United States presidential election of 2000 | United States government | Britannica.com United States presidential election of 2000 United States government United States presidential election of 2000, American presidential election held on Nov. 7, 2000, in which Republican George W. Bush narrowly lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore but defeated Gore in the electoral college . Results of the American presidential election, 2000… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The campaign Gore, as Bill Clinton ’s vice president for eight years, was the clear favourite in the primary to win the Democratic nomination. He captured it easily, seeing off a challenge from Bill Bradley , a former U.S. senator from New Jersey . Al Gore. © Lisa Quinones—Black Star/PNI Most of the excitement in the primaries came on the Republican side, as Bush faced a stiff challenge from John McCain , a U.S. senator from Arizona; other candidates included businessman Steve Forbes , diplomat and conservative commentator Alan Keyes , U.S. senator Orrin Hatch , and conservative activist Gary Bauer. Bush ultimately prevailed after a strenuous fight, including an especially brutal effort by the Bush campaign in the South Carolina primary.

George W. Bush at a campaign rally in Melbourne, Florida, 2000. Paul J. Richards—AFP/Getty Images Despite the continued economic growth that Gore could attribute to his economic stewardship with Clinton, early in the general election campaign it appeared that Bush might easily defeat Gore, who appeared wooden and dismissive of Bush in the campaign’s debates and who was criticized repeatedly by the Bush campaign as an exaggerator. In late October, however, the gap in the polls between Bush and Gore narrowed dramatically. On election night, no clear winner emerged. Print and broadcast media cited often contradictory exit-polling numbers, and the races in Oregon and New Mexico would remain too close to call for some days. Ultimately, the contest focused on Florida. Networks initially projected Gore the winner in Florida, but later they declared that Bush had opened an insurmountable lead. Gore called Bush to concede the election, but in the early hours of the following morning it became apparent that the Florida race was much closer than Gore’s staff had originally believed. Fewer than 600 votes separated the candidates, and that margin appeared to be narrowing. About 3:00 am Gore called a stunned Bush to retract his concession .

Similar Topics United States presidential election of 1972 Florida state election law required a mandatory statewide machine recount. By November 10 the machine recount was complete, and Bush’s lead stood at 327 votes out of six million cast. As court challenges were issued over the legality of hand recounts in select counties, news stories were filled with the arcane vocabulary of the election judge. County officials tried to discern voter intent through a cloud of “hanging chads” (incompletely punched paper ballots) and “pregnant chads” (paper ballots that were dimpled, but not pierced, during the voting process), as well as “overvotes” (ballots that recorded multiple votes for the same office) and “undervotes” (ballots that recorded no vote for a given office). Also at issue was the so-called butterfly ballot design used in Palm Beach county, which caused confusion among some Gore voters—prompting them to inadvertently cast their votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan , who received some 3,400 (some 20 percent of his total votes statewide).

A canvassing board member showing a disputed ballot to an election observer at the Broward County … Rhoma Wise—AFP/Getty Images Sample ballot from Palm Beach county, Florida, for the 2000 U.S. presidential election. By late November the Florida state canvassing board certified Bush the winner by 537 votes, but the election still was unresolved, as legal battles remained. Eventually, the Florida Supreme Court decided (4–3) to order a statewide manual recount of the approximately 45,000 undervotes—ballots that machines recorded as not clearly expressing a presidential vote—and accepted some previously uncertified results in both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, reducing Bush’s lead to a mere 154 votes. The Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to delay the recounts until it could hear the case; a stay was issued by the court on December 9.

Three days later, concluding (7–2) that a fair statewide recount could not be performed in time to meet the December 18 deadline for certifying the state’s electors, the court issued a controversial 5–4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court’s recount order, effectively awarding the presidency to Bush (see Bush v. Gore ). By winning Florida, Bush narrowly won the electoral vote over Gore by 271 to 266—only 1 more than the required 270 (one Gore elector abstained). Gore, however, won the popular vote over Bush by some 500,000 votes—the first inversion of the electoral and popular vote since 1888. Britannica Stories George W. Bush - U.S. Presidents - HISTORY.com Google George W. Bush: Education, Family and Early Political Career Bush, the oldest of six children of George H.W. Bush (1924-) and Dorothy Pierce Bush (1925-), was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven Connecticut , when his father, a former World War II naval aviator, was a student at Yale University.

He was raised in Texas , where the senior Bush was an executive in the oil industry, and attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts . Bush went on to Yale, the alma mater of his father and grandfather, Prescott Bush (1985-1972), a banker and U.S. senator, and earned a degree in history in 1968. Did You Know? Bush was the first son of a president to become president since John Quincy Adams. That same year, with America fighting the Vietnam War (1954-75), Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard. He trained to become a pilot and completed his active-duty service in 1970. In 1973, he entered Harvard Business School, and received an MBA in 1975. Bush then returned to Texas to work in the oil and gas industry and eventually started his own exploration company. On November 5, 1977, he married Laura Welch (1946-), a librarian and school teacher. The couple had twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, in 1981. In 1978, Bush ran for the U.S.

House of Representatives from Texas but lost to his Democratic opponent in the general election. Afterward, he returned to his oil business, which he sold in 1986. Bush moved to Washington , D.C., to work on his father’s successful 1988 presidential campaign, and the following year became an investor in the Texas Rangers baseball team (he sold his ownership stake in 1998 for $15 million). In 1994, Bush defeated Democratic incumbent Ann Richards to become governor of Texas. He was re-elected four years later. In the summer of 1999, Bush announced his candidacy for president, and campaigned as a “compassionate conservative.” George W. Bush: 2000 Presidential Election In the 2000 election, Bush and running mate Dick Cheney (1941-), a former congressman and U.S. defense secretary under George H.W. Bush, defeated Vice President Al Gore (1948-) and his running mate, U.S.

Senator Joe Lieberman (1942-) of Connecticut, by a margin of 271-266 electoral votes, though Gore won the popular vote by 48.4 percent to Bush’s 47.9 percent. The 2000 election was the fourth election in U.S. history in which the winner of the electoral votes did not carry the popular vote. George W. Bush: First Presidential Term: 2001-2005 Bush’s first term in the White House was dominated by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against America, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed, and their aftermath. The following month, in response to the attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to overthrow the Taliban government, which was suspected of harboring Osama Bin Laden (1957-2011), leader of Al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban regime was quickly toppled; however, Bin Laden was not captured for another decade.

With the goal of protecting the United States from future terrorist attacks, Bush also signed the Patriot Act into law created the Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which was officially established in November 2002. Then, in the spring of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in order to overthrow leader Sadaam Hussein (1937-2006), whose regime was accused of supporting international terrorist groups and possessing large caches of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In December 2003, U.S. forces captured Hussein (who was later executed by Iraqi officials); however, no WMDs were ever discovered. Also in his first term, Bush won Congressional approval of widespread tax-cut bills and the Medicare prescription drug coverage program for seniors; signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law; allocated billions of dollars to fight HIV/AIDS around the world; created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and withdrew America’s support of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was signed by President Bill Clinton and was intended to combat worldwide global warming (Bush said he was concerned that the international agreement’s requirements would hurt the U.S. economy).

Bush ran for re-election in 2004 and defeated Democratic challenger John Kerry (1943-), a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, by a margin of 286-251 electoral votes and with 50.7 percent of the popular vote to Kerry’s 48.3 percent George W. Bush: Second Presidential Term: 2005-2009 Bush enjoyed strong public approval ratings throughout much of his first term; however, during his second term his popularity plummeted. Critics said Bush had used misleading claims about Iraq’s WMDs as a justification for the invasion of that Middle Eastern nation. Additionally, after Hurricane Katrina devastated America’s Gulf Coast region in August 2005, resulting in some 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in damages, the Bush administration was widely criticized for its slow response to the disaster. A troubled economy also contributed to Americans’ dissatisfaction with Bush. He began his presidency with a federal budget surplus; however, factors such as the enormous cost of fighting two wars and the broad tax cuts led to annual budget deficits starting in 2002.

Then, in 2008, with America experiencing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Congress passed a series of controversial Bush administration-sponsored plans to bail out the financial industry with hundreds of billions in federal funds. Bush also lobbied unsuccessfully for a plan to replace Social Security with private retirement savings accounts. Throughout his terms, Bush rarely wavered from his stance as a social conservative. He made two nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, both in 2005: Chief Justice John Roberts (1955-) and Samuel Alito (1950-), both regarded as judicial conservatives. George W. Bush: Post-Presidency Following the January 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama (1961-), Bush left office as a polarizing figure. He and first lady Laura Bush returned to Texas, where they divided their time between homes in Dallas and Crawford. In 2010, Bush released a memoir, “Decision Points,” in 2010, but otherwise maintained a low national profile. Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault . Start your free trial today.

Tags 2000 US Election 2000 US Election US Prez Polls' Results Declared: Donald Trump President Elect, Mike Pence VP The much anticipated results of the US Presidential elections were finally declared late on November 8, 2016. The Republican Party has scored a landslide victory. Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence are going to be the next President and Vice President of the USA. Republican Dominance in House of Reps to Stay The Republicans' dominance in the US House of Representatives is set to continue. While the party may find it difficult to retain majority in the Senate, continued Republican dominance in the House could hamper any legislative agenda taken up by Clinton, in case she is elected. On the other hand, Trump's victory could lead to a prompt demise of outgoing President and Democrat member Barack Obama's health reforms.﻿ Tweets about @Mapsofworld The 2000 US Election is considered to be one of the closest Presidential elections in the history of US Presidential elections. The 2000 US election saw the defeat of the Democratic Party candidate Al Gore and the victory of George W. Bush, the candidate of the US Republican Party. George W.

Bush defeated Al Gore with the margin of only 537 popular votes and merely five electoral votes. The nomination process of the Democrats in the US Presidential Election of 2000 was conspicuous because of the reluctance of serious candidates to run for the nominations. The popularity of Vice-President Al Gore was largely uncontested, and he was almost a unanimous choice for the party. Whatever competition he faced was in the form of Bill Bradley, the former Senator of New Jersey. Joe Lieberman was nominated as the running mate to Al Gore. The Republican nomination, on the other hand saw the participation of a number of candidates. However, the only serious challenge to George W. Bush, son of the former US-President George H.W. Bush, came in the early stages of the primaries through Alan Keyes. John McCain also posed some serious challenge. Despite an early loss to McCain at the New Hampshire primary, George W. Bush ultimately won the nomination quite handsomely. He secured as many as 2038 delegate votes. Bush selected Richard B. (Dick) Cheney as his running mate. The inclusion of Ralph Nader as the third party candidate further added to the excitement of the elections.

Soon after securing his nomination, Bush started vigorous campaigning tours for ensuring his success in the 2000 US Presidential Election. Gore also stressed on the economic progress of the country and consciously downplayed the Clinton scandal. The Republicans however, used it as a pointer to prove the overall moral degradation of the American society, a trend that they pledged to stop. Bush not only emphasized on improving the social scenario of the country, but also promised an establishment of peace and integrity within the country. The election of 2000 did not lack in drama, and the result was one of the most controversial ones in the history of US Presidential elections. After the two competitors ran neck to neck, almost equally sharing the spoils, problems resulted after the counting began in Florida. After a series of unexpected turns to the event, Bush was finally declared winner with a slender margin of around 500 votes. Gore immediately asked for recounting. The incident gave rise to a number of lawsuits, and it was only after prolonged legal debates that Bush was finally declared to have carried Florida.

At the end, Gore ended up with marginally more votes than Bush in the popular votes, securing 48.4% of the votes to Bush's 47.9%. However, when the electoral votes were cast, Bush won the day with five more votes than Gore. Bush received 271 electoral votes, whereas Gore received 266 electoral votes. Gore's defeat is often accounted to his loss in his home state Tennessee. BBC ON THIS DAY | 8 | 2000: Bush and Gore fight to the finish About This Site | Text Only 2000: Bush and Gore fight to the finish The result of the American presidential election is still hanging in the balance hours after the last polls officially closed. Votes are still being counted in the key state of Florida where it seems there are only a few hundred votes separating the two would-be presidents. Early exit polls claimed Republican George W Bush had taken the Sunshine State - but the claim was later retracted. The Democrat White House hopeful, Al Gore, had apparently been on the verge of admitting defeat.

Circumstances have changed since I first called you Al Gore He had already phoned Mr Bush to offer his congratulations when he was told the Florida result was still too close to call. Mr Gore telephoned Governor Bush a second time to withdraw his concession. He said: "Circumstances have changed since I first called you. "We have now learned we are down by only about 600 votes out of millions cast and that means an automatic recount." The election campaign has been one of the closest for years. National polls gave Governor Bush a slender lead as voters went to the polls but one survey gave Al Gore a two point advantage suggesting he could still win the race. A high turnout of blacks and union members appears to have helped Mr Gore in the large industrial states. Jeb Bush, Mr Bush's brother and governor of Florida, had promised to deliver the state for his brother. The Texas governor appeared to hold a slender advantage in a string of swing states, including Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Nevada. If he wins in Florida, he will probably have enough electoral college votes to become president. It is possible Mr Bush could win the electoral college but lose the popular vote.

This has not happened since 1888 when Benjamin Harrison became President even though Grover Cleveland had amassed more votes. Mr Bush closed his White House campaign by vowing to be a "uniter not a divider" if elected president and Mr Gore promised to "fight for you". If Mr Bush were to win, he would be the first son of a former president to win the White House since John Quincy Adams was elected in 1824. For Mr Gore, the son of a senator, victory would represent fulfilment of a childhood ambition and the culmination of 24 years as a congressman, senator and vice-president. He ended his campaign with a whistle-stop tour of five states, ending in Florida. He was joined in Miami by celebrity supporters including actors Robert de Niro, Glenn Close, Ben Affleck and Stevie Wonder. Al Gore concedes presidential election - Dec 13, 2000 - HISTORY.com This Day in History: 12/13/2003 - Saddam Hussein Captured After the decision in Bush v. Gore, Vice President Al Gore conceded the presidential election on December 13, 2000, making George W. Bush the President.

It was also on this same day, in the year 1642, that the country of New Zealand was discovered, and in 1978, the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar was entered into the currency. This was the first time a coin had honored a woman in United State's history. Lastly, it was on December 13, 1918, that a President first traveled to Europe during his term in office. This President was none other than Woodrow Wilson, and he visited France. To learn what else occurred in history on December 13th, watch the This Day in History video. Lead Story Al Gore concedes presidential election Share this: Al Gore concedes presidential election Author Al Gore concedes presidential election URL Publisher A+E Networks Vice President Al Gore reluctantly concedes defeat to Texas Governor George W. Bush in his bid for the presidency, following weeks of legal battles over the recounting of votes in Florida, on this day in 2000.

In a televised speech from his ceremonial office next to the White House, Gore said that while he was deeply disappointed and sharply disagreed with the Supreme Court verdict that ended his campaign, ”partisan rancor must now be put aside.” “I accept the finality of the outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College” he said. “And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Gore had won the national popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, but narrowly lost Florida, giving the Electoral College to Bush 271 to 266. Gore said he had telephoned Bush to offer his congratulations, honoring him, for the first time, with the title ”president-elect.” ”I promised that I wouldn’t call him back this time” Gore said, referring to the moment on election night when he had called Bush to tell him he was going to concede, then called back a half hour later to retract that concession. Gore only hinted at what he might do in the future. ”I’ve seen America in this campaign and I like what I see.

It’s worth fighting for—and that’s a fight I’ll never stop.” Among the friends and family beside Gore were his wife, Tipper, and his running mate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, and his wife, Hadassah. A little more than an hour later, Bush addressed the nation for the first time as president-elect, declaring that the “nation must rise above a house divided.” Speaking from the podium of the Texas House of Representatives, Bush devoted his speech to themes of reconciliation following one of the closest and most disputed presidential elections in U.S. history. ”I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation,” Bush said. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, took office onJanuary 20, 2001. They were re-elected in 2004 over Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards. Related Videos The Stolen Presidential Elections The Stolen Presidential Elections (updated version, May 2007) In one of the closest contests in U.S. history, the 2000 presidential election between Democratic Vice-President Al Gore and Republican governor of Texas George W. Bush (hereafter referred to as Bush Jr.

to distinguish him from his father who was also a president), the final outcome hinged on how the vote went in Florida. Independent investigations in that state revealed serious irregularities directed mostly against ethnic minorities and low-income residents who usually voted heavily Democratic. Some 36,000 newly registered voters were turned away because their names had never been added to the voter rolls by Florida’s secretary of state Kathleen Harris. By virtue of the office she held, Harris presided over the state’s election process while herself being an active member of the Bush Jr. state-wide campaign committee. Other voters were turned away because they were declared--almost always incorrectly--“convicted felons.” In several Democratic precincts, state officials closed the polls early, leaving lines of would-be voters stranded. Under orders from Governor Jeb Bush (Bush Jr.’s brother), state troopers near polling sites delayed people for hours while searching their cars. Some precincts required two photo IDs which many citizens do not have. The requirement under Florida law was only one photo ID. Passed just before the election, this law itself posed a special difficulty for low-income or elderly voters who did not have drivers licenses or other photo IDs.

Uncounted ballot boxes went missing or were found in unexplained places or were never collected from certain African-American precincts. During the recount, GOP agitators shipped in from Washington D.C. by the Republican national leadership stormed the Dale County Canvassing Board, punched and kicked one of the officials, shouted and banged on their office doors, and generally created a climate of intimidation that caused the board to abandon its recount and accept the dubious pro-Bush tally. 1 Then a five-to-four conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in a logically tortured decision ruled that a complete recount in Florida would be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause because different counties have different ways of counting the votes. At that point Gore was behind by only a few hundred or so votes in Florida and was gaining ground with each attempt at a recount. By preventing a complete tally, the justices handed Florida’s electoral votes and the presidency to Bush, a stolen election in which the conservative activists on the Supreme Court played a key role. Even though Bush Jr. lost the nation’s popular vote to Gore by over half a million, he won the electoral college and the presidency itself. Florida was not the only problem.

Similar abuses and mistreatment of voters and votes occurred in other parts of the country. A study by computer scientists and social scientists estimated that four to six million votes were left uncounted in the 2000 election. 2 The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the incumbent president George W. Bush amounted to another stolen election. Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004. Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush Jr. with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000.

To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors. Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up. In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its candidate-—or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast, prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s huge budget deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats to individual liberties. Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry. 3 All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and a solid victory in the electoral college.

Yet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election by two million votes. What follows are examples of how the GOP “victory” was secured. 4 In some places large numbers of Democratic registration forms disappeared, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots. Sometimes absentee ballots were mailed out to voters just before election day, too late to be returned on time, or they were never mailed at all.Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the State Department were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004. Nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad--a noticeable number of whom formed anti-Bush organizations--never received their ballots or got them too late to vote. Military personnel, usually more inclined toward supporting the president, encountered no such problems with their overseas ballots. A person familiar with my work, Rick Garves, sent me this account of his attempt to cast an overseas ballot: I filled out the forms to register to vote absentee since I live here in Sweden. They were even done at a meeting for “Democrats Abroad in Stockholm.” I mailed the forms and when I got my packet back I looked at it and they had me as being in the military. Of course I am not and never have been.

I also never checked any boxes on the forms even remotely close to anything insinuating that I was in the military. So there was not enough time to fix the “error” and I did not even bother to vote because I knew they would check and find that I am not in the military and my vote would be invalidated. I now wonder even more if that happened because of the Pentagon taking over the handling of the absentee voter registration and too, how many more overseas voters had the same problem? Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rolls in several states because of “felonies” never committed, or committed by someone else, or for no given reason. Registration books in Democratic precincts were frequently out-of-date or incomplete. Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the Republican National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in Nevada, promising to turn them in to public officials, but then systematically destroyed the ones belonging to Democrats. Democratic precincts--enjoying record turnouts--were deprived of sufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many of the machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours many people went home without voting.

The noted political analyst and writer, Gregory Elich, sent me this account of his election day experience: I recall being surprised when I went to vote before work here in Ohio in 2004. Normally, at election time, I can go to the polling place before work, walk in and be in a voting booth in less than two minutes, even in a presidential election. In 2004, when I arrived I saw a long, snaking line of people. I waited twenty minutes, and the line barely moved. It was clear I would be late for work if I persisted, so I left and decided to take an hour or so of vacation time in the middle of the day to vote. I thought surely, in the middle of the work day, the line would not be bad. The line was worse, and it took me close to two hours to vote. My neighborhood is about 65 to 70 percent African-American. The next day, in conversation with an African-American co-worker, she told me that she waited in line for four hours. And I heard stories later of people waiting as long as 7 hours.

I also stopped at the post office, and voting was a topic of conversation for those of us in the post office line. The man ahead of me, who lived in a well-to-do neighborhood said he was surprised to hear the stories, because it only took him two minutes to vote. Just anecdotal stories, but there were so many more, that there certainly seemed to be a pattern in regard to wealthy vs. working class neighborhoods. Pro-Bush precincts almost always had enough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick and convenient. A similar pattern was observed with student populations in several states: students at conservative Christian colleges had little or no wait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were forced to line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up. In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the voting machines were locked in an office and apparently no one could find the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because John Kerry’s name had been “accidentally” removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.

A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while a polling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossibly low turnout of 7 percent. Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were readily given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush “won” an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush. Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls--all untrue. They went door to door offering to “deliver” absentee ballots to the proper office, and announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday.

Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut out by squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after the polls closed Republican officials announced a “terrorist attack” alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret, producing an amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000. It wasn’t the terrorists who attacked Warren County. Bush Jr. also did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush. In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush’s favor.

These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico’s Republican Secretary of State as an “administrative lapse.” Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush Jr. in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent. Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another. Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world. Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate because they were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out in greater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters are late sleepers.) In fact, the polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the earlier sampling.

It was also argued that exit pollsters focused more on women (who favored Kerry) than men, or perhaps large numbers of taciturn Republicans were less inclined than chatty Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations. Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome. In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.

One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls. In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail. Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine. A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed, and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail. Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, anomalous congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of Democrats who were substantially ahead in the polls.

All of Georgia’s voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, and Georgia’s incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts. In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat’s name found that the GOP candidate was chosen. It never happened the other way. No one reported choosing a Republican and ending up with the Democrat. In Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won the touchscreen contest by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, a near statistical impossibility. This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself. In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote (compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines, including counties that had shown record increases in Democratic voter registration.

5 In sum, despite an arsenal of foul ploys that prevented people from voting, those who did get to vote still went decisively for Kerry--but had their votes subverted by a rigged system. Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to allow election officials to evaluate the secret voting machine software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system, leaving it susceptible to fixed outcomes. Caveat emptor. Postscript. In the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, the Democrats won back the House with a 30-seat majority and the Senate by one seat. This might lead us to conclude that honest elections won the day. To be sure, the U.S. electoral system is a patchwork of fifty different state systems, all with additional county-level variations. So there must have been honestly conducted electoral proceedings in many parts of the country. Still, what has to be explained is why the Democratic victory was so relatively slim. Given the massive crossover reported in the polls, why was it not a landslide of greater magnitude?

From 15 to 30 percent of erstwhile Republican voters reportedly either switched or stayed home. Most Democratic gains in 2006 were in normally Republican, White, suburban, middle class districts. Meanwhile traditional Democratic strongholds held fairly firm. It seems the Republicans lost because while they focused on trying to suppress and undermine the Democratic base, they lost a large chunk of their own following. In several states, residents in Democratic areas were confronted by purged registration lists, falsely based threats of arrest, and exacting voter ID requirements. Irregularities were so outrageous in Virginia that the FBI was called in. According to the polls, Senate Republican incumbent George Allen should have lost Virginia by a substantial margin instead of a few thousand votes. Touch screen irregularities and voter discouragement tactics helped him close the gap but not enough. In Florida’s district 13, the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by a few hundred votes after 18,000 ballots were lost by touchscreen machines that left no paper trail to rectify the situation. Democrats lost another seat in Florida and at least two in Ohio, Harvey Wasserman reports, that they should have won according to the polls.

The Democrats should have won the House by 50 or more seats and the Senate by a wider margin, Wasserman suggested in a radio interview (Pacifica, May 2007). Touchscreen machines have been variously described as “faulty,” or ridden with “glitches.” This is not usually the case. If it were simply a matter of malfunction, the mistakes would occur randomly, rather than consistently favoring the GOP. What we are dealing with are not faulty machines but fixed machines. The United States is the only country (as compared to Western Europe) that makes it difficult for people to vote. Historically the hurdles have been directed at low-income voters and ethnic minorities. In 2006, various states disqualified voters if their registration information failed to match perfectly with some other record such as a driver’s license. Because of this at least 17 percent of eligible citizens in Arizona’s largest county were denied registration. In some states persons who conduct voter registration drives risk criminal prosecution for harmless mistakes, including errors in collecting forms.

In Florida some 50,000 voters were purged in 2004 (in addition to the many purged in 2000), many of them African-American, who still were unable to vote by 2006. In various states and counties the subterranean war against electoral democracy continues. 6 Notes: For these various irregularities, see New York Times, 30 November 2000 and 15 July 2001; Boston Globe, 30 November 2000 and 10 March 2001. A relevant documentary is Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, L.A. Independent Media Center Film, 2004. New York Times, 15 September 2002; the investigators were from California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mark Crispin Miller, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Basic Books, 2005), 7-31, 262, and passim.

All the various instances that follow—with the exception of the Rick Garves and Gregory Elich testimonials-- are from Miller, Fooled Again, passim; Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 (CICJ Books/ 2005); Anita Miller (ed.), What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005); Andy Dunn, “Hook & Crook,” Z Magazine, March 2005; Greg Palast, “Kerry Won: Here Are the Facts,” Observer, 5 November 2004; Steven F. Freeman (with Joel Bleifus), Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? (Seven Stories, 2006). Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman, “The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Polls and Vote Count Data,” Freepress.org, 2 January 2004; .

Freeman, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? 99-134 and passim; Fitrakis and Wasserman, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election, 51, 55-57. New York Times, 9 November 2006. How Groups Voted in 2000 - Roper Center How Groups Voted in 2000 Search Form How Groups Voted in 2000 Administrator 2015-03-10T20:40:39+00:00 Al Gore / 3 Notes: Survey by Voter News Service, a consortium ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News, NBC News and the Associated Press. Sample of 13,225 voters as they left voting booths on Election Day, November 7, 2000. Oregon residents were interviewed by telephone October 29-November 4, 2000. Election Years Ten years since Bush v.

Gore: The stolen election of 2000 - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Ten years since Bush v. Gore: The stolen election of 2000 By Patrick Martin 13 December 2010 Sunday, December 12 marks ten years since the US Supreme Court effectively decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, halting the counting of votes in Florida and awarding the White House to George W. Bush. The 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, together with the contemptible capitulation of the Democratic Party, constituted a milestone in the decay of American democracy. In a social and political context in which the debacles produced by the Bush administration loom so large in everyday life, it might be thought that the American media and political opinion makers would devote considerable attention to the tenth anniversary of the event that placed Bush in the White House. In fact, however, the silence is deafening. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, the two leading national newspapers, published retrospectives to mark the occasion. Their example was emulated in the regional and local press and on the television networks.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the four dissenters in Bush v. Gore, gave a rare live interview to Fox News Sunday, but the subject never came up. Only one bourgeois pundit, right-wing columnist George Will, took up the issue, and he dismissed the Supreme Court action as one of little or no lasting significance, asserting that the passions over the decision “dissipated quickly” and that “remarkably little damage was done” by the post-election crisis. Significantly, however, Will’s cursory rehash of the dispute included flatly antidemocratic assertions—that the votes of those who “cast ballots incompetently” should simply have been discarded and that the fundamental right at stake in the court fight was the “rights of state legislatures” (in Florida’s case, Republican-controlled), which have “plenary power” to determine voting procedures. Will, of course, agrees with the five-member majority in Bush v. Gore that the central issue was not to determine, in as objective a fashion as possible, how the people of Florida actually voted—in other words, to count every vote—but to bring the controversy to a speedy end with the result favored by the political right.

This entailed ignoring the result of the popular vote, won by Democrat Al Gore. The silence of the nominally “liberal” press is a guilty one. They do not wish to revisit the history, not so long ago, in which the Democratic Party and the liberal media surrendered to a right-wing judicial coup d’état, whose effect was to install the most right-wing government in American history. The election of November 7, 2000 The events of Election Day 2000, encompassing the night of Tuesday, November 7 and the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 8, are among the most extraordinary in American political history. Yet they came after a presidential campaign of the most humdrum character, in which no political issues were seriously discussed. The consensus among political pundits and pollsters was that Bush, then governor of Texas, held a narrow but significant lead over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore.

As in 1998, however, when predictions of major Republican gains in the midst of the impeachment crisis failed to materialize, it appeared as the votes began to be counted that the political establishment had underestimated the popular hostility towards the right-wing program of the Republican Party, founded on tax cuts for the wealthy and the slashing of domestic social spending. Gore won many of the big industrial states with relative ease, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Democrats were sweeping the northeastern states and were expected to win the Pacific Coast, while Bush carried the south and southwest, the Rocky Mountain states and Ohio. It appeared that the election would be decided by Florida’s 25 votes in the Electoral College. Just before 8 p.m., several US television networks called the outcome in Florida for Gore, based on their exit polls of voters compiled throughout the day. The Bush campaign reacted immediately, breaking with precedent and putting the candidate before television cameras to denounce the network projections and declare his certainty that Florida—where his brother Jeb was governor and the Republicans controlled the machinery of state government—would end up in his column. The networks backed down, rescinding their call for Gore and declaring the outcome in Florida still undecided.

Then, in the early hours of Wednesday, Fox News became the first network to call Florida for Bush, thereby declaring him the victor in the election. Heading the decision desk, where the network reviewed vote totals and polls to arrive at projections, was John W. Ellis, a first cousin of George W. Bush. Ellis unilaterally called the election for Bush before any determination by the Voter News Service, the consortium of leading newspapers and television networks, after a 2 a.m. telephone discussion with Bush and his brother Jeb. When the other networks followed suit, pronouncing Bush the winner, Democrat Al Gore telephoned his concession to Bush. But on the way to make his televised concession speech before an audience of supporters in Nashville, Gore received a phone call from campaign aides who advised him that the numbers in Florida showed the race too close to call. Gore telephoned Bush again and retracted his concession. These events had critical importance for what was to follow. The media coverage, as well as Gore’s premature concession, gave the impression to the public that Bush had “won” Florida—and the national election—by a narrow margin.

Throughout the ensuing crisis, the corporate-controlled media largely parroted the official Republican posture that Bush was the presumptive winner. The fact that Gore had won by a sizeable margin in the national popular vote, as much as a half million votes, was dismissed as of no significance. The struggle in Florida Gore retracted his concession phone call to Bush because of reports flowing in to his campaign about numerous and widespread irregularities in the Florida voting, including measures to suppress the Democratic vote by arbitrarily barring black voters. It emerged that in a single county, Palm Beach, some 19,000 votes cast for president were invalidated because the voters, confused by the layout of the ballot paper, had chosen more than one candidate. Thousands more in Palm Beach, in heavily Jewish precincts, had inadvertently cast ballots for the ultra-right independent candidate Patrick Buchanan. In Miami-Dade, there were numerous reports of ballots being distributed in Haitian immigrant precincts that were pre-punched for Bush. In Duval County, which includes the city of Jacksonville, nearly half the “spoiled” ballots came in four of the county’s 14 districts—those which were largely black and had gone heavily for Gore.

In some black precincts the rate of supposed spoilage rose to 31 percent. The first recount of voting machines, required by Florida law, cut Bush’s supposed margin from 1,725 to 327 votes, but there were tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted, concentrated in four major metropolitan counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, Volusia and Palm Beach—where there was a substantial Democratic majority. Local officials began hand recounts in each of these areas. The Republican-controlled state government stepped in to block this vote counting. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida and a Bush elector, first ordered the counting stopped. When reversed in court, she said she would not extend the November 14 deadline for reporting final totals, even though her own actions, in initially halting the count, made it impossible for three of the four counties to finish their recounts in time. This arrogant opposition to demands that all votes be counted typified the stand of the Bush camp from the beginning. It was combined with misinformation and lies.

The chief of the Bush recount team, former secretary of state James Baker, declared that machine counts were more reliable than hand counts, although hand counts are accepted as the highest standard in most states, and Bush had signed a Texas state law to that effect. Bush spokesmen continually declared that the votes in Florida had been counted multiple times, each time showing the Republican the winner, although there were tens of thousands of ballots that were never counted at any time. The purpose of such lies was to cover up the basic fact that a Bush election victory required the suppression of votes cast in Florida. The response of the Democratic Party and the Gore campaign to this procedural coup d’état was belated and halfhearted. The Gore campaign went to court against Harris’s decision, but sought a recount only in the four large metropolitan counties rather than statewide. In contrast to the ferocious partisanship and aggressiveness of the Bush campaign, Gore put his Florida recount effort under the direction of former secretary of state Warren Christopher, a corporate lawyer who was hostile to a court fight and rejected making any appeal to the democratic sentiments of the American population.

The issue of the right to vote On Friday, November 17 the issue came to a head when a local judge in Tallahassee, Florida ordered a halt to all vote recounts, only to be overturned hours later by the Florida state Supreme Court, which barred Harris from declaring Bush the winner of the state’s electoral votes and reinstated the vote counting in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, although for a limited period. Four days later, the court issued a decision compelling state officials to accept and certify the hand recounts, based on the right of Florida citizens to vote and to have their votes counted. Citing the Florida state constitution, the seven justices wrote, “The right of suffrage is the preeminent right contained in the Declaration of Rights, for without this basic freedom all others would be diminished.” The purpose of election laws was not to arbitrarily exclude voters who failed some technical requirement, but to “facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy.” The Bush campaign responded with a vitriolic denunciation of the court, a legal appeal to the US Supreme Court, and frenzied efforts to counter the state court’s decision by any means necessary, including violence.

There were calls for the Republican-controlled state legislature to intervene with legislation that would award Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush, regardless of the will of the voters. Florida state legislators began preparations for such action, using as a pretext the December 12 deadline for states to submit the list of electors to Washington. In the US capital, leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress suggested they would refuse to accept Democratic electors from Florida when the electoral votes were officially tabulated in January. The Bush campaign also made an open appeal to the military to intervene. They claimed that the Gore campaign and the Florida Democratic Party were seeking to exclude absentee ballots cast by military personnel overseas. Bush spokesman Marc Racicot declared, “I am very sorry to say but the vice president’s lawyers have gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in our armed forces.” The day after the court ruling, a mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami-Dade County board of canvassers, grabbing a Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those involved in manually recounting the ballots. A few hours later the Democratic-controlled board announced it was abandoning its recount, effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes were not registered in the original machine tally.

The result of the recounts in Palm Beach and Broward cut Bush’s statewide lead to only 537 votes. It was more than likely that if Miami-Dade, the state’s largest county, and heavily Democratic, had conducted a similar recount, the tiny Bush lead would have been erased. As it was, the capitulation of the Democrats in Miami-Dade enabled Katherine Harris to certify Bush as the winner of the state’s electoral votes on November 26. The Supreme Court steps in A federal appeals court, with a top-heavy majority of Republican appointees, refused to take jurisdiction over the Florida recount, as demanded by the Bush campaign, citing the right of the Florida state Supreme Court to interpret and make final rulings on state law. The Bush campaign appealed to the US Supreme Court, which scheduled a hearing on Friday, December 1. The three most right-wing justices, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, took the lead in the hearing, suggesting that the Florida state Supreme Court, by elevating the right to vote as the highest principle, was violating Article II of the US Constitution, which delegates to state legislatures the decision on how to choose electors.

There was no constitutional right to vote for president, Scalia said. Neither the four members of the moderate-to-liberal faction, nor Gore’s lawyer Laurence Tribe made any direct attack on this authoritarian argument. The best Tribe could manage was to sputter, “The disenfranchising of the people, which is what this is all about—disenfranchising people isn’t very nice.” On Monday, December 4 the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling remanding the case back to the Florida Supreme Court, with instructions that the Florida justices clarify the grounds on which they had overruled the Republican state authorities. The opinion of the unanimous ruling included the Article II argument made by Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. The Florida Supreme Court revisited the arguments made by the Bush and Gore campaigns, as well as lower court rulings against the recounts in various counties. On Friday, December 8 it ordered a recount of all “undervotes” (ballots where punch card readers failed to detect the vote) in all Florida counties, so that in all cases where the voter’s intention could be determined by evidence, the vote would be counted.

The majority affirmed basic principles of popular sovereignty: “This essential principle, that the outcome of elections be determined by the will of the voters, forms the foundation of the election code enacted by the Florida Legislature and has been consistently applied by this Court in solving election disputes,” the majority wrote. “We are dealing with the essence of the structure of our democratic society.” The Bush campaign immediately appealed this decision to the US Supreme Court, and a day later, as election officials throughout Florida were beginning the recount, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order to stop. The 5-4 ruling found that “irreparable harm” would be done to the petitioner, George W. Bush—i.e., he would be deprived of the presidency by a valid count of the votes. While the four-member liberal minority argued that the federal courts had traditionally deferred to state courts in the interpretation of state constitutions and state election laws, the five-member majority discarded their usual posture of support for “states’ rights” when it came into conflict with the interests of the Republican Party and its ultra-right backers.

Three days later, the same 5-4 majority handed down its final ruling, declaring, in a perfect Catch-22, that the delay in the recount—caused by its own order—had made it impossible to complete a recount in time to meet the December 12 deadline for certifying electors. Accordingly, the decision of the Republican-controlled state government, awarding the electors to Bush, was upheld. Because the three ultra-right members could not obtain agreement from two other conservatives, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, to base the decision on Scalia’s Article II claim that the American people have no constitutional right to vote for president, the court majority found an entirely new legal argument to support its predetermined outcome: putting Bush in the White House. They ruled that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision that election officials in the 64 counties should set the standards for determining voter intent was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of “equal protection of the law.” With unparalleled cynicism, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas, invariably hostile to “equal protection” arguments when made by plaintiffs who were black, Hispanic, female, poor or otherwise politically disadvantaged, embraced the argument on behalf of the millionaire son of a former president.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent for the minority, 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.” The capitulation of the Democrats The submission of the Gore campaign to the transparently biased and antidemocratic Supreme Court majority was evident at the hearing held on December 11, the day before the final ruling was issued. Gore’s lead attorney, David Boies, made no mention of the frontal assault on democratic rights embodied in the position of Scalia and sought to appeal to the two “swing” justices, O’Connor and Kennedy, with legalistic quibbling. Public spokesmen for the Gore campaign and the Democratic Party repeatedly declared their full confidence in the impartiality and fairness of the high court and their determination to abide by whatever result was handed down. When the ruling was issued, Gore went on national television to publicly declare his capitulation and embrace the presidency of George W. Bush as legitimate. This capitulation was foreshadowed by the entire conduct of the Gore campaign, even before the Florida crisis.

Gore selected as his running mate Senator Joseph Lieberman, perhaps the most right-wing Senate Democrat, largely because of his early public denunciation of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Throughout the Florida crisis, Lieberman acted as a virtual Republican asset, opposing any serious campaign against the efforts to suppress vote counting and hijack the election, and making public statements that frequently echoed the arguments from the Bush camp. Gore himself, however, set the tone, initially restricting the recount to four counties, opposing efforts to mount a public political campaign that would mobilize working-class supporters in favor of an exclusive focus on the courts. At one point, when the question arose of absentee ballots cast improperly by overseas military personnel, Gore insisted on dropping the issue, declaring that he could not become president over the opposition of the military. The record of the WSWS The World Socialist Web Site recognized immediately the fundamental issues of democratic rights at stake in the 2000 election crisis. As socialists, opposed on principle to both big business parties, we did not give political support to Gore or the Democratic Party.

But we intransigently opposed the effort of the Bush campaign and the ultra-right to steal the election, and we warned that the success of this effort would have devastating implications for the American people. In the very first statement published by the WSWS after Election Day 2000, we wrote: “The crisis of the 2000 elections reflects the growth of social contradictions to such a point of intensity that they can no longer be adjudicated within the existing political and constitutional framework… Most fundamental is the enormous growth of social inequality, which has reached proportions not seen in the US since the 1920s. The division of America between a fabulously rich upper crust and the vast majority of the population is, in the end, incompatible with democratic forms of rule.” Only a few days before the Supreme Court ruling, in an address to a public meeting in Sydney, Australia, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North said: “What the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes?

Is it prepared to install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through blatantly illegal and antidemocratic methods?” North said that unlike the unserious middle-class “left” organizations, which declared the Florida crisis a tempest in a teapot and dismissed its significance, the Marxist movement based its analysis on an understanding of how the political crisis arose from and gave expression to the intensifying class conflicts in America. He explained that the United States was now the most unequal of the advanced capitalist countries, and that social tensions had reached an extreme pitch, notwithstanding the lack of open class conflict on the surface of society: “Indeed, within the context of the extremes of social inequality, the absence of a politically conscious class struggle testifies, above all, to the intensity of the social oppression of the American working class.” North concluded that the crisis over the 2000 election was not merely an American crisis, but a world crisis, because it represented the political destabilization of American imperialism, the bulwark of world capitalism throughout the 20th century.

“The basic article of faith, for all those who have doubted or denied the viability of Marxism, is that, ultimately, no matter what problem capitalism faces in any part of the world, Uncle Sam will always bail it out,” North said. “The events now taking place in America signify the end of that long period where the affairs of world capitalism could rest securely under the leadership of US imperialism. The United States will no longer be able to play that role. However protracted it proves to be, the 2000 presidential election marks a new stage in the crisis of American and, therefore, world capitalism.” Throughout this crisis, the WSWS warned that a government installed by methods of lying and provocation, against the will of the people, would necessarily conduct itself in the same way in both foreign and domestic policy.

These warnings have been vindicated again and again in the decade that has ensued: two illegal wars of aggression, in Afghanistan and Iraq; the buildup of the police powers of the federal government, on the pretext of the struggle against terrorism but in actuality directed against the democratic rights of the American people; and in the ever-widening social gulf in America between the financial elite and the working people, culminating in the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the ongoing slide into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. FURTHER READING For the address given by David North, editorial chairman of the WSWS, at a meeting in Sydney, Australia on the eve of the Supreme Court decision, see:

Question: Which Democrat did George W Bush defeat in the 2000 US Presidential Election?
Answer: Al Gore