A few days ago, I saw the documentary Unprecedented: the 20000 Presidential election, and LA Independent Media Center Film by filmmakers Richard Ray Pérez and Joan Sekler. I had paid close attention to events during the Florida recount and had heard most of the facts, but the strength of this documentary comes from placing all these different elements of malfeasance and fraud together and making use of results of public inquiry made after the elections.
They start off by talking about Jeb Bush. He lost his first bid for Florida governor. During that campaign, when asked what he could do for African-Americans in Florida, he responded "Not much". When he won his second race for governor, he did more than that, he removed most affirmative action laws. That prompted a large voter registration campaign by African-Americans for the 2000 elections, with the take five people to the polls drive. As a result, in 2000, 65% more African-American voters went the poles. But there they faced multiple obstacles. Many weren't on the roster, although they had voted in the same county previously. Some voter were wasked for multiple forms of id, although state law has not such requirement. Police gave tickets for loitering to people waiting in line. Who knows how many votes were lost this way. But there were more coordinated modes of voter exclusion:
(a) the felon purge list - this involved the misuse of a 1868 florida law, written by ex-confederate soldiers, in order to exclude many Af-Am from voting. Since then, it had been used haphazardly, but in 1998, the Florida State Legislature toughened the law, requiring a private firm to compile a computerized felon list. Katherine Harris, in charge of implementing the making of this list, hired Data Base Technologies (DBT). Florida state officials told DBT to use loose parameters in building the list. In Unprecendented, Greg Palast explains that among these parameters were the disregard of middle initials and Jr./Sr., the use of only the first four letters of the first name, a close apporximation of a persons birthdate. So that if your name somewhat matched that of a convicted felon anywhere in the states, you were put on the purge list. It was later shown that DBT had concerns about this practice and the number of resulting false positives.They wrote Emett Mitchell IV of the state government, and the state replied this is how they wanted the list compiled.
(b) Even if you conviction date appeared to be somewhere in the future - which I didn't quite understand how that could be. But they showed a excluded voter, whose conviction date was in 2007. Most of these were dealt with by blanking out the conviction dates. There were 4,000 missing conviction dates. 50% of these were Af-Am. 93% of the Af-Ams voted Democrat in Florida. Overall, its estimated that 15% of the people on the list were not felons. Someone points out that the state payed 4 million dol. to compile felon list, but would not spend 100,000 dol. on voter education.
[The trick to watching the documentary is to add up the number of votes that were not cast or thrown out, and how it swamps the differance between Gore and Bush.]
(c) In addition, 2,883 ex-offenders, convicted outside of Florida, whose voters rights were restored, and subsequently moved to Florida, were wrongfully not allowed to vote. According to Florida Supreme Court, you cannot have any of your civil rights removed when entering the state. However, Jeb Bush required that these ex-felons, some of which had already voted after leaving prison, had to write him and ask for permission to vote, a requirement that appears nowhere in state law. 93% of people coming out of prison vote democrat. So the future president's brother and Florida governor, Jeb Bush, and the Bush Florida Campaign director and Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, knew they were desenfranchising sectors that voted democrat overwhelmingly.

Then came election date, Nov 7th 2000. Remember staying up until late, and then finally concluding it was going to take longer than normal.
Of the 6,137,938 ballots cast, Bush was ahead 1,784 votes in the first count. As this was <0.03%, less than a 'tenth of a percentage point' state requires an automatic recount. This was done in the same way, by machines. On the second count, the margin was reduced to 350. This in itself is amazing. 350 votes separated the presidential candidates!. [Of course, not counting at all all those desenfranchised voters mentioned earlier.] After the machine recount, officials revealed that 175,000 ballots were uncounted by machines, wither because they were under- or overvotes. Here's were the 'butterfly ballot' comes in. This is the ballot with names of presidential candidates on both sides of a middles strip where voters had to punch their vote. The order of the holes alternated in correspondance to names to its left and right, such that the second hole corresponded not to Al Gore, the name underneath George Bush in the left-side column, but to Pat Buchanan, who was the first name on the right side column. 5,300 ballots overvoted for Buchanan and Gore. There was also the catterpillar ballot (this one I had missed): a multi-page ballot, with the explicit instruction that voters need vote on every page. The problem is there were presidential candidates on more than one page. This lead to 27,000 overvotes being thrown out in Duval county. 16,000 of these were in precints that vote 98% democratic. [Still counting?]
As a result of these irregularities, the Gore campaign, lead by Warren Christopher, requested manual recounts in only 4 counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volucia. The fact that a state-wide manual recount was immediately requested was heavily criticized by different interviewees in the documentary. An the legal battle begins. The Bush side was lead by James Baker III and had the help of many Jeb Bush key aides that resigned shortly after a mess was percieved and joined the Bush campaign full time.
Katherine Harris refused to delay the state certification deadline of Nov 17th, which wouldn't give enough time for manual recounts. The democrats appealed to the State Supreme Court. The Court ordered a delay of certifications pending their rule on the case. During the delay, the manual recounts continued and a battle over absentee ballots began. Ironically, because democrats wanted to exclude the absentee ballots cast after the election, the Bush camp turned the table on Gore argument, and accused him of wanted to not count all the votes, particularly those by voters serving in the armed forces.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled the deadline of certification moved to Nov 26th. Republicans appealed to US Supreme Court. Amid vociferous protests from Bush supporters, the counties continued counting. When Nov 26th arrived, Palm Beach hadn't yet finished recount and Miami-Dade decided to shut down because of pressures from protesters lead by Republican staffers. Broward county reported a net gain of 563 ballot gain for Gore and Volucia County a 96 gain for Gore: a sum 659 ballot net gain for Gore. Hoever, combined with the absentee ballots, mostly republican, gave Bush a margin of 537 votes. The NY Times later reported that 680 overseas absentee ballots marked after election day were certified by K.Harris. Based on the official count, on Nov 26th, Katherine Harris excluded to unfinished return from Palm Beach and delcared Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes. The Gore campaign went back to the courts, and by a vote of 4-3, the Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts in Florida counties were these had not yet occurred. The recount Dec 9th deadline. The Republicans appealed to the US Supreme Court. Their 4-3 ruling, on Dec. 12th, to stay the recount ended the election. Their majority argument was that the lack of a uniform standard for counting manually violated the 'equal protection clause' of the 14th ammendment. The dissenting Supreme court justices argued that if a unform standard was lacking, send the case back to Florida and request them to devise one. According to Alan Dershowitz, the ruling ignored Florida court rulings in which 'voter intent prevails over tecnicalities'. The decision was unique in that it only applies to Bush vs. Gore, because the majority was full aware that if it were used broadly, given the heterogeneity of standards nationwide, any elections in the US would be invalid.
In 2001, a media consortium including the NYTImes, Washington Post, LA Times and Orlando Sentinal and others, analyzed the statewide 175,000 unread ballots. Somewhere from 2,000 to 20,000 of these were retrievable votes. Their results were published on Nov 12 2001, and conclude that if you look at all of the ballots, in all the Florida counties, Gore would have won by a small margin.
However, if you included only their recounts for the 4 counties requested by Gore - and which had never been completed - then Bush had more votes. The media, almost without exception, made more of the later fact. Inside, however you would find that a full statewide review - never requested, which the Florida Supreme Court had permited, but the US Supreme Court disavowed - would have given Al Gore the majority of Florida votes . The Washington Post presents a table, with the margin of votes favorable for Gore, regardless of the method used. Actually, the more accepting the method is (say from 'fully produced chads and limited marks on optical ballots' to 'one corner of chad or any optical mark') the smaller the margin for Gore. The later method would have given him a margin of 60 votes statewide.