page_title: 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida
section_title: Controversial issues
hierarchical_section_title: 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida / Recount / Controversial issues
caption_attribution_description: Florida Supreme Court Building, Tallahassee, Florida
context_page_description: The Florida election recount of 2000 was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court.
  Bush's win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.
context_section_description: Various flaws and improprieties in Florida's electoral processes were immediately apparent, while others were reported after later investigation. Controversies included:
  All five major U.S. TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) assumed that they could confidently call a winner in any state "where the vast majority of polls had closed", based on history. No call in a state with two different poll-closing times had ever turned out wrong. While most of Florida is in the Eastern time zone, polls in the westernmost counties in Florida were open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they are in the Central time zone. The network calls were made about ten minutes before the polls in the Central time zone closed, based on the Voter News Service calling the state of Florida for Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who might not have voted due to the networks' call as high as 15,000, which could have reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes; a study by Fox News columnist John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes. This survey assumed that the turnout in the Panhandle counties, which was 65%, would have equaled the statewide average of 68% if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. But the relatively smaller turnout percentage in the Panhandle has been attributed to the surge in the black vote elsewhere in Florida to 16% of the total, from 10% of the total in 1996. In a 2010 television special by the TV Guide Network, the "2000 Election Flip Flop Coverage" ranked #3 on a list of the 25 biggest TV blunders, having caused news outlets to change the way they report on election night.
  Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up roadblocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election. The Voting Section of the U. S. Department of Justice later investigated reports from the Tallahassee and Tampa areas and concluded that there was no evidence that roadblocks were related to the election or had occurred in close proximity to voting places.
  On November 8, Florida Division of Elections staff prepared a press release for Secretary of State Katherine Harris that said overseas ballots must be "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day. It was never released. Harris did send out a letter saying that absentee ballots without postmarks must be discarded, but Florida's Attorney General subsequently said they should not be. On November 13, Harris issued her first statement on overseas ballots, saying that they had to be "executed" on or before Election Day, not "postmarked on or prior to" Election Day. Over Thanksgiving, 14 county boards decided to include 288 overseas ballots that had been rejected days earlier, an act that was dubbed the Thanksgiving stuffing.
  On November 14, Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo on how to challenge flawed ballots, including overseas ballots cast by members of the military. The Herron memo gave postmark and "point of origin" criteria that Herron maintained could be used to challenge overseas ballots. It was in line with a letter sent out by Harris stating that if a postmark was not present on an overseas ballot, it had to be thrown out. Meanwhile, Republicans relied on their own 52-page manual for the same purpose. But on November 19, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore supporter, later told the counties to reconsider those ballots without a postmark. Before that, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce postmark requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots from overseas, which were p
caption: Supreme Court of Florida.
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