A big call to make, CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column.
Turn the lights down, the party just got wilder.
Florida goes to Mr. Bush.
Bush wins, headline of the hour.
Ah folks, it might be premature.
So we take Florida away from George W. Bush
This is no longer an election, this is like Alice in Wonderland.
The one thing no one expected in a presidential campaign
is that we wouldn’t know who won on Election Day.
Bush versus Gore was a watershed moment where the curtain was lifted on our election system
in the United States and we realized we’ve got to do something to fix it. And in some ways Congress did.
But then there were the unintended, or possibly intended, consequences.
If you are just waking up and just tuning in, you should know that after a long night
of swing votes, the presidential race is frankly still too close to call.
On November 8th, Kurt Browning, the Supervisor of Elections for Pasco County, woke to shocking news.
The vote is now so close between them that there will be an automatic recount.
What are you talking recounts? I’m-I’m in bed. There’s no recounts going on.
And literally, within three hours, we were in the throes of a recount.
The tug of war for the Presidency is now down to the most local of politics:
counties in Florida, precincts in Florida, where the recount has begun.
Under intense media scrutiny, the flaws in Florida’s system became clear.
Vote-a-matic machines and conflicting rules about ballots, and fuzzy rules about what is a vote.
Democrats charge a confusing ballot layout led voters to think they were punching
the ballot for Al Gore, when they were actually voting for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.
3,500 people did not vote for Pat Buchanan.
Come on, this is heavily Democratic Palm Beach County.
It is a ballot that was approved by an elected Democratic official, and hey, guess what?
There were no complaints, until after the election.
As both campaigns launched lawsuits over the disputed results, accusations of partisanship fueled the tension.
I voted, whether or not my vote counted I don’t know.
The question of who will be the next president is right on her desk.
She's the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
As Secretary of State, I am Chief Elections Officer.
Harris was the state co-chair of George Bush's presidential campaign.
Today, Governor Jeb Bush said she’s doing a good job.
Political insiders say there is no evidence Harris is being manipulated by the Bushes.
What I think people didn’t realize before 2000 is that the people running the elections
had a huge stake in the outcome.
While each campaign battled it out in court, the recounts dragged on.
We were in the middle of a final recount when somebody’s phone in the room rings.
Thirty-six days after the election, the U.S. Supreme Court brought everything to a halt.
It does appear quite clear that George W. Bush, the eldest son of a former president,
is going to be the President-Elect of this country with the 25 electoral votes from Florida.
The Court declared that the recounts violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause
because there was no uniform standard for counting all ballots.
The overwhelming consensus after 2000 was that our electoral machinery was broken.
We did not run elections as well as we should, and we should fix that.
In the fall of 2002, Congress passed a sweeping reform bill: The Help America Vote Act, or HAVA.
For the very first time, the national government will step up to the plate and meets its constitutional duty
to uphold the soundness and sanctity of the ballot in this country.
This bill would provide almost four billion dollars, much of it to individual states,
to replace old voting machines, train poll workers, and combat fraud.
The heart of the reform was a promise to improve voting machines, to make the machines work better.
That, more or less, has been kept, but a whole series of new problems were injected.
The bill attempts to address one of my key concerns and that, of course, is the issue of voter fraud.
Senator Kit Bond led a Republican effort to fight potential fraud by requiring ID
from first time voters who registered by mail.
Senator Bond used to talk about a little dog in St. Louis getting registered to vote, named Ritzy Meckler.
I have great respect for the dead and I love dogs. I don’t think either one should vote.
While HAVA set minimum voting standards, it was up to the states to enact the reforms,
and by 2011, many were passing voter ID laws that were tougher than what HAVA required.
Florida already had one when Dennis Baxley, then a Representative, took office in 2010.
I think voter identification is just a responsible act.
If I go to a bank, I expect them to verify and protect my money and make sure I’m the one getting it.
You can’t buy a beer, board a plane, or even rent a movie without showing proper ID.
But voting? In most states, all you need is a name.
The idea that fraud is a bad thing is appealing to everyone, and so how can you object to
fighting it? The complexity comes when you dig beneath the surface and find out there
is essentially no such thing as voter fraud and it is simply a way of making it harder
to vote for constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic.
There are people who don’t have the voter identification that they want to require
and they are hugely disproportionately African Americans, Latinos, naturalized citizens.
And those groups tend to vote for Democrats.
Are they really trying to keep certain people from voting at all?
It became a lightning rod issue as people perceived that we were up to some nefarious project
of depriving people of their vote. I couldn’t dream of anything farther from the truth.
We want it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Multiple investigations have found little evidence of the widespread voter fraud that ID laws would target.
but Republicans say that Democrats are hyping stories of voter suppression.
This is how Democrats try and motivate their voters.
They try and keep them paranoid and angry to get them out to the polls.
Wendy Weiser, who tracks election law for the Brennan Center, says it’s hard to fully
quantify how much voter turnout is being affected.
But the 2000 election made it clear that even a few thousand votes can have big consequences.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of voters, here or there, can really determine
election outcomes. Politicians saw that small manipulations of the rules of elections
can really make a difference.
In the past two years, almost every state in the country has introduced or passed
some type of change or restriction to the voting laws.
In 2011 in Florida, Kurt Browning had become the state’s top election officer
and saw firsthand what happened when the voting rules were changed.
Governor Rick Scott is expected to sign a bill that would drastically change Florida’s election laws.
A Republican-led effort to cut early voting and later purge non-citizens from the voting rolls
became national news.
Supporters say the law will prevent fraud. But voters rights groups say
it's a blatant attempt to suppress voting.
I sit here oftentimes, when I was an elections supervisor, saying, “Why is this so difficult?
Why is this so hard?” And I will tell you what makes it hard. It’s the politics.
The candidates are all out to make sure that their voters are getting registered and their voters are voting.
Browning left office before the election, and the new law was blamed, in part,
for long lines at the polls and a vote count that took four days.
Florida voters, who were in lines up to seven hours on Election Day, say the entire process is embarrassing.
Florida tonight remains too close to call. So where is the good news you say?
Here it is: the election was decided without them.
In the years since Bush v. Gore, the voting wars show no sign of slowing.
This voting system is out of control. You have people, in my opinion, that are voting many, many times.
Stop fear mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud.
Since 2013, nearly two dozen states have enacted new voting regulations
ranging from purging voter rolls to imposing strict voter ID laws.
A trend fueled after the Supreme Court threw out part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Which had protected the rights of minority voters in certain states.
The two biggest drivers of restrictive voting laws are partisanship and race.
The greater the increase in political participation by minority voters and the greater the Republican control
of the state, the more likely the state is to pass laws cutting back on voting rights.
Some states have made it easier to vote, with automatic registration
and mail-in voting.
And in 2020, in response to fears over the Coronavirus,
many states loosened restrictions on voting by mail.
But that quickly became a political piñata.
They're sending millions of ballots all over the country. There's fraud.
No one has established at all that there is fraud related to mail-in ballots.
We can’t just rest our entire voting rights in the hands of politicians.
Whether their self-interest is expanding voting access or restricting voting access,
their motives are not going to be pure.
What people thought Bush v. Gore did was expose a problem that politicians could solve.
What in fact it did was it exposed an opportunity that politicians could exploit.
And that’s really been the most important legacy of Bush v. Gore.