What started out as a simple race to replace the controversial, and impeached President Bill Clinton ended up being a precedent setting election; one that has changed not only the conduct of American politics, but has changed the conduct of America as a nation on the international stage. George W. Bush won the November 7th 2000 election with a total of 271 Electoral College votes, naming him the 43rd President of the United States of America; however, the Democratic candidate Al Gore had received a total Popular Vote of 51,003,936, edging out Bush’s total by 543,816 votes (Martin). This disparity between the Electoral College votes, and the Popular vote, is one that highlights a deep-rooted problem in the American political system. Combine this with the unprecedented involvement of the United States Supreme Court in the decision involving Florida on the 12th of December 2000 (“Bush v. Gore”), the Bush family ties to the state of Florida and Fox news, as well as Katherine Harris’s voter list tampering in the same state, and a bigger picture of the reasons for Bush’s presidency begins to come to light.

   The Electoral Collegiate was once likened to the Centurial Assembly of the Roman Republic, where “adult male citizens of Rome were divided into groups of 100 who cast on vote in favor or against proposals of the Roman Republic” (“What is the Electoral College”). The idea behind the Electoral both in past and now present, is that the general public is not knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions of a political nature, and these decisions must therefore be left to a separate group (Longley and Peirce 19). In the United States, it is the states themselves that take up the role of the Roman citizens, and the number of votes each state has is dependant on the size of the Congressional delegation of the state. In a populous country such as the United States, this means that there are a total of 538 (“What is the Electoral College”) votes for the Electoral College, 270 of which are needed to become President. The Popular Vote in the case of the 2000 Election went to Gore; more individual Americans voted for him on their differing ballot forms on the 4th of November 2000. This Popular Vote counts only towards the Electoral College as the people do not elect the President; the candidate that a majority of the people in the state have voted for becomes the candidate that the state electors in the College are ‘pledged’ to vote for. Any candidate that wins the Popular Vote in the state wins all of the votes towards the states electoral votes (Longley). The problem between these two systems comes from what happens when a candidate narrowly wins a state, giving them all the Electoral College votes, while not truly acknowledging that the state is more divided than anything. This is what happened in the 2000 Election. In Florida, Bush only defeated Al Gore by less than 600 popular votes, but received all 25 of the Electoral College votes (Dover 32). This is a huge problem in American politics, because the election of the president does not accurately represent the wishes of the greater American public.

   With the small margin between Popular votes cast for Bush and Gore in Florida, there became a whole new issue involving the recounts. Al Gore petitioned to the Supreme Court of United States to have the Popular Vote recounted in four Florida counties; the petition was then sent to the Florida Supreme Court after Gore was unable to “meet proof of burden” ("George W. Bush, Et Al., Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., Et Al") in the United States Supreme Court. Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Volusia, and Broward counties were all to be recounted starting immediately on November 8th, 2000 ("George W. Bush, Et Al., Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., Et Al"). However, due to Florida state legislature, the deadline for all recounts was November 14th 2000, a date which Florida Secretary of State and Republican partisan (Tapper) Katherine Harris refused to wave. In total, the Miami-Dade recount found 168 votes were “legal votes [that] could change the outcome of the election” ("George W. Bush, Et Al., Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., Et Al"). Palm Beach recorded an additional 215 votes for Al Gore. By this time, Al Gore had also filed a petition for the recount date of the Florida counties to be extended, and had lost. On the 6th of January 2001, members of the Congressional Black Caucus went before Congress stating that there was no Senator willing to co-sponsor a challenge to the Florida electors. As Vice-President at the time, Al Gore had to preside over this session. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to further ban any other recounts using alternative methods; the original 7-2 vote had been to ban recounts because it was unconstitutional, and it was feared that different parts of Florida would have different recounting standards (“United States presidential election, 2000”). It is worth noting that at the time there were five Conservative Supreme Court Justices; Chief Justice Rhnquist, and Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, Scalia and Thomas held majority over the four more liberal judges of Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens (Jacobson and Rosenfeld 89). Finally, it was after the 5-4 vote by the United States Supreme Court that all recounting of ballots in Florida stopped, and George W. Bush was declared the winner of the state, but by a marginal 537 votes. This result in Florida gave Bush the needed votes to boost him from 246 to 271 Electoral College votes, the original number of which would not have been enough to beat Gore’s 267 (with the addition of Florida, 292) votes, and thus naming Bush the next president of the United States of America (“United States presidential election, 2000”).

   At the time of the election the governor of Florida was John Ellis ‘Jeb’ Bush, the second son of former President George H.W. Bush and younger brother of the Republican candidate George W. Bush. Not only was his state involved in the massive recount and Supreme Court battle, but Jeb himself had a closer connection to the results of the 2000 Election. When Florida’s recount controversy began, Jeb Bush met privately with U.S Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts, a high-profile lawyer with close political and economic ties to Florida and the Republican Party. US Representative Robert Wexler commented on the situation afterwards when Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court- “Judge Roberts worked to ensure that George Bush would become president- regardless of what the courts may decide. And now he is being rewarded for that partisan service by being appointed to the nation’s highest court” (Fineout and Klas).

   Before the election fallout however, on election night itself, Jeb Bush was also constantly in telephone contact with the head of Fox News’s election night decision team, John Ellis Bush, and his brother George. Ellis was the one to make the decision at 2:16am for Fox to officially call the election for his cousin, forcing the other major networks of CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS to declare the same within four minutes (Wittstock). These same networks were forced to recant their announcements only hours later when it became very apparent that there was no clear winner, and there would be no winner for some time to come. These retractions came too late however, as the announcement of Bush as the President-elect gave an upper-hand to the Republicans who used it as a ideal that Bush had ‘won’ the election, and the Democrats were only being sore losers as the days dragged on without any official winner. Tom Rosenstiel commented that “Fox’s call- wrong, unnecessary, misguided, foolish- helped to create a sense that the election went to Bush, was pulled back, and it’s just a matter of time before his President-elect title is restored” (qtd. in Wittstock). Furthermore, after the election Ellis was being looked into for potential violation of Voter News Service rules by being in contact with the Florida governor and one of the presidential candidates (“One Call Too Many?”). Before the election specific rules were set out stating what information could or could not be shared with individuals outside the elections coverage group regarding the exit polls. The exit polls from around the country were used on election night by major news networks to attempt to determine voting trends and which states would go to which candidates. As the head of the head of the Fox election team, and working for the company that was in charge of the exit polls, Ellis’s contact with both Bush’s is said to have violated not only the rules of media, but also undermined the democratic process.

   Katherine Harris is best known for representing Florida’s 13th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. However, she played an extremely prominent and controversial part in the 2000 election. Secretary of the State of Florida at the time, Harris was responsible for overseeing and finally announcing the winner of the electoral votes for her state. This is where the problems begin; not only was Harris the co-chair of Bush’s Florida election campaign, and a delegate to the Republican National Convention, she also knew about the 57,700 legal voters that had been taken off the Florida voting list (“Katherine Harris”). 8,000 names on the list were of Texas felons, all of whom who had only committed misdemeanours and not actual felonies, under United States law. ChoicePoint Inc., a company that contributed large sums of money to Republican candidates, provided these names (”Katherine Harris”), which lead to the speculation that this tampering of the voting list was due to partisan reasons. ChoicePoint Inc. has admitted a 15% rate of error in their voter lists, which amounts to 8700 votes, easily more than enough to give the state of Florida to Gore (Palast). Investigations into the list since the election has shown that over 55,100 voters were illegally disenfranchised by ChoicePoint Inc. and Harris (Palast). As co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, she hired retired general Norman Schwarzkopf for a state-funded commercial ad, as he was actively campaigning for Bush in the state (“Katherine Harris”). She also took time off her duties as Secretary of State to travel to New Hampshire to campaign for Bush there (Simo), joining other Floridians in handing out oranges and posing for photo ops (Tapper). Further proof of her partisanship is that she had gone so far as before the Election Day to say “I am thrilled and honoured to announce my support of George W. Bush for the presidency” (Tapper).

   “The American people have spoken. It’s too bad it’s going to take a little while to determine what is it they had to say” (qtd. In ‘The US election 2000”) are the words outgoing American President Bill Clinton uttered a few days after the November 7th 2000 vote. It would not be until five weeks later that a winner was finally chosen; Texas State Governor George W. Bush was sworn into office on the 20th of January 2001, becoming the 43rd President of the United States. This day came into fruition surrounded still by controversy and questions, the least of which from Democrats which was ‘How could this happen?’ A seemingly simple election to begin with, it would not be remembered as the first real election to embrace technology in all it’s forms, nor would the candidates be remembered for their views on education, and defence, the environment, or the economy. Instead the public of the world remembers this election for it’s undemocratic Supreme Court justices, who did not put aside their own beliefs and negate the legal side of the Florida recounts fairly and unbiased. They are the ones who decided the presidency. The 2000 Election is remembered for Jeb and John Ellis Bush, the Republican candidate’s Florida state governor brother, and respectively, his first cousin who was heading the Fox election coverage team that announced his win of the presidency far too early, and swayed the public view of the whole election Wittstock). They are also the people who decided the presidency that year. Finally, Katherine Harris decided the presidency. The Florida Secretary of State disenfranchised 55,100 registered and legal Florida voters, most of who were Gore supporters (Palast), co-chaired Bush’s Florida campaign, and when overseeing the Florida recounts after the election, her partisanship was too strong to allow a fair and democratic recount for outgoing Vice-President Al Gore; a recount that would have surely seen a different man sitting in the White House. This election will be remembered as a testament to the inherent problems in democracy, and the very real truth that in that institution, the people do not always chose their president.



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