> So recount all the counties.

There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...

> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted

That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1

Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.

What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...

See also: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/partisanship-my...

> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.

> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore

> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”

That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.

Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.

> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).

The butterfly ballot could have been better designed, but there was an arrow clearly pointing to what hole voters were supposed to punch: https://static-propublica-org.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/s...