highest percentage of African American voters has a white Republican election administrator. And so you can't like accuse this person on a one to one basis of saying you suppress the vote. But all of the incentives are there for that person

to suppress the vote. If you're a conservative and you know that African Americans vote 90% for Democrats, it's not that far to say, well, maybe we just won't have these little ATM machines that let them check their votes. There's also an election administrator in I think it's Duval County that also has a large African American population. He publishes an op ed before the vote saying make sure you vote on every page. And so a lot of people interpret that as you vote on the left hand page for Al Gore and you vote on the right hand page, you fill in the circle and you write in Al Gore because he's saying you have to vote on every page where they have these butterfly ballots. Right. So I don't again, I don't think there's any conspiracy theory. I don't think anyone

knew it was going to be this close. I feel like if you have a system that has become pretty corrupt in a lot of ways, we're just everyone's defending their little margin, you know, that they have and they have their little, you know, oh, we just won't have machines in these counties and we just, you know, we'll just kind of egg out black voters who stay here and there, you know, we'll have our little tricks. Yeah. And this is what this commission report finds, is that in the same way it's sort of like a Ouija board where no one is aware of themselves moving it into the letters, but it just sort of happens that way. They say it, there's no evidence of a conspiracy. There's no email saying, hey, Jeff, let's disenfranchise all these black voters.

But it's just at every level, people just aren't looking at it. Right. There's this fake voter fraud thing in the 1997 election where 100 felons voted, apparently. And so Florida spends $4 million on a statewide effort to remove all of the felons from the rolls. The Civil Rights Commission mentions that they spent in this period $0 on voter education, but they spent $4 million getting all of the felons off of the rolls. And so, of course, they hire a private contractor. And what they start doing is they start purging the voter rolls based on names and birthdays. So if your name, if you have a common name, if your name is Christina Smith and your birthday and name are the same as any felon anywhere in the United States,

you're taking off the voter rolls. So if you're a white guy with three names, you're fucked. Your name like Billy Ray Jones. It's like, oh, I was alone gunman with that name somewhere. So that's another thing that a lot of people apparently showed up at the polls and were like, nope, you can't vote, you're a felon. And they're like, what? No, I'm not. As our constitution observed, probably, who knows. It is better that a million non-felons be disenfranchised than that one criminal be allowed to vote. And so, I don't know. Again, this is one of those things that comes out afterwards, comes out after 9-11, after Bush's approval rating is sky high. I don't know. It's a long

article. It's a government report. It's these kinds of things that have a way of just disappearing. And then you sound like a crazy person when you bring them up, when you're like, ah, the election was stolen. It just seems a little sore loser-ish. And so, none of this stuff ever gets play. It's kind of seen as all in the game type of framing. Even blogs and things were pretty young at the time because the gatekeepers, the media gatekeepers basically decided it happened. The Supreme Court is a legitimate institution. We're all going to move on. There weren't other places where that information could bounce around and really get much bigger. So really also, I mean, what this answers from you, too, is that the Ralph,

like Ralph Nader was an important factor in this, but- Well, there's still 97,000 votes for Ralph Nader in Florida, and only 50,000 extra African-American votes. Not 100% of which would have gone to Gore. So if the Nader people want to hang on to fuck Ralph Nader, then hang on to it, guys. You guys got all the ammunition you need. You do you. The last thing I want to say about this is I want to talk about the lemonade theory, which is not about Beyonce, unfortunately. This guy, Rick Hasen, who's a law professor, a lot of scholars looked at the Bush versus Gore decision and wanted to find lemonade in it. They said, well, the court has now established a principle that voting procedures

matter, and voting procedures can, in fact, disenfranchise people. Hopefully, what will happen after this is other courts, lower courts, will take this precedent and will say, you know what, there shouldn't be any punch cards. There shouldn't be these optical scan machines. We shouldn't have lines. That is not what happened. What? I mean, this is my thing of, I don't know if it's the central you're wrong about, but one of them, that election administration has not gotten better. It's gotten worse since 2000. It's more partisan now. There are more partisan officials in charge of elections than there were in the 1990s. There's more litigation now, too, that most candidates for electoral office have lawyers on their teams, and they're going to

file a bunch of motions after the election. We don't have a system where you can sue over this stuff before the election, which is when you want to fight about this stuff. You want to do it not when your mind is clouded with the particulars of the election. You want to do it before the election when you can say, as a principle, let's recount all the undervotes. Let's recount all the overvotes. Whatever your principle is, the time to have those fights is before the election, but there's no way to do that now. We sue each other a lot over elections now. Well, we got to sue each other over something else. How do we feel alive? The thing that I can't get over is that this thing with the butterfly ballots, the terribly

designed ballots, there is no federal authority to tell counties how to design their ballots. This problem, there's nothing preventing it from happening again. So you could theoretically tell voters to drive a hole into a rock with a nail or something. Yeah. There's no way for the federal government to look at the way that ballots are designed in particular counties and just be like, you got to be fucking kidding me. There's no way to do that. So what he says essentially is, this is going to happen again. Whenever a narrow margin election happens, it's going to come down to the counties and most counties are super dysfunctional. But what are the odds that we would have another extremely narrow margin

of presidential election after election 2000? I mean, what, you know, we won't have to use these lifeboats. The strategy since 2000 really does appear to be just hoping, hoping that it doesn't all come down to one county. Well, the lifeboats be seated according to glass. Oh my God. I mean, one thing that Hassan mentions in this article about the lemonade theory is, basically, there was never any lemonade, there's only lemons. Wow. Every single problem of the 2000 election has gotten worse. I wish there was like a 90s Chris Farley movie where Chris Farley inadvertently becomes a Supreme Court justice and it would be called like trying or something, you know, and he ends up

bringing the gift of compassion back to the Supreme Court and saving America and it exists in my mind. One of the forgotten chapters of this is that while this big fight over deadlines was going on, Florida legislators and the governor moved toward a provision in law that would make all of the Electoral College voters vote for George W. Bush regardless of what the recount said. What? Yes. This was something that they threatened to do and were actually moving toward it. So there's actually a chance that if the Supreme Court had voted for the recount and if the recount had happened, the Electoral College would have voted for George W. Bush anyway. This is something that legal scholars say is the biggest vulnerability is the Electoral College itself. These people can

just vote for whoever they want to. There's nothing binding them to any outcome, essentially. In the same way, our election laws were a huge liability that only became clear in 2000. We have 30 more of these massive ticking time bombs that just haven't become the center of some giant clusterfuck, but they easily could and the biggest one is the Electoral College. Right, because we wrote our laws based on the idea of human decency. Yeah, norms. And we're like, how will a decent person behave in this situation? Like a human being who feels shame and mercy and humility and it's like, why don't we write laws for those people? That's like

7% of the population. So that's our episode. That's our episode. Burn it down. It's been the beginning of pushing a snowball down a hill that's just rolling faster and faster and getting bigger and bigger. Well, all right. I learned that the high jinks of my childhood are not something I should be nostalgic about because they weren't better than the high jinks today. They were just precursors of the thing that we have ended up with. And so in conclusion, we millennials have always been doomed,

so let's just embrace it. We have to torque some stuff before we'll have a democracy again. Well, we've already killed Applebee's. The Electoral College can be a thing too. I'm okay with Applebee's. I can let Applebee's live if I'm allowed to have free and fair elections. How about that? How about we have that deal? We can have Applebee's. We also want democracy. Deal.