M1: Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.
President Bush: I George Walker Bush do solemnly swear --
M2: With this stunning situation in Florida, where the Secretary of State says only 629 votes, 629 votes separate --
M3: There is no certainty, punch in a mark.
F1: I am furious. They give me a ballot that's illegal. They put it on a machine that doesn't work.
Al Gore: What is at stake is the integrity of our democracy. Making sure that the will of the American people --
M4: Many people probably voted for Buchanan, meaning to vote for Gore.
F2: What happens, do we go to jail? Because I'm willing to go to jail.
CARD: "Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election"
Cathy Dubin: There was mass confusion at 7:00 o'clock when the polls opened, we knew that there was a problem. Because people were walking out of the polls distraught, calling their husbands, calling their wives, telling them to be careful.
M5: I'm a veteran from 1942, Marine Purple Heart, I'm entitled to my vote. They've just taken it away from me.
Thomasina Williams: Statewide, we had complaints of everything from police intimidation, police threatening people with tickets for loitering who happened to be standing in line. We've had reports of people being required to produce multiple pieces of identification. When they have a valid voter registration card, there's no such requirement under Florida law.
Andy Johnson: On election day, I got calls from a lot of people who complained that they had gone to vote, and that they local precinct didn't have their name on the list.
M6: They said I don't have my name there. Why my name is not there? So they send me to see a clerk.
Yvonne Montalvo: There were no bilingual pollers, there were no bilingual translators, there was no one there.
Pam Iorio: You know the story of the 2000 Presidential Election is a multi-faceted story that has to do with decision making at a lot of different levels. And in consistencies and policies and in voting systems and technologies.
VO #1 (6 sec.) But the story of the 2000 Presidential Election started long before election day.
F3: Truth be told, Bush did not expect to be campaigning in Florida this hard, this late. After all, brother Jeb is the popular governor here.
Jeb Bush: I told my brother that we were going to carry Florida for him, is that going to be a truthful statement?
Everyone: Yes.
Jeb Bush: It better be.
John Lantigua: Jeb Bush first ran for governor in 1994. During a debate he was asked what he would do if elected for Florida's black community. And he gave a two-word answer, which was proved to be both accurate and prophetic. I mean, his answer was, "Probably nothing."
John Lantigua: That answer galled the black community.
VO #2 (7 sec.) Jeb Bush lost in 1994, but he won in 1998 with only 10 percent of the black vote.
Jeb Bush: You've honored me beyond measure by asking me to lead Florida forward into a new --
John Lantigua: And he was asked to know what he was going to do to reassure black voters. And he said- he said, "I guess I'm going to have to reach out to that community." And what he did was reach out and take away almost all the affirmative action programs in the state.
VO #3 (3 sec.) Furious, the state's black leaders started to organize.
Thomasina Williams: We had one of the largest demonstrations ever in Tallahassee, the state capital, protesting against Governor Jeb Bush's one Florida initiative.
M7: There is increased interest, and it's not going to end with this year.
Lantigua: Blacks decided right then that they were going to mount a voter registration campaign.
Thomasina Williams: All the civil rights organizations from around the country had offices set up here in Florida.
Shamon Lettman-Pacheco: We did tours around the state going into rural communities, urban communities, community centers, all the way up to corporate buildings.
Anthony Hill: We had cards that people signed that said they were going to bring five people to the polls with them.
F4: It was an early voter mobilization program.
F5: It's a union, it's a statement all of us coming together saying that we're not just here, we want to make a difference.
M8: Have we forgotten while my grandmother was hosed down --
VO #4 (7 sec.) Their effort paid off. 65% more Black voters went to the polls than in the previous election.
F6: I'm voting democrat all the way.
VO #5 (4 sec.) But when election day came, there were unexpected obstacles.
Andrew Gillum: As the precincts closed later that evening, we began to get reports here in the Student Government Association from just different students about either not having their voter registration card, going to their precinct that they had voted at before. And now being told that they weren't on the roster, that their names had been purged.
VO #6 (6 sec.) Many more irregularities were confirmed when the NAACP held hearings a few days after the election.
Donnise DeSouza: I showed the poll worker my identification and he looked at the roll and he looked at me and he said, "We have a problem, you're not on the roll." I did nothing wrong, I voted in this county, there is no reason why I should not have been on that roll, but I was not on that roll. And I was not allowed to vote.
VO #7 (4 sec.) These irregularities were reported throughout the State.
Kweisi Mfume: This effort is to establish a record, a public record uh.. that will further assist the Justice Department, which doesn't seem to be actively trying to establish its own record uh.. with respect to whether or not there have been violations of civil rights and civil rights law, and maybe violations --
VO #8 (7 sec.) But the most serious voting rights violation was the misuse of something called the "felon purge list".
Greg Palast: There's some type of list of voters that were being purged so that votes -- voters were being removed from the registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris and by Jeb Bush's office.
VO #9 (6 sec.) The list was based on an old Florida law that prevents ex-offenders from voting.
John Nichols: The law to deny ex-felons the ability to vote was written into the state Constitution in 1868 by ex-confederate soldiers who did it because they were being forced to allow blacks to vote by the federal government. And so they wrote this law in specifically to deny as many blacks as possible, their franchise.
VO #10 (11 sec.) This law had only been enforced haphazardly. Then in 1998, to toughen this law, the Republican legislature called for a computerized central list of all ex-offenders in the state.
VO #11 (4 sec.) It was Katherine Harris' job to ensure the implementation of this list.
Katherine Harris: As Secretary of State --
VO #12 (2 sec.) But there were problems.
M9: I came on felony, and he said, "Well, Mr. Whitey, have you been to court yet?" I said, "Well sure. I was a federal juror." And he said, "Oh, no." He said, "No, no, no." He said, "You couldn't have been a federal juror." I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because we have you listed as a convicted felon." He said, "You've been purged from my roll."
Corrine Brown: This man had never been arrested, the minister in the community. But yet they had identified him as a felon.
CARD: Graphic [cu bill]
John Lantigua: The bill that was passed by the legislature called for the hiring of a private data crunching firm to identify individuals who should be purged from the voter roles.
John Lantigua: Database Technology then started to create lists of possible matches.
VO #13 (25 sec.) Florida officials told DBT to use loose parameters in setting up the data base. For instance, voters names & birtdates would not have to match exactly with those of ex-felons. Blacks, who vote over 90 percent democratic, represented over half the names on the purge list. So, the state's instructions eliminated thousands of democratic voters from the rolls.
VO #13 Alternate (25 sec.) Florida officials told DBT to use loose parameters in setting up the data base. For instance, voters names & birtdates would not have to match exactly with those of ex-felons. Blacks represented more than half the names on this purge list. Since Blacks vote over 90 percent democratic, the state's instructions eliminated thousands of democratic voters from the rolls.
CARD: Graphic [56,000 felons]
Greg Palast: And I'll tell you how they did it. They said, "Don't match middle initial, don’t worry about that. Date of birth? Don't worry about that, it can be close. Junior, Senior, don't worry about that. First name, only use the first four letters. If the rest of the letters don't match, don't worry about that." Let me give you an example. Here's Johnny Jackson, Jr. He's matched with a felon in Texas named John Fitzgerald Jackson. You notice that there's no Junior. You notice that there's a Fitzgerald, there's no middle name on the Florida voter. Johnny's legal name and yet this is John, it's not a complete match.
Pam Iorio: When you're talking about somebody's right to vote, you don't throw out that wide net and you don't say even if the gender doesn't match, you know, even if the race doesn't match, you go ahead and consider that a match.
Greg Palast: Go to Leon County which is Tallahassee the state capital, where one election supervisor had gone name by name by name to verify.
Ion Sancho: The list that we received, contained 690 felons supposedly registered in Leon County. When we spent an intensive two-week computer analysis of that data, we were able to confirm 33 of those 690 as felons.
Greg Palast: 95 percent of the names that he checked, were names of people who never committed a crime. They just happened to share a name and a rough birthday with someone who had committed a crime.
CARD: Graphic [marlene email]
John Lantigua: Marlene Thorogood, a project manager for DBT had some doubts about these perjures.
CARD: Graphic [marlene email cu her doubts]
John Lantigua: One of her emails says, "We're going to get a lot of false positives here," that means people on the list who shouldn't be there.
CARD: Graphic [mitchell email]
John Lantigua: And Mitchell assistant general council for the Division of Elections answered her, and this was in late March 1999, that that's the way we want it.
Greg Palast: There were other problems with the list. See this guy Thomas Cooper. Thomas Cooper was born in 1973, and then it says he was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007. The clerks wrote notes saying, you know there are people convicted in the future here, what should we do? The answer from the republican functionaries was, "Blank out the conviction dates and no one will know." There are 4,000 blank conviction dates. Now you have to understand under Florida law, a supervisor who gets a list from Katherine Harris, has to remove the name, they have no choice. Unless they have specific evidence that there's an error on that name.
Pam Iorio: How did the supervisors figure that out? What tools do we have at our disposal other than sending someone a letter?
Greg Palast: Letters saying, "You're listed as a felon. If that's not true send us documentations and papers and we'll check it out."
John Lantigua: People were considered guilty and had to prove themselves innocent to the state before they could be allowed to vote.
Pam Iorio: I mean, in our county for example, we had about 300 names that we never even sent those folks letters because they were not matches at all according to us. We didn't even bother going down that road. The names were vastly different.
Greg Palast: We're finding out, we're going county to county finding out that at least 15 percent, at least 15 percent of the people removed from the voter rolls, were innocent of any crime. That's 8,000 voters, half of them are black, 93 percent of all black voters in Florida voted Al Gore. Well, you do the arithmetic and there's- there's the presidency.
Greg Palast: Katherine Harris, who's in charge of the entire voter purge project, she's also the- the co-chair of the George W. Bush for President campaign in Florida.
VO #14 (9 sec.) Clayton Roberts, the director of the Division of Elections under Katherine Harris, was asked why this list was so inaccurate and who was responsible.
Clayton Roberts: No, I didn't ask DBT to -- they do what we contract them to do. We have a statute that says we have to have a private company to do this. We put it out for bid, they got the bid, and I think I'm done with this interview.
Greg Palast: Wait, well let me just ask, let me just show you the contract if I could, Mr. Roberts, wait. It says here right in the contract that the verification is supposed to be done by DBT, that you paid them $4 million dollars.
Cornine Brown: The State of Florida would not spend $100,000 in voter education, but the State of Florida spent $4 million, identifying felons.
VO #15 (9 sec.) Then, county election supervisors found another flaw. Ex-offenders from other states who had their voting rights restored, were also purged.
M9: My rights were taken from me. My rights were stripped. Unlike other people, when I came from New York City, I came from New York City I had a right to vote. But when I went to vote one day and applied to vote, I was told that I couldn't vote. And I said, "What do you mean I can't vote?" And he said, "Well, because you're a felon." I says, "I know I'm a felon, I don't have anything to hide from you." "Well, felons in this state can't vote." I said, "What do you mean felons in this state can't vote?"
CARD: Graphic [clerk letter]
Greg Palast: So they wrote a note to Katherine Harris' office saying, "Well, we're not supposed to purge these people are we?" And they got back a note from Jeb Bush's office saying, "If there's someone from another state who comes into Florida with the civil rights but may have had a record, they have to ask to Jeb Bush for permission to vote."
CARD: Graphic [letter/see governor seal]
Howard Simon: That position has been rejected by the state Supreme Court, by a federal court. It was clearly illegal for them to insist that people have to go through the clemency process. If they came from another state in which their rights were automatically restored.
CARD: Graphics overlay 2000 felons with election results, gore 500 behind.
VO #16 (10 sec.) Over 28-hundred ex-felons who had moved to Florida from other states and whose voting rights had been restored, were illegally purged from the voter rolls.
Greg Palast: 90, 93 percent of the people who come out of prison vote democratic. So they knew exactly who they were removing from the voter rolls. There was no guesswork here.
John Lantigua: You had a Republican governor whose brother was running as a Republican for President of the United States, deciding how many of these potential democratic votes were going to be cast.
VO #17 (12 sec.) In January 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Florida on voting irregularities. The commission heard testimony from George Bruder, project manager for DBT.
George Bruder: There's no doubt the list included a number of what we call "false positives" as the division of election required the exceptions list to be very broad. We advised the state of the likelihood of a significant number of false positives and made recommendations to reduce those numbers.
CARD: Stylized Emmit Mitchel Email
George Bruder: However, and I quote, "We wanted these lists to be fairly broad and encompassing," said Emmit Buckey Mitchel, a former Division of Elections lawyer who headed the purge effort.
Greg Palast: It's databases, a Secretary of State who is a chairman of a political campaign, working with the brother of the presidential candidate. We thought that the issue of race and voting was settled in 1965, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, voting rights act of '65.
Greg Palast: Now we're back to the basic issue, do black people have the right to vote? Except this time it's not George Wallace standing in the doorway of a schoolhouse saying segregation now and forever. Now it's done quietly and with computers.
CARD: Jeb Bush denied our request for an interview. Katherine Harris did not respond to repeated requests.
M10: I don't think anybody who went to bed last night could imagine waking up this morning and not knowing who the President of the United States --
VO #18 (4 sec.) The morning after the election, a startling picture emerged.
M10: Al Gore is the winner of the national popular vote but the State of Florida, whomever wins there, wins the White House.
VO #19 (6 sec.) The margin was so narrow, the Miami Herald prepared three versions of the morning paper.
M11: From the Daily Mail, President Who? It says.
CARD: Graphic Florida results.
VO #20 (20 sec.) Out of more than 6 million ballots cast, Bush was ahead by just over 17-hundred votes; less than 3-hundreths of a percentage point. Florida law requires a machine recount if the difference is less than one-half-of-one percent. So the Division of Elections ordered all 67 counties to recount.
Clayton Roberts: The supervisor of elections are complying with our request to try to get the recount done by this evening.
George Sheldon: The recount that's occurring in Florida, is an automatic recount based on state law. It was not requested by the Gore campaign, uh.. and we've gone through those before.
VO #21 (6 sec.) But there were, and still are, questions about how complete this mandatory recount really was.
Jake Tapper: To this day there has not been a true statewide recount uh.. as mandated by state law. A lot of counties just kept their original numbers or just double-checked one machine to make sure one machine didn't work.
VO #22 (4 sec.) Even with this partial recount, George Bush's lead started to shrink.
George Bush's lead started to shrink.
Chris Sauter: The initial election night result had Bush ahead of Gore by a little over 1700 votes. By the time the machine recount was completed, that margin was 350 votes. So it became clear that the numbers were changing to Gore's favor.
VO #23 (4 sec.) Officials from both campaigns immediately flew to Florida.
Jeb Bush: The stakes are high and the circumstances demand responsibility by both political parties. To ensure that there is not the slightest appearance of a conflict of interest, I have chosen to recuse myself from serving on the Elections Canvasing Commission. Florida law requires that my replacement on the commission be appointed by the director of the Division of Elections in the Department of State.
John Nichols: After the election, Jeb Bush was highly active, hustling in every way to set the stage for the recount, because he knew there would be a recount. In the middle of the night on election night, his legal counsel stepped down as legal counsel for the governor's office and went to work for the Bush campaign. As did a number of other aids in his office, key aids who moved over instantaneously to the Bush campaign. They contacted all of the Bush political apparatus around the entire state of Florida and said, "Your job, the governor says your job is to deliver for this campaign."
VO #24 (14 sec.) After the machine recount, officials revealed that thousands of ballots did not register a vote for president at all. With Al Gore trailing by only 357 votes, those unread ballots became crucial.
Jake Tapper: And I was amazed to hear that there were about 175,000 ballots in the State of Florida that the machines had not read, either under votes or over votes. And I thought to myself and I think a lot of us thought, "Okay, well, let's find out who won those."
VO #25 (8 sec.) Some of these ballots were rejected because of malfunctioning voting machines. People could not punch all the way through the ballots.
Cathy Dubin: The machines in Palm Beach County had not been cleaned out for two years. And there's no way that you can punch through.
VO #26 (7 sec.) Other ballots were rejected because some counties had confusing ballot designs. Like the infamous “Butterfly Ballot” in Palm Beach County.
M13: Then realizing my error, I pressed the hole for Gore.
F1: Looking at the ballot laid out incorrectly, I voted incorrectly. The arrow went to a place between two holes.
Cathy Dubin: We had about 19,100 over votes. That's what an over vote is, a double punch.
John Nichols: What a lot of people don't know, is that many counties in Florida had something called the "caterpillar ballot". That was where the names moved to like a caterpillar from row-to-row.
CARD: duval county caterpillar ballot
John Nichols: At the same time, people are told to vote on every page.
Corrine Brown: If you voted on every page, your ballot would be void, because on two pages we had presidential candidates.
CARD: insert ballot "vote every page"
Corrine Brown: On November the 10th, they announced that Duval County was throwing out 27,000 votes.
CARD: slug headline.
Corrine Brown: 16,000 of them was in precincts that vote 98 percent democratic.
VO #27 (12 sec.) Although the machines could not read these ballots, very often the voter’s intention could be determined by manual examination. So, the democrats requested a manual recount of these ballots.
James Baker III: It is wrong, simply wrong and I would submit not fair to say as our opponents do over and over that these votes have never been counted. They've been counted just like all of the other non-votes.
Warren Christopher: The only four counties in which hand counts were requested, were counties where there was real anomalies that showed up, real irregularities.
VO #28 (17 sec.) The Gore campaign petitioned four counties for manual recounts. They picked counties, which had reported numerous irregularities on election day, Counties which were heavily democratic: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia.
Al Gore: What is at stake is the integrity of our democracy. Making sure that the will of the American people is expressed and accurately received.
George Bruder: This is ballot one.
VO #29 (10 sec.) The manual recounts in the four counties began. But the Gore campaign never requested a statewide manual recount of all 175,000 unread ballots.
Timmothy Downs: That decision was contrary to just basic recount strategy. The basic rule is if you're behind you ask to recount everything.
Warren Christopher: There are other options that we have before us and we're going to hold onto those options for the present time.
Timmothy Downs: The early decision not to go for an across the board recount of everything in a very real way, limited the options that would be available at a subsequent date.
Jake Tapper: More important than whether or not it achieved it's political ends is the fact that he was rhetorically saying, count every vote and he- uh.. he was not trying to count every vote.
Mark Seibel: I mean, we went through this long discussion about whether these ballots, both over votes and under votes should be reviewed or not. But Florida law I think dictated that they should be looked at.
George Bruder: Ballot 67 is a vote for Gore.
Mark Seibel: A canvassing board may not reject a ballot where the intent is clear. To reject a ballot you must first look at it. You can't just throw it out because it didn't go through the machine. The law is clear and damaged ballots must be reviewed by the Canvassing Board and those that are marked improperly. It's a big task, but the law's clear.
Timmothy Downs: Manual recounts of punch cards had been done literally thousands and thousands of times throughout the history of our country. And they always come out more accurate than the machine count election night.
VO #30 (6 sec.) But the Republicans began to advance the idea that there was something wrong with manual recounts.
James Baker III: The nation has left manual counting, the machine counting because it is less subject to human error and potential mischief.
Warren Christopher: The State of Texas recently enacted a law signed by Governor Bush providing for a hand count as the best way to reach an accurate result in certain disputed situations.
James Baker III: There's been a lot of talk about the Texas manual recount provision. It says a dimple chad can be considered only where it- it also is accompanied by a clearly ascertainable intent of the voter to vote.
Jake Tapper: They were completely mocking the idea of hand recounts when, in fact, George Bush as Governor of Texas in 1997, had signed one of the most liberal hand recount laws that exists into law. Basically the same law that they were mocking in Florida.
Timmothy Downs: If you're ahead, you try to prevent any recount from occurring.
CARD: News graphic Election Results
Timmothy Downs: We're not judging the Republican strategy by what's in the public interest. The Gore strategy has to be judged by the same standard what was in the best interest of their client.
VO #31 (12 sec.) Brushing aside the manual recounts, George Bush began planning his transition team to the White House. Then, the Republicans launched a campaign to discredit the standards used to assess the ballots.
Frank Keating: To suggest just bumping it is a vote, just touching it is a vote, is a manifest injustice.
Stacy Ritter: What's going on upstairs is theater. Democrats are sitting very quietly watching this count proceed while the Republicans are doing their best to make sure that we do not get a full count.
M14: We have people bending ballots, we have chads starting to fall out on the tables over there.
Charles Lichtman: It's absolutely false, it is a very calm process. Nothing like that is happening whatsoever.
James Baker III: So they now argue that a punch card vote should count even if there appears to be only an indentation. This, of course, is the famous dimple chad.
Mark Seibel: You can't make a dimple by mistake. You make it because the equipment fails you. And that's- and that's pretty clear.
Charles Lichtman: What we had argued was that the voter intent rule that’s probably most reflective by oddly enough the Texas statute that George Bush signed into law, is what should have prevailed in Florida that says you look at the totality of the ballot.
Jake Tapper: I mean any analysis, any examination of those ballots through a completely legitimate method of a recount, which happens all the time in America, any examination of those ballots shows that there are some votes there.
VO #32 (5 sec.) As the recount continued, the Republicans carried their battle to Federal Court.
James Baker III: And therefore this morning we have asked that the United States District Court for the southern district of Florida --
Jake Tapper: They wanted this in Federal Court, they did not want this in State Court. Federal Courts are known to be more conservative and State Courts, especially in Florida, are known to be more liberal.
VO #33 (9 sec.) While the courts considered the Republican lawsuit, Secretary of State Harris announced that there would be no extension of the deadline to certify the election.
Katherine Harris: That deadline is November 17, 2000.
John Nichols: Katherine Harris was a very smart political operative who had aggressively been trying to position herself to be a player in Florida and national politics.
Jake Tapper: She had played a very, very active role in the Bush campaign. Had gone up to New Hampshire during the New Hampshire primary to campaign for him, which a lot of election officials in the state were really surprised at because she's the chief elections officer of the state. This is the woman who Florida was counting on for fair and impartial leadership during this recount.
VO #34 (20 sec.) The Democrats asked a Florida Court for an extension of the deadline, but were denied. The judge told Harris that she could reject the manual recounts but would have to have a “good reason.” Harris promptly asked the counties to justify their manual recounts. County officials replied immediately and Harris responded.
Katherine Harris: I've decided it is my duty under Florida law to exercise my discretion in denying these requested amendments.
VO #35 (3 sec.) Palm Beach County was furious.
F6: This board has now been mandated by chief election officer of the State of Florida not to count the votes of the people of Palm Beach County.
F7: You have an abinding opinion from the Division of Elections.
F6: What happens? Do we go to jail? Because I’m willing to go to jail.
Everyone:
VO #36 (3 sec.): The Democrats appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.
M15: Hear yea, hear yea, hear yea. The Supreme Court of the great State of Florida --
VO #37 (18 sec.) The court ordered Harris to delay certification until it could rule on the case. During the delay, the manual recounts continued. Both Democratic and Republican observers sat and watched the counting of each ballot. But the two camps fought over the process.
M16: There's never been a uniformed standard from the very beginning that's lasted all the way through when it comes to talking about which of these ballots are going to be counted and which ones are not.
Mr. Sherer: It is obvious that you know that you can't get this election any other way, so what are we going to do, recount all of these votes again? You've told these lawyers to go bring you more votes. And I assume we're going to keep bringing them to you until such time as you've got 1,000 votes. I think that's what you're looking for.
George Bruder: Alright Mr. Sherer, you're out of line, okay? And we'll go ahead and recess. I'll ask the deputies to clear the courtroom and Mr. Sherer is not welcome back in this room. He can watch the proceedings from outside.
Charles Lichtman: They did everything they could to slow it down. There's- there's one point in time I remember that uh.. Bill Sherer the Republican lead counsel came into the Canvassing Board and just leveled a bunch of false accusations at the Canvassing Board about how they were counting the votes. And he served subpoenas on them and they had to shut down the county temporarily because the Canvassing Board members had to run to court to go appear before the judge, to talk about whether or not we were eating chads.
VO #38 (6 sec.) As the deadline approached, Republicans turned their attention to another arena: the overseas absentee ballots.
M17: We're a thousand miles here away in Kosovo and our absentee ballots, it could come down to our absentee ballots making the vote. It's really kind of an exciting time for us, it makes the military, all of us here pretty much feel like we can make the election.
VO #39 (12 sec.) According to Florida law, absentee ballots must be postmarked or signed and dated by election day. Democrats sought to disqualify ballots, which did not follow these rules.
Karen Hughes: The targeted effort by the democratic party sought to throw out as many as a third of the overseas absentee ballots received since election day. Many of them, the votes of the men and women of our United States Armed Forces who are serving the cause of freedom throughout the world.
Mark Herron: The rules that we try to impart to our people were the rules for everybody, civilians and military. It became the military can vote no matter what, and that was the chant that was picked up by the Republican lawyers subsequently and that's how they were able in my view to brow beat Canvasing Boards around the state into accepting votes that were illegal as hell.
Dan Keating: There were widespread counties that counted ballots that were patently not legal. You know, because they were postmarked after the election. Or they were from people who weren't even registered to vote in the county.
VO #40 (9 sec.) A New York Times investigation found 680 illegal absentee ballots included in the official election results certified by Katherine Harris.
Sean Holton: And only the performance that Bush, the boost he got from the absentee overseas ballots that were certified 10 days later, that's where he got his official margin of 537 votes.
CARD: Graphic illegal postmarks
VO #41 (24 sec.) The Democrats lost votes to this Republican strategy. But they received good news on the legal front. The Florida Supreme Court moved the deadline for the hand recount to November 26th. Republicans immediately appealed to the United States Supreme Court and stepped up pressure on the local election boards.
Mark Seibel: Raucous demonstrations including by congressional aids that had Republicans who had been flown in from- from Washington.
Mark Seibel: There became this- this pounding on the doors and- and really kind of a Republican mini-riot.
VO #42 (3 sec.) In Miami the demonstration was led by republican staffers.
M19: The Canvassing Board when they did reassemble publicly just decided to stop counting all together.
VO #43 (3 sec.) The Broward County recount faced similar pressure.
Peter Deutsch: We will not approve of paid political operatives from out of state coming to Broward County and stop the fair and accurate count.
VO #44 (23 sec.) When the deadline arrived, in Broward County there was a net gain of 563 votes for Al Gore. Valusia County showed a net gain of 96 votes for Gore. Palm Beach County was not able to finish by the deadline. They filed what they had completed and continued counting. But Katherine Harris rejected these returns.
Katherine Harris: Palm Beach County has submitted a document that purports to be an amended return, but contains two different compilations of the presidential vote.
VO #45 (5 sec.) The Miami-Dade recount had been shut down, so no returns were filed.
VO #46 (5 sec.) On November 26th, Katherine Harris made the official announcement.
Katherine Harris: On behalf of the State Election Canvasing Commission, and in accordance with the laws of the State of Florida, I hereby declare Governor George W. Bush, the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes for the President for the United States.
VO #47 (8 sec.) The game seemed lost for the Democrats. But they approached the Florida courts to contest the election one last time.
VO #48 (3 sec.) Then, a stunning announcement.
M19: By a vote of 4 to 3, the majority of the court has reversed the decision of the trial court in part. The Circuit Court shall order a manual recount of all under votes in any Florida County where such a recount has not yet occurred.
James Baker III: We have no alternative other than to appeal once again to the Supreme Court of the United States for relief. We have already put in motion the process to do that.
Vincent Bugliosi: That recounting started on the morning of December the 9th, at 8:00 a.m.
VO #49 (7 sec.) Three hours later the United States Supreme Court granted the Republicans an emergency stay stopping the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court.
Supreme Court as a revered institution like no other. And if we can't rely on them to be above the fray, to be above politics, whom can we rely upon?
M20: A very unusual late night ruling from the United States Supreme Court -- lawyers, students and history buffs line up to grab a copy of the ruling that ended it all.
M21: Court rules 5 to 4, that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court is so flawed there's no way to start it up again and make –
M20: The decision ending any lingering hope of a recount.
Jamin Raskin: The Supreme Court is a political institution and we should be clear about that. Politics is inextricably bound up with the interpretation of the law. There's no use in pretending as if most of the time the Supreme Court actually judges and in this one case they acted like politicians. No, they -- politics is always part of what they do.
Vincent Bugliosi: They based their ruling on the allegation that in Florida because there was a lack of a uniform standard of counting votes, this violated the Equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Ed Baker: If when applied the standard that the court wanted to use, it would probably invalidate all the elections in the country. You couldn't take them- them seriously in that. The notion that all voters should have their voted -- vote count equally, would for instance mean, that if different voting machines operate differently, then a state couldn't have different voting machines in different precincts. All states do that.
VO #50 (7 sec.) The United States Supreme Court also ignored long standing Florida court rulings which permit hand recounts.
lan Dershowitz: The Florida courts had for 75 years had a governing principle that the intent of the voter prevails over technicalities.
F8: Are you really saying that the votes, the 9,000 --
Alan Dershowitz: And that's been Florida law 75 years. The Supreme Court simply ignored it. They didn't quote that provision of Florida law, they made believe it didn't exist.
CARD: Graphic dissenting opinions
Vincent Bugliosi: The dissenting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, all four of them said "If you're really serious about the fact that there's an Equal protection violation here and we don’t want that. We want a uniformed standard, there's a very simple solution. Send the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to come up with a uniform standard, and then continue the vote for six more days.
VO #51 (6 sec.) The court majority then ruled that their decision would apply only to the Bush vs. Gore case.
Jamin Raskin: The Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the actual disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters in Florida and said, "What do you mean use equal protection to freeze the voting?" Because the pregnant chads might be treated differently in one county than in another. It's got nothing to do with anything that would actually benefit people.
Vincent Bugliosi: Legal scholars say this is probably the first time in the 210 year history of the United States Supreme Court, that the court limited its ruling to the case in front of it. They knew that if that ruling were applied elsewhere, it would invalidate elections throughout the entire country. So what did they do? They said, "We'll solve the problem. We'll apply it only to this case right here."
CARD: Graphic Supreme Court rules
John Nichols: The U.S. Supreme Court has precise rules on when a judge should take himself or herself off a case. Anthony Scalia's two sons, both worked for law firms that had represented the Bush campaign in the recount process. After the recount process, one of his sons received a top-level appointment by the Bush administration to be the legal counsel for the labor department.
CARD: Graphics scalia photo
John Nichols: And it is unreasonable to suggest that Anthony Scalia did not understand those potential advantages. It is equally unreasonable to suggest that Clarence Thomas, whose wife had the role of reviewing resumes for potential Bush appointees. And it is unreasonable to suggest the he couldn't have recognized that there was a clear conflict there that his wife's role would be enhanced, advantaged by a Bush victory.
Alan Dershowitz: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She said in front of witnesses that she was very, very upset and she said this is terrible when the projections were that Gore would win the election. Her husband explained to the crowd that it was terrible because she wanted to retire and would only retire if a Republican could name her successor.
CARD: Graphic highlight 4 justices
VO #52 (22 sec.) The four justices who opposed the majority each wrote a dissenting opinion. The most forceful was Justice Stephens’, who wrote: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
CARD: Graphic Zoom in on Stephens
VO #53 (14 sec.) In November 2001, a media consortium which included the Washington Post, Orlando Sentinel, New York Times and Los Angeles Times released the results of a thorough analysis of Florida's unread ballots.
Dan Keating: Based on what is marked on the ballots,
if you look at every ballot, it would indicate that
more people voted for Gore.
Sean Holton: We found anywhere from 2,000 to 25,000 ballots out of these 175,000 ballots were, in fact, legal votes.
Dan Keating: The reason why there's a lot of retrievable over votes, is this pattern, particularly on optical ballots where people vote the candidate and then they go to the bottom of the ballot. And at the bottom after the candidates it says, "Write in candidate name." Well, a lot of people followed that instruction, they wrote it in again.
Sean Holton: The state law that was in play during the election specifically says you have to count such ballots as votes.
CARD: Newspaper Mastheads and headlines.
VO #54 (9 sec.) It is only when the state’s under votes were counted, that Bush would have retained his lead.
Victoria Wilson: Well how can some counties be counted and others not counted without discrimination?
Clayton Roberts: I don’t think that they can. But there is some uh.. counties where the supervisors have interpreted the statutes to not require a machine recount in that automatic machine recount.
F10: The people who commit a kind of voter fraud regularly in American elections, are the people who run those elections. And they do have an incentive because American elections are not run by nonpartisan officials. American elections are run by the parties.
F10: It's a way of fixing elections by trying to make it less likely that some people vote than other people vote.
Chris Sauter: I think he himself, his own instincts from what I've read subsequently were that he should go for a statewide hand count. But he was talked out of it by some of his advisors.
John Nichols: After the election their job was to make sure that the votes were counted, all the votes, not just their own. They got so concerned about finding the 500 votes that they needed, that they forgot their broader responsibility.
Jake Tapper: So in the end they settled on these four Democratic leaning counties. Instead of getting or asking for a statewide recount of all 175,000 ballots that were unread, they focused on these four. And uh.. I think that was a mistake. I think that was a serious mistake.
John Nichols: But the Gore camp would have won, they would have- they would have pulled this thing off had they been good citizens. Had they actually gone out and said, "We really do want every vote counted and we want to make sure that everybody is treated fairly."
F11: It's- it's a hard test for an African-American person to really go out and vote, because we're not- we're not sure whether this person is really for us or against us.
F12: Whereas people think that this- this election coming up is going to be all right, it's not going to be all right. They- they have plans for us. They have the money and they have the plan.
F11: Because if you take these same people back to the poll again and this happen again, you know what's going to happen next -- the next election, no one is going to show up.
M21: That's what they want you to do. They want you to get disgusted. That's the part of the plan okay. You don't want -- we got to keep on fighting, we have to keep on -- you can't- you can't give up.
F13: Always remember that one person can make a difference in this world if you just really have passion and commitment that it just exhumes and it's contagious. But then you've got to get out and organize. And so if you really passionately believe in something, you can organize other people will be drawn to you like a magnet.
F14: The idea is to again build a new generation of young people who are thinking about- about voting rights, about electoral reform and about the weaknesses in democracy and how they tie to the issues that they care about.
Kweisi Mfume: We recognize that this strange and sometimes twisted democracy that we have, it's our democracy nonetheless. It is what we make it. And so stewards of that democracy I think we have a very special responsibility to make sure that we improve upon it. And that we leave a democracy and a democratic form of government to the next generation that they can be proud of and recognized that it is one that has survived the test of time and it will survive this and it will get better because of this.
CARD: A coalition of civil rights organizations filed a lawsuit against Katherine Harris, Clayton Roberts, and Data Base Technologies alleging discriminatory policies in Florida’s electoral system.
CARD: As part of a settlement, Data Base Technologies has agreed to assist the plaintiffs in identifying voters who had been wrongfully purged from the rolls.
CARD: The U.S. Department of Justice found that three Florida counties failed to provide proper language assistance to voters during the 2000 Presidential election.
CARD: The U.S> Department of Justice has not addressed other allegations of voting rights violations.
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