2000 Election

=this is a nodesee brooks bros node and tagcapt 12/16==<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/">https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/</a>no lnx
AUGUST 17-24, 2015 ISSUEHow the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter DisenfranchisementA botched voter purge prevented thousands from voting—and empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics.By Ari Berman JULY 28, 2015On November 7, 2000, Willie Steen, a Navy vet who had served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, went to cast his ballot for president at the St. Francis Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida.
He brought his 10-year-old son, Willie Jr., to the polls for the first time. They waited a half hour to reach a poll worker. When Steen gave the poll worker his name, she searched a list of registered voters in the precinct and told him, “You can’t vote. You’re a convicted felon.”
“You must be mistaken,” a shocked Steen replied. “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” He worked at a hospital, a Tampa orthopedics center, that wouldn’t employ anyone with a felony conviction.
This article is adapted from Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2015 by Ari Berman. All rights reserved.The poll worker gave him a number to call at the board of elections, but no one picked up. The 75 people behind him in line grew antsy. Few would look him in the eye.
He left in embarrassment, struggling to explain to his son what had just happened. After fighting for his country abroad, he wasn’t able to exercise his most fundamental right at home. “I felt I was shafted,” Steen said. “I think there were a lot of things that weren’t done properly. My name was dragged through the mud.”
He later found out from journalist Greg Palast that he’d been confused with a convict named Willie O’Steen, who had committed a felony between 1991 and 1993, when Steen was in the Persian Gulf. Little did Steen know that the same thing was happening to voters across the state of Florida—and disproportionately to voters like him, who were African-American.
Before the election, Florida sent its county election supervisors a list of 58,000 alleged felons to purge from the voting rolls. Florida was one of eight states that prevented ex-felons from voting. The felon-disenfranchisement law dated back to 1868, when the state banned anyone with a felony conviction from voting unless the governor issued a pardon. The law targeted newly emancipated African-Americans, who during slavery were far more likely to be arrested than whites, including for such offenses as looking at a white woman. This racially discriminatory policy was still on the books in 2000. Blacks made up only 11 percent of registered voters in the state, but 44 percent of those on the purge list, which turned out to be littered with errors.
Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, the antics of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and thousands of Jews accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach were among the stories that captured the headlines during the chaotic 36-day Florida recount between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The widespread and wrongful purging of registered voters was the most consequential—and least discussed—aspect of the Florida election.
“The parties and the candidates did not want to focus on the racial impact of decisions that were made in Florida,” said civil-rights lawyer Judith Browne Dianis. “It was one of those moments when race was being swept under the rug.”
The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.
No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.
The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.
* * 
On election night in Florida, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes. Because of the closeness of the election, an automatic recount began two days later in every county. Hundreds of lawyers flocked to Florida. Ben Ginsberg, national counsel for the Bush campaign, called it “Woodstock for constitutional lawyers.”
Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks,nicknamed the Cabal.
“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.
Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.
Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.
Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.
Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable.”
The Bush campaign, which led by 327 votes after the automatic recount, wanted as few disputed ballots accepted as possible. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount, which favored Gore, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount four days later, on December 12, thereby declaring Bush the winner of the election. No justice put his name on the unsigned 5–4 opinion.
The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred.
Fifteen years later, Cruz and Jeb Bush are run- ning for the GOP’s nomination for president, and Roberts is celebrating his 10th year as chief justice of the United States.
 * 
On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge. He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.
“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.
“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said.
But blatant warning signs were ignored by Bush and the state well in advance of the election. On the orders of state officials, names were added to the purge list if there was only a 70 percent matchbetween a name on the voter rolls and a name in the state’s felon database. This meant that voters could be tagged as felons even when middle initials, suffixes, nicknames, and even race and sex data didn’t match perfectly. Hence the confusion of Willie Steen with felon O’Steen.
DBT warned the state that it was compiling “false positives.” Bucky Mitchell, a senior attorney for the Division of Elections, told the company, “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Voters were deemed guilty until proven innocent. The election supervisors became responsible for Florida’s intentionally lax record-keeping.
In May 2000, after the first supposedly corrected batch of names was released, the election supervisor in Madison County found herself on the purge list. Ion Sancho, the election supervisor for Tallahassee’s Leon County, was the only election official to go through the list one by one. “We went for a five-for-five match,” he told Vanity Fair. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”
Nonetheless, the highest-ranking officials in Florida did not urge the election supervisors to disregard a list that many knew was deeply flawed. “Once the problems emerged, Governor Bush could have made it clear that it wasn’t acceptable to wrongly take voters off the rolls,” says Matthew Corrigan, professor of political science at the University of North Florida and author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida.
In January and February 2001, the Civil Rights Commission listened to 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses during three field hearings in Tallahassee and Miami—including Bush, Harris, the state attorney general, and numerous county election supervisors. The commission’s final report found evidence of “widespread voter disenfranchisement”—which likely violated the VRA—and concluded that an “overall lack of leadership in protecting voting rights was largely responsible for the broad array of problems in Florida during the 2000 election.”
A strenuous dissenting statement was filed by the conservative intellectual Abigail Thernstrom, whom Bush had appointed to the Civil Rights Commission at the beginning of his presidency, and Russell Redenbaugh, a Philadelphia businessman appointed by Bush’s father. Thernstrom had been the leading critic of the VRA since the 1980s, arguing that the law represented “an instrument for affirmative action in the electoral sphere.”
The civil-rights panel had focused on the wrong set of voting problems in Florida, the two commissioners asserted in their dissent: “The Commission should have looked into allegations of voter fraud, not only with respect to ineligible felons, but allegations involving fraudulent absentee ballots in nursing homes, unregistered voters, and so forth. Across the country in a variety of jurisdictions, serious questions about voter fraud have been raised.”
Despite this dissenting statement, a majority of the commission called on the Justice Department to immediately prepare litigation against Florida and its governor for violating the VRA. By then, however, it was too late: The Bush administration followed Thernstrom’s lead and prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement.
 * A thousand miles north of Florida, a similar electoral calamity, with equally profound ramifications, unfolded in St. Louis.On Election Day 2000, Mahina Nightsage, a 41-year-old community organizer, went to her polling place of 20 years. But this time, she found that her name was not on the registration rolls. Her local alderman told her to visit the board of elections downtown to find out what had happened.When she did, Nightsage saw a scene that resembled an election in a Third World country. Hundreds of voters were lined up around the block and packed inside, standing on tables to get the board’s attention. Nightsage waited two and a half hours before the board processed her paperwork and she was able to return to her polling place to vote for Gore.
Not everyone was as lucky. “There were many people who had been waiting for hours, and they just left,” Nightsage said. The line of jilted voters in the heavily Democratic city was predominantly African-American.
The problems started before the 2000 election, when the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners sent voter registration cards to all eligible voters. Those whose mail was returned as “Attempted—Not Known,” “Not Deliverable as Addressed,” or “Forwarding Order Expired” were labeled “inactive” and removed from the rolls. More than 50,000 voters in St. Louis were placed on inactive status between November 1996 and November 2000. None were notified about the change in their status. Thus, thousands of voters like Nightsage arrived at the polls on Election Day only to learn that they were no longer on the rolls.
The Gore campaign filed an emergency suit late that afternoon asking a court to keep the polls open an extra three hours so that everyone could vote. When a circuit court ordered the polls open until 10 pm in St. Louis, the Bush campaign filed an immediate appeal. Forty-five minutes later, the Missouri Court of Appeals rescinded the order and closed the polls. Only 100 additional voters had been able to cast ballots during the brief additional time. “As of 10:00 pm on election day,” a Justice Department lawsuit later stated, “individuals were still standing in line at the downtown headquarters of the Board of Elections.”The brief extension of polling hours infuriated Missouri Republicans, who had gathered at an election-night party at the St. Louis Marriott West Hotel. Missouri Senator John Ashcroft watched in disbelief as the election returns showed him losing to a dead man.
Ashcroft’s opponent in the closely watched Senate race, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, had been killed in a plane crash three weeks before the election. His name remained on the ballot, and his wife, Jean, ran in his stead.
Republicans viewed the extended poll hours as a last-ditch attempt to illegitimately oust Ashcroft from office. “I know there are very serious allegations of fraud and corruption as it related to the conduct of the election in the city of St. Louis,” Ashcroft said.
Missouri’s senior senator, Republican Kit Bond, was far more blunt. “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election,” he screamed into the microphone at the Marriott, slamming his right fist on the podium in anger.
How else could a sitting senator lose to a dead man? For Missouri Republicans, St. Louis became the contemporary version of the 1960 election in Chicago, when ballots from dead voters allegedly elected John F. Kennedy president.
Ashcroft lost by 49,000 votes—a result that would not have been determined by 100 extra people voting from 7 to 7:45 pm. Nevertheless, Bond sent the FBI and the US Attorney’s office a 250-page report alleging “a major criminal enterprise designed to defraud voters.” Less than two months later, Bush nominated Ashcroft as attorney general, and a new right-wing voter-fraud movement was born.
Soon after Bush’s inauguration, his administration embarked on a dramatic effort to restrict voting rights. With Ashcroft in charge, longtime civil-rights lawyers were fired from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which enforced the VRA, and replaced by ultraconservative zealots like voting-section chief Brad Schlozman, who vowed to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.” US Attorneys in states like New Mexico, Washington, and Missouri were fired for refusing to prosecute trumped-up cases of voter fraud.
Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, the first of its kind, was approved by the Justice Department under the VRA, despite objections from state lawyers and clear evidence that the law would disproportionately burden black voters. According to the Justice Department’s report, Representative Sue Burmeister of Augusta, the lead Republican sponsor of the bill, told department lawyers that “if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. [Burmeister] said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”
Most significantly, these new reactionaries soon found crucial allies in John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the two Supreme Court justices appointed by the Bush administration. In April 2008, the Court approved Indiana’s voter-ID law in the first major voting-rights case heard under Roberts. The Court backed the measure even though Indiana presented no instances of voter impersonation that the law would stop, which signaled that states could implement new voting restrictions merely by invoking the specter of voter fraud, even if such fraud had not actually occurred. (The author of the decision, John Paul Stevens, has since admitted that “the impact of the statute is much more serious” on poor, minority, disabled, and elderly voters than he’d initially recognized.)
Five years later, in a decision written by Roberts, the Supreme Court invalidated the centerpiece of the VRA: the formula that required states with the worst histories of voter discrimination to approve changes to their voting systems with the federal government. That decision has led to new voter-suppression efforts in states like North Carolina and Texas, and has set a chilling precedent for voting rights in the Obama era.
The result has been the most significant effort to restrict voting rights since the Jim Crow era. From 2011 to 2015, 468 voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states. Half the states in the country have passed new laws making it harder to vote. None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the 2000 election in Florida.
Ari BermanTWITTERAri Berman is a former senior contributing writer for The Nation.<div>
</div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000part 2As the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization" title="World Trade Organization" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">World Trade Organization</a> (WTO) negotiations collapsed amid <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests" title="1999 Seattle WTO protests" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">protests</a> at a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization_Ministerial_Conference_of_1999" title="World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">summit</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle" title="Seattle" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Seattle</a>, Trump appeared on the December 5 airing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Company" title="American Broadcasting Company" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">ABC</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Week(ABC_TV_series)" title="This Week (ABC TV series)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">This Week</a>. He said that the WTO was not "necessarily fair" to the United States, and argued that "our best, and our smartest, and our brightest" were not being used to negotiate the deal. He renewed his attack on the negotiation skills of Barshefsky, saying that both she and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_Commerce" class="mw-redirect" title="Secretary of Commerce" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Secretary of Commerce</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M.Daley" title="William M. Daley" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">William M. Daley</a> did not know how to negotiate.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-67" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[67]</a> Next, Trump embarked on a two-day campaign stop in California, which the media covered extensively. During the stop, Trump held a press conference, appearing with his campaign entourage that included his girlfriend Melania, Roger Stone, and bodyguard Matt Calamari. Aides made <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_sanitizer" title="Hand sanitizer" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">hand sanitizer</a> readily available for reporters, presumably due to Trump's alleged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaphobia" class="mw-redirect" title="Germaphobia" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">germaphobia</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ws-66" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[66]</a> The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press" title="Associated Press" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Associated Press</a> (AP) noted that Trump "made little attempt to appear statesman-like" at the press conference with responses that seemed "tailored more to entertain his listeners than establish his credibility."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ap-68" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[68]</a> In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burbank,California" title="Burbank, California" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Burbank</a>, Trump appeared on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno" title="The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Tonight Show with Jay Leno</a> where he attacked Buchanan as "having a love affair with Adolf Hitler" and discussed his upcoming book, The America We Deserve. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weekly_Standard" title="The Weekly Standard" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Weekly Standard</a> reported that though the release date was only a month away, the book had yet to be written.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ws-66" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[66]</a> After the Tonight Show appearance, Trump attended a meeting of one hundred Southern California Reform Party members, to whom he delivered a speech and answered questions. Crowds cheered Trump when he discussed his opposition to NAFTA, but some were offended<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ap-68" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[68]</a> when he questioned the existence of a Reform Party platform and, after receiving a copy, left it on the podium when he exited. On the final day, Trump visited the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wiesenthal_Center" title="Simon Wiesenthal Center" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Simon Wiesenthal Center</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Tolerance" title="Museum of Tolerance" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Museum of Tolerance</a> and walked through an exhibit of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust" title="The Holocaust" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Holocaust</a>. He delivered a speech and held another press conference at the museum atrium, where he denounced Buchanan's views on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazis" class="mw-redirect" title="Nazis" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Nazis</a>. Afterwards, Trump boarded his jet for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach,California" title="Long Beach, California" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Long Beach</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ws-66" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[66]</a> During an on-jet interview, Trump placed his odds of waging a full-scale campaign at "50/50," but "edging closer," believing there to be a "fervor" among the public about his campaign. The AP evaluated the California response as more "warm" than fervent, but described Trump's treatment as that of a "high profile dignitary." At Trump's final event, he spoke at a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins" title="Tony Robbins" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Tony Robbins</a> motivational conference.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ap-68" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[68]</a> Robbins and Trump had made an agreement that would pay Trump $1 million for showing up at ten of Robbins' events. Trump planned to make campaign stops to coincide with Robbins' shows, speculating that he "could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-fortune-69" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[69]</a> At the event, Trump received what the AP called a "moderately enthusiastic applause"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ap-68" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[68]</a> after asking the 21,000 people in attendance<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ws-66" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[66]</a> whether he should run for president.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ap-68" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[68]</a> He received a large ovation when he proclaimed, "people want to hear straight talk. We're tired of being bullied by these moron politicians." Overall, The Weekly Standard praised Trump for his candor on the campaign trail.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ws-66" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[66]</a>In discussing his campaign strategy with The Los Angeles Times, Trump proclaimed, "the only strategy is, I'll be on television a lot." Responding to a poll of probable Reform Party voters that showed him with only 14% support, fourth place behind Ventura (20%), Perot (25%), and Buchanan (30%), Trump pointed to the spike in ratings each television network received whenever he appeared on air. He admitted, "whether or not TV ratings can transfer into votes is an interesting question." The Times characterized Trump's campaign as "Political Science 101 on how far politics is devolving into pure entertainment."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-baum-70" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[70]</a> Nevertheless, Trump contemporaneously delved into the politics of third party campaigns when he wrote a letter to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates" title="Commission on Presidential Debates" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Commission on Presidential Debates</a> asking the body to review its standard for third party candidate inclusion in the general election debates. His letter included a veiled threat of litigation if the body enacted a standard preventing his participation. At this time, Trump announced that he would make his decision on whether to wage a full-scale campaign by early February.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-baum-70" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[70]</a> In addition, he retained two signature collection agencies in order to secure ballot access.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-71" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[71]</a>As 1999 drew to a close, the conflict within the Reform Party escalated. To the chagrin of the Perot faction, chairman-elect Jack Gargan pushed through a motion to move headquarters from Perot's home in Dallas to Florida.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-72" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[72]</a> Shortly thereafter, the Perot faction incorporated the Reform Leadership Council as an entity separate from the main party to preserve the vision of Perot. They also moved the National Convention from Ventura's home in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis" title="Minneapolis" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Minneapolis</a> to Long Beach.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-73" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[73]</a> The Ventura faction filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Perot faction and threatened to bolt the party, prompting chairman Verney to instruct, "don't let the door hit them when they leave."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-74" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[74]</a> As the conflict unfolded, Ventura publicly expressed that he could never support Buchanan as the party's nominee, describing him as "very shallow." Ventura said that in a head-to-head against Buchanan, he favored Trump. Ventura and Trump planned a campaign event together in Minnesota to begin the new year.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-75" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[75]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: none; line-height: 1.6;">January 2000[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000&action=edit&section=8" title="Edit section: January 2000" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>
On January 7, Trump appeared in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Park,Minnesota" title="Brooklyn Park, Minnesota" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Brooklyn Park, Minnesota</a>, where he spoke before the Chamber of Commerce, attended a Reform Party fundraiser, and held a joint press conference with Ventura. At the fundraiser, Trump identified North Korea as the nation's greatest foreign policy threat, blasted Japan for "ripping us off" for the last 25 years, and ripped <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia" title="Russia" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Russia</a> as being "totally mixed up" for placing "people nobody ever even heard of" in charge of missiles.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-84" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[84]</a> At the press conference, Trump claimed he had yet to decide whether to run officially and so had not asked for Ventura's endorsement. Ventura said that if Trump decided to run, he would give his "full consideration." Trump asserted it would be "disaster for the Reform Party" if Pat Buchanan received the presidential nomination.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-85" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[85]</a> Describing himself and Ventura as self-made and not part of the "lucky sperm club," Trump made an indirect jab at both the Republican front-runner George W. Bush, the son of former President Bush, and Democratic front-runner Al Gore, son of the late Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore,Sr." class="mw-redirect" title="Albert Gore, Sr." style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Albert Gore, Sr.</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-86" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[86]</a> Trump and Ventura released a written statement opposing the Commission on Presidential Debates' decision to limit debate participation to candidates polling above 15 percent in the general election and urging the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Election_Commission" title="Federal Election Commission" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Federal Election Commission</a> to take action.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-87" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[87]</a>Trump officially released his book The America We Deserve on January 1. Dave Shiflett received credit as co-writer.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-amazon-76" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[76]</a> To promote the book, Trump held a January 5 press conference at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower" title="Trump Tower" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Trump Tower</a>, which aired on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN" title="C-SPAN" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">C-SPAN</a>. He signed books and answered questions from reporters, once asserting, "I may be too honest to be a politician."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-77" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[77]</a> Trump's book, consisting of 286 pages,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-amazon-76" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[76]</a> covers Trump's political positions and policy proposals, including strict anti-crime measures, increased pressure on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China" title="China" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">China</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade" title="Fair trade" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">fair trade</a>, border control, increased military spending, support for public capital punishment, and the implementation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care" class="mw-redirect" title="Single-payer health care" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">single-payer health care</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-78" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[78]</a> It advocates eliminating <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_money" class="mw-redirect" title="Soft money" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">soft money</a> contributions to political parties and full disclosure of campaign donations to political candidates, but calls for the removal of limits on the amount of donations, arguing, "[i]f you want to give your life savings to Al Gore, that should be between you, Al Gore and your psychiatrist." In addition, it raises concerns about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism" title="Terrorism" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">terrorism</a>, proposing the creation of a national <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery" title="Lottery" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">lottery</a> to raise funds for anti-terrorism programs,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-auto-79" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[79]</a> and offers a choice to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea" title="North Korea" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">North Korea</a> to disarm or face military strikes.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-dave-17" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[17]</a> The America We Deserve also includes praise for former boxer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali" title="Muhammad Ali" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Muhammad Ali</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teamsters" class="mw-redirect" title="Teamsters" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Teamsters</a> leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P.Hoffa" title="James P. Hoffa" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">James P. Hoffa</a>, as well as Trump's future political opponents Florida governor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bush" title="Jeb Bush" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Jeb Bush</a> and New York governor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pataki" title="George Pataki" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">George Pataki</a>, among others.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-loop-80" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[80]</a> It cites friendships with baseball player <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammy_Sosa" title="Sammy Sosa" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Sammy Sosa</a> and entertainer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs" title="Sean Combs" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Sean Combs</a> as making Trump more understanding of racial diversity. Trump later backpedaled his book's praise of Combs after Combs was charged with violating gun laws following a shooting at a New York nightclub. Trump said he did not "know [Combs] really well."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-puffy-81" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[81]</a> The book condemns Congressman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrold_Nadler" title="Jerrold Nadler" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Jerrold Nadler</a> as a "hack" for opposing Trump's development of waterfront real estate in Manhattan, and describes Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Smith(American_politician)" title="Bob Smith (American politician)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bob Smith</a> as "the dumbest guy in the U.S. Senate" after he grilled Trump's sister <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryanne_Trump_Barry" title="Maryanne Trump Barry" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Maryanne Trump Barry</a> on abortion when she testified before the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Judiciary_Committee" class="mw-redirect" title="Senate Judiciary Committee" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Senate Judiciary Committee</a> in 1999 upon her nomination to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Third_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Third Circuit Court of Appeals</a>. It criticizes Democratic presidential candidate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bradley" title="Bill Bradley" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bill Bradley</a> as a "phony" for his Senate sponsorship of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986" title="Tax Reform Act of 1986" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Tax Reform Act of 1986</a> that purportedly hurt Trump financially. It also notes the hypocrisy of both an unnamed Senator and an unnamed conservative columnist who each engaged in extramarital affairs at Trump's hotels and resorts while they attacked President Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-loop-80" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[80]</a> In a scathing review, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Magazine" class="mw-redirect" title="New York Magazine" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">New York Magazine</a> described the book as inadvertently satirical.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-82" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[82]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booklist" title="Booklist" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Booklist</a> pondered whether Trump was "the only man ever to run for president in order to promote a book."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-83" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[83]</a> Dave Saltonstall of the New York Daily News, labeled it as autobiographical and reported that it contains "enough details to paint a fairly comprehensive picture of what a Trump presidency might look like."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-auto-79" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[79]</a>Trump ended his relationship with Melania Knauss in January 2000, removing a key figure of the campaign entourage.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-88" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[88]</a> According to the New York Daily News, an associate of Trump said the move was meant to appease Reform Party leaders. Roger Stone denied the suggestion.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-89" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[89]</a> In addressing the matter, Trump complimented Knauss and commented, "she will be missed."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-90" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[90]</a> Shortly thereafter, in an attempt to bring the two Reform Party factions together, Trump invited party leaders to the Trump-owned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago" title="Mar-a-Lago" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Mar-a-Lago</a> club in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Beach,Florida" title="Palm Beach, Florida" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Palm Beach, Florida</a>. Addressing the 170 party members, who attended the event (including former chairman Russ Verney), Trump proclaimed "I'm very proud to be in the party of Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura." Verney appreciated the gesture and in shifting from his once-chilly reception to the Trump candidacy, he welcomed Trump into the race. After opening the event to questions, one attendee asked Trump whether he would appear at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Party_of_Florida" title="Reform Party of Florida" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Florida Reform Party</a>'s state convention. Trump said he would consider it "very seriously." Concerning Buchanan, Trump repeated he could not support Buchanan as the party's nominee.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-91" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[91]</a> Despite the retreat, the intra-party dispute over the location of the convention continued.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-bicker-92" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[92]</a> Citing scheduling conflicts, Trump did not attend the Florida Reform Party's state convention. Reports suggested that Trump insiders believed Buchanan had packed the convention with supporters and would embarrass Trump by winning all the state's delegates. There were also growing indications Trump was considering withdrawing from the race, commenting that he was "deeply concerned" about the conflict within the party.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-93" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[93]</a> In another attempt to unite the party's factions, Trump wrote letters to Ventura and Perot, requesting the two make peace.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-94" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[94]</a>Trump believed the instability of the party would hinder his chances of presidential success. Stone commented that "the [Reform] party is melting down before our very eyes."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-bicker-92" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[92]</a> On the final day of January, Trump was removed from the New York primary ballot after a judge determined that Trump's supporters had failed to obtain the required 5,000 signatures from registered Reform Party members. This marked a victory for Buchanan's supporters, including leftist activist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenora_Fulani" title="Lenora Fulani" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Lenora Fulani</a>, who had hoped to prevent Trump from appearing on the ballot in his home state.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-95" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[95]</a><h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: none; line-height: 1.6;">February 2000[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000&action=edit&section=9" title="Edit section: February 2000" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Despite Trump's efforts, the conflict within the Reform Party escalated. A special Reform Party meeting was planned for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville" class="mw-redirect" title="Nashville" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Nashville</a> at which the Perot faction was expected to vacate the national chairmanship of Ventura-ally Jack Gargan.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-96" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[96]</a> Both Trump and Ventura expressed disgust with the national party. Ventura desired to disassociate the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Party_of_Minnesota" title="Independence Party of Minnesota" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Minnesota Reform Party</a> from the national party. An unnamed official within the party told the AP that Ventura and Trump discussed a scenario where Ventura would run as the presidential nominee of the disaffiliated party with Trump as his running mate. The chairman of the Minnesota Reform Party denied Ventura would be part of any presidential ticket.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-97" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[97]</a> After privately notifying Trump of his intentions and seeking his blessing,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-today_show-98" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[98]</a> Ventura held a press conference on February 12 and officially left the national Reform Party, remaining a member of his state party, which he urged to disaffiliate and return to its original name, the Independence Party of Minnesota. He voiced dissatisfaction with the presidential contest, explaining that Pat Buchanan was running "virtually unopposed" and receiving support from former <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan" title="Ku Klux Klan" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ku Klux Klan</a> leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke" title="David Duke" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">David Duke</a>; something with which Ventura could not associate. Ventura invited Trump to run for the presidential nomination of the Independence Party, which Ventura believed could become a national entity.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-dysfunctional-99" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[99]</a> At the party's next meeting, it disaffiliated.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-100" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[100]</a> Trump considered Ventura's invitation but had concerns, particularly the question of whether other state parties would affiliate with the new party.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-101" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[101]</a> Minnesota political scientist Steve Schier doubted the party could become a national entity, arguing that it was far too small to make an impact on the national level.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-dysfunctional-99" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[99]</a> Ventura's move came just ahead of the Nashville meeting where, with the rationale of failing to "faithfully perform and execute the duties of his office," Gargan was removed by a 109 to 31 committee vote.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-102" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[102]</a> The chaotic meeting, dominated by Perot-faction members, featured shoving matches and physical squabbles as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Nashville_Police_Department" title="Metropolitan Nashville Police Department" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Metropolitan Nashville Police Department</a> intervened to restore order. Gargan charged that the meeting was illegal due to insufficient notice, though a quorum was present.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-103" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[103]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Withdrawal[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000&action=edit&section=10" title="Edit section: Withdrawal" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><div class="quotebox" style="float: right; clear: right; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.8em 1.4em; width: 215px; padding: 6px; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 240);"><div class="" style="position: relative;"><div style="margin: 0px 2em;">So the Reform Party now includes a Klansman—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke" title="David Duke" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Mr. Duke</a>, a Neo-Nazi—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan" title="Pat Buchanan" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Mr. Buchanan</a>, and a Communist—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenora_Fulani" title="Lenora Fulani" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ms. Fulani</a>.
This is not company I wish to keep.</div><div style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" font-size="font-size" large="large" color="color" gray="gray">“</div><div style="position: absolute; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" font-size="font-size" large="large" color="color" gray="gray">”</div></div><cite style="font-style: inherit; display: block; text-align: center;">Donald Trump<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-press-104" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[104]</a></cite></div>On February 14, Trump withdrew from the race.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-ducks-105" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[105]</a> In a press release, he cited infighting in the Reform Party as not "conducive to victory," concluding he could not win the election as the party's nominee and so, as pledged, would not continue his campaign. He expressed concerns about the direction of the party, particularly its membership, referring to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Lenora Fulani as a Klansman, a Neo-Nazi, and a Communist, respectively. However, he lauded party members Russ Verney, Jack Gargan, and others as "wonderful people" he was honored to meet. Trump lamented the exit of Jesse Ventura from the party, arguing "without Jesse, the Reform Party is just an extremist shell and cannot be a force or even a factor in 2000." Trump declined to seek the nomination of Ventura's new Independence Party, finding it "healthy" but too young to win. He expressly kept open the possibility of running for president in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,2004" title="United States presidential election, 2004" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">2004</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-press-104" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[104]</a> Trump publicly announced his withdrawal on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today(U.S.TV_program)" title="Today (U.S. TV program)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Today Show</a> in an interview with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Lauer" title="Matt Lauer" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Matt Lauer</a>. He explained that though he still could have won the Reform Party nomination, he believed he would only win 20 percent in the general election, which he did not want. He claimed the party was on the verge of "self-destructing" and referred to it as a "total mess."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-today_show-98" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[98]</a> In response, Pat Choate, who became the new Reform Party chairman after the unseating of Gargan, disputed Trump's claim about the party<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-newson6-106" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[106]</a> and said Trump's campaign was meant only "to smear Pat Buchanan."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-107" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[107]</a> He declared Trump "unwelcome" to seek the party's 2004 presidential nomination.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-newson6-106" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[106]</a> Choate later remarked that he believed Trump's campaign was a "Republican dirty trick" orchestrated by Roger Stone "to disgust people and drive them away from the Reform Party."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-108" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[108]</a> Stone argued that John McCain "running on Trump's message" and surging in the polls signaled an end to the Trump campaign.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-fortune-69" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[69]</a>Several days after withdrawing, Trump reflected on his campaign in an editorial published in The New York Times titled "What I Saw at the Revolution." Disputing the claim that he ran for the publicity, Trump countered that he felt the nation was ready for a non-establishment "businessman president" who offered "straight talk." He cited three reasons for dropping out: (1) the criteria of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which would have made it "impossible" for him to qualify for general election debates; (2) the rise of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_presidential_campaign,2000" title="John McCain presidential campaign, 2000" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">presidential campaign of John McCain</a>, whose similar message would have made a contrast difficult; and (3) the exit of Ventura from the Reform Party. Trump called his run the "greatest civics lesson that a private citizen can have," but said it was "enormous fun" and a "great life experience," though it "doesn't compare with completing one of the great skyscrapers of Manhattan."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-109" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[109]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Results[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000&action=edit&section=11" title="Edit section: Results" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>During the campaign, Trump qualified for the Michigan and California Reform Party presidential primaries. Both of these elections were held after Trump exited the race.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-110" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[110]</a> On February 22, Trump won the Michigan Primary with 2,164 votes defeating uncommitted with 948 votes.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-111" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[111]</a> Trump won the California primary on March 7 with 15,311 votes (44.28%) defeating perennial candidate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_D.Weber" title="George D. Weber" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">George D. Weber</a> who received 9,390 votes (27.16%), former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M.Bowman" title="Robert M. Bowman" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Robert M. Bowman</a> who received 4,879 (14.11%), former Congressman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B.Anderson" title="John B. Anderson" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">John B. Anderson</a> who received 3,158 (9.13%), and political activist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E.Collins" title="Charles E. Collins" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Charles E. Collins</a> who received 1,837 (5.31%).<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-112" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[112]</a> Pat Buchanan was not listed on either ballot. A slate of Trump supporters petitioned to list Trump on the New York Independence Party presidential primary ballot but were denied on a technicality.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-113" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[113]</a>Pat Buchanan eventually won the Reform Party presidential nomination at a chaotic<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-chaos-114" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[114]</a> National Convention in Long Beach in August 2000.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-115" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[115]</a> Buchanan had lost the support of the Perot faction, which accused Buchanan of fraud and held a counter-convention, nominating Buchanan's only major opponent physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagelin" title="John Hagelin" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">John Hagelin</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Law_Party" title="Natural Law Party" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Natural Law Party</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-wins-116" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[116]</a> According to Russ Verney, the Perot faction lost faith in Buchanan when he emphasized pro-life and anti-homosexual issue positions after promising to respect the party's neutral stance on social issues.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-117" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[117]</a> After the filing of a complaint over the party's matching funds, the FEC ruled against the Perot faction and invalided the Hagelin selection.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-118" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[118]</a> The decision was affirmed on appeal. On Election Day, Buchanan appeared on the ballot in all 50 states and received 448,895 votes, 0.42% of the popular vote. George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in a close contest<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-119" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[119]</a> that required a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount" class="mw-redirect" title="Florida election recount" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">recount</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v.Gore" title="Bush v. Gore" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Supreme Court intervention</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-120" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[120]</a> The Bush campaign recruited Roger Stone to oversee the recount.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-121" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[121</a>aftermath:

In 2009, Trump changed his voter registration from Democrat back to Republican.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-five-2" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[2]</a> He seriously considered running for president as a Republican in 2012 and led in an April 2011 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmussen_Reports" title="Rasmussen Reports" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Rasmussen Reports</a> survey.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-130" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[130]</a> While considering a run, Trump emphasized China's currency manipulation and criticized the trade policies of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama" title="Barack Obama" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Barack Obama</a> administration.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-131" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[131]</a> Additionally, he questioned the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories" title="Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">legitimacy of Obama's citizenship and birth certificate</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-132" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[132]</a> He decided not to run in May 2011,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-133" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[133]</a> but proclaimed "I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and, ultimately, the general election."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-134" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[134]</a> After reports that a group in Texas was attempting to create the "Make America Great Again Party" with the intention of running Trump as a candidate,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-great-135" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[135]</a> Trump briefly considered a 2012 Independent bid and changed his voter registration from Republican to "I do not wish to enroll in a party."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-five-2" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[2]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-136" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[136]</a> Trump said he would run if the Republicans selected the "wrong candidate."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-great-135" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[135]</a> Ultimately, he again decided against running. Trump re-registered as a Republican in 2012<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-five-2" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[2]</a> and publicly endorsed Republican presidential nominee <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney" title="Mitt Romney" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Mitt Romney</a> for president.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-137" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[137]</a>After the election, Trump returned to his real estate business, rekindled his relationship with Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-122" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[122]</a> and hosted NBC's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice(U.S.TV_series)" title="The Apprentice (U.S. TV series)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Apprentice</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrity_Apprentice" title="The Celebrity Apprentice" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">The Celebrity Apprentice</a> for 14 seasons from 2004 to 2015, acquiring the catchphrase, "You're fired!".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-123" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[123]</a> In addition, he continued an involvement in politics. He changed his voter registration from the New York Independence Party (Reform Party affiliate) to the Democratic Party in August 2001<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-five-2" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[2]</a> as the Reform Party continued its decline. By 2004, the party had lost ballot access in all but seven states, which it gave to Independent presidential candidate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader" title="Ralph Nader" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ralph Nader</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-124" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[124]</a> Trump was critical of the George W. Bush administration's handling of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War" title="Iraq War" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Iraq War</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-125" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[125]</a> and publicly endorsed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_impeach_George_W.Bush" title="Efforts to impeach George W. Bush" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bush's impeachment</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-126" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[126]</a> He considered challenging Bush in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,2004" title="Republican Party presidential primaries, 2004" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">2004 Republican presidential primaries</a>, but ultimately decided against it.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-127" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[127]</a> Jesse Ventura, who chose not to run for re-election as Governor of Minnesota in 2002,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-128" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[128]</a> also considered a 2004 presidential run and publicly asked for and received Trump's support at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_XX" title="WrestleMania XX" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">WrestleMania XX</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-129" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[129]</a> However, Ventura did not run.After much speculation, Trump officially <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2016" title="Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">decided to run for president as a Republican</a> in 2016, using the motto "Make America Great Again." In his announcement speech in June 2015, Trump took a tough stance against illegal immigration and promised to build a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_barrier" title="Mexico–United States barrier" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">wall on the U.S.–Mexico border</a> if elected president.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-138" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[138]</a> After announcing, Trump became the front-runner for the nomination, taking the lead in nearly every national poll, ahead of his rivals for the Republican nomination including Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson" title="Ben Carson" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ben Carson</a>, Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz" title="Ted Cruz" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ted Cruz</a> of Texas, and Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Rubio" title="Marco Rubio" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Marco Rubio</a> of Florida.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-139" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[139]</a> Trump styled himself as the candidate of anti-establishment Republicans and received praise from former rival Pat Buchanan, who compared Trump's run to Buchanan's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,1992" title="United States presidential election, 1992" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">1992</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,1996" title="United States presidential election, 1996" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">1996</a> campaigns.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-140" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[140]</a> His attacks on the Republican establishment included a slight against the war hero status of John McCain, whom Trump complimented during his 2000 campaign.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-141" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[141]</a> Republican voters favored the purported honesty of Trump's message and his abrasive approach,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-142" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[142]</a> which eschewed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness" title="Political correctness" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">political correctness</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,2000#cite_note-143" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[143]</a> Roger Stone, who headed Trump's 2000 presidential committee, served as an adviser for the 2016 campaign until a much publicized split in August 2015.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,_2000#cite_note-144" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[144]</a> The campaign generated major media attention and attracted large crowds to campaign events. Trump won multiple Republican primaries, receiving more votes than any previous Republican candidate, and earned the party's presidential nomination at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Republican_National_Convention" title="2016 Republican National Convention" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">2016 Republican National Convention</a>. In the general election, Trump defeated Democratic presidential nominee <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton" title="Hillary Clinton" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Hillary Clinton</a> to be elected the 45th President of the United States.http://www.moldea.com/bushology4.html<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1.  Bush-Cheney 2000        The Public i, "Under the Influence:  George W. Bush:  Pragmatic, with Ties to Corporate America" 
        * Center for Responsive Politics: George W. Bush<blockquote>          --TPJ, "<a href="http://www.tpj.org/bush/index.html">The Governor's Gusher:  The Sources of George W. Bush's $41 Million Texas War Chest</a>," January 20, 2000.          --TPJ, "<a href="http://www.tpj.org/pioneers/index.html">The Pioneers:  George Bush's $100,000 Club</a>," July 28, 2000.          --Mike Allen, Washington Post, "'Pioneers' Paved Bush's Way With Big Dollars," May 6, 2003.</blockquote>        * Julie Reynolds, El Andar, "Los Amigos De Bush:  The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush's Latino advisors," no date.<blockquote>          --Julie Reynolds with Eduardo Valle, El Andar, "The Price of a Favor," (Bush and Enrique Fuentes Leon), no date.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><hr size="8" width="75%" /><a name="Cheney">2.  Dick Cheney</a>          <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882164.html">Biography of Dick Cheney</a><blockquote>          --Knut Royce & Nathaniel Heller, The Public i, "Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough," August 2, 2000.<blockquote><blockquote>* Mike Allen, Washington Post, "Cheney's Ties to Halliburton," September 26, 2003.</blockquote></blockquote>          --No byline, Oil News (via AP), "Cheney, Oil Execs Raise $8M for GOP," September 28, 2000.          --Colum Lynch, Washington Post, "Firm's Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has Said," June 23, 2001.<blockquote>--Neely Tucker, Washington Post, "Suit Versus Cheney Is Dismissed Judge Gives Administration Broad Victory on Oversight," December 10, 2002.--Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, "Cheney, Little Seen by Public, Plays a Visible Role for Bush," January 31, 2003.--Dana Milbank, Washington Post, "GAO Ends Fight With Cheney Over Files:  Weakening of Hill's Oversight Decried," February 8, 2003.--Henri E. Cauvin, Washington Post, "Judge Questions U.S. Move in Cheney Suit," April 18, 2003.--Henri E. Cauvin, Washington Post, "Cheney Loses Ruling on Energy Panel Records," July 9, 2003.</blockquote>* Mike Allen, Washington Post, "Cheney Says He'll Run for Reelection With Bush," May 8, 2003.</blockquote><hr width="75%" /><a name="recount">3.  The recount battle</a><blockquote>Anabelle de Gale, Lila Arzua & Curtis Morgan, Miami Herald, "If the vote were flawless . . . , " December 2, 2000* David Barstow & Don Van Natta, Jr., New York Times, "How Bush Took Florida:  Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote," July 15, 2001.</blockquote>          * New York Times:  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/eln-profiles.html">The aftermath of the presidential election:  Key characters</a>          * Washington Post:  <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/elections/postelection2000coverage.htm">Key documents, transcripts, columns, etc.</a>          * Jeffrey Rosen, New Republic, "Disgrace:  The Supreme Court Commits Suicide," December 14, 2000.<blockquote>* David Savage & Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times, "High Court in Awkward Spot Over Equal Protection Ruling," December 16, 2000.* Vincent Bugliosi, The Nation, "None Dare Call It Treason," February 5, 2001.* Alan M. Dershowitz and Richard A. Posner, "The Supreme Court and the 2000 Election," an ongoing debate that began on July 2, 2001.* Renata Adler, New Republic, "Irreparable Harm," July 21, 2001.* Phil Agre/Red Rock Eater's catalogue of articles, chronicling the continuing controversy.</blockquote><hr width="75%" /><a name="goonsquad">4.  The Bush-Cheney goon squads</a><blockquote><center><img src="http://www.moldea.com/GOP.jpg" height="142" width="228" />
Colin Braley, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/">Reuters</a></center>     Young Republicans, alleged by Democrats as a "violent mob," participated in the now-infamous demonstration at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters on November 22, 2000.  According to Al Kamen's "In The Loop" column in the Washington Post on December 6, these "penny-loafer protesters" are identified as:<blockquote>     1. Tom Pyle, policy analyst, office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).     2. Garry Malphrus, majority chief counsel and staff director, House Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice.     3. Rory Cooper, political division staff member at the National Republican Congressional Committee.     4. Kevin Smith, former House Republican conference analyst and more recently of Voter.com.     5. Steven Brophy, former aide to Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.), now working at the consulting firm KPMG.     6. Matt Schlapp, former chief of staff for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), now on the Bush campaign staff in Austin.     7. Roger Morse, aide to Rep. Van Hilleary (R-Tenn.).     8. Duane Gibson, aide to Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) of the House Resources Committee.     9. Chuck Royal, legislative assistant to Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).     10. Layna McConkey, former legislative assistant to former Rep. Jim Ross Lightfoot (R-Iowa), now at Steelman Health Strategies.</blockquote></blockquote>          * Video, MSNBC, "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/msnbc/ms112200-1v.htm">Let us in!  Let us in!,</a>" November 22, 2000.          * Don Finefrock, Miami Herald, "Emotions mark day of indecision," November 23, 2000.          * Jacqueline Charles & Don Finefrock, Miami Herald, "Democratic leader has angry encounter with Republicans," November 23, 2000.          * Paul A. Gigot, Wall Street Journal (op-ed), "<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pgigot/?id=65000673">Miami Heat:  A burgher rebellion in Dade County,</a>" November 24, 2000.          * Jonathan Chait, New Republic Online, "Losing It:  The Madness in the GOP's Method," November 30, 2000          * Ceci Connolly & Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4526-2000Nov29?language=printer">GOP Organizes a Campaign to Pressure Gore</a>," November 30, 2000.          * Dennis Prager, Wall Street Journal (op-ed), "<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=65000704">An Open Letter to Democrats: This time, you've gone too far</a>," November 30, 2000.          * Joe Conason, New York Observer, "Right-Wingers Praise Antics of Bush Thugs," December 4, 2000.          * Tim Padgett, Time, "Mob Scene in Miami," December 4, 2000.          * Terence P. Jeffrey, Human Events, "What a Riot:  Republicans in Miami," December 8, 2000.          * David Grann, New Republic, "Quiet Riot:  Bush Rides the Tiger," December 25, 2000<hr width="75%" /><a name="transition">5.  Transition activities</a>          * The Bush Transition:  An Interactive Guide, MSNBC<blockquote>          --Robert L. Borosage, Washington Post, "Operation Divide and Discredit," January 10, 2001</blockquote><hr width="75%" /><a name="inaugural">6.  The Bush inauguration</a>          <a href="http://www.rnc.org/">* 2001 Presidential Inaugural Committee</a><hr width="75%" /><a name="protests">7.  Inaugural demonstrations</a>          <a href="http://dc.indymedia.org/">* Independent Media Center</a>  (Anti-Bush)          * National Conservative March  (Pro-Bush) ...</blockquote>==<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount</a>

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,2000">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,2000</a>

A full cousin of George W. Bush, <a title="John Prescott Ellis" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Prescott_Ellis">John Prescott Ellis</a>, was analyzing data from the <a title="Voter News Service" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_News_Service">Voter News Service</a> for <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News" title="Fox News">Fox News</a> and had several times contact by telephone with both George and Jeb Bush that night. It was his decision to call Florida for Bush, with Fox being the first network to do so. However, Fox had also incorrectly called the state for Gore before the polls had closed, like the other networks, and retracted around the same time they did which was at around 10 p.m. that evening. Fox only called the state for Bush at 2:16 a.m., shortly after the famous <a title="Volusia error" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error">Volusia error</a> was introduced. This error took 16,022 votes away from Gore and added those votes and more to Bush, producing more total votes in the precinct than there were registered voters. The other major networks announced the same totals within minutes. The error was corrected quickly and the calls retracted one by one.

??? Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo distributed to Democratic election canvassers on how to disenfranchise military absentee voters. The <a class="new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Herron_Memo&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Herron Memo (page does not exist)">Herron Memo</a> stated postmark and "point of origin" criteria Herron maintained could be used to invalidate military ballots. Conveniently, the memo attached a form that could be duplicated and used to protest the validity of individual ballots. By the time the Herron memo made headlines, the Democrats had challenged more than 1,500 absentee ballots (which grew to more than 2,400) mostly from soldiers overseas.[<a title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed">citation needed</a>]

----

The recount was in progress on December 9, when the United States Supreme Court 5-4 (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting) granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount, which had an unofficial lead of 154 votes for Bush.

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the <a title="Equal Protection Clause" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause">Equal Protection Clause</a> of the <a title="United States Constitution" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution">United States Constitution</a> in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. Five justices held there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped and Florida be allowed to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. The 5–4 decision became extremely controversial due to the partisan split in the decision and the majority's irregular instruction that its judgment in <a title="Bush v. Gore" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore">Bush v. Gore</a> should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore publicly disagreed with the court's decision, but conceded the election.

This <a title="Bush v. Gore" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore">ruling</a> stopped the vote recount, allowing Florida Secretary of State <a title="Katherine Harris" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Harris">Katherine Harris</a> to certify the election results. This allowed Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him the winner.

---

In brief, the breakdown of the decisions was:

<ul>

<li>Seven justices (the five Justice majority plus <a title="Stephen Breyer" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Breyer">Breyer</a> and <a title="David Souter" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Souter">Souter</a>) agreed that there was an Equal Protection Clause violation in using different standards of counting in different counties.</li>

<li>

</li><li>Five justices agreed that December 12 (the date of the decision) was the deadline Florida had established for recounts (<a title="Anthony Kennedy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Kennedy">Kennedy</a>, <a title="Sandra Day O'Connor" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor">O'Connor</a>, <a title="William Rehnquist" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist">Rehnquist</a>,<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v.Gore#cite_note-rehn-25">[26]</a> <a title="Antonin Scalia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia">Scalia</a> and <a title="Clarence Thomas" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas">Thomas</a> in support; Breyer,<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v.Gore#cite_note-breyer-26">[27]</a> <a title="Ruth Bader Ginsburg" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg">Ginsburg</a>, Souter<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#cite_note-souter-27">[28]</a> and <a title="John Paul Stevens" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens">Stevens</a> opposed). Justices Breyer and Souter wanted to remand the case to the Florida Supreme Court to permit that court to establish uniform standards of what constituted a legal vote and then manually recount all ballots using those standards.</li>

<li>

</li><li>Three justices (Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas) agreed that the Florida Supreme Court had acted contrary to the intent of the Florida legislature. Justices Kennedy and O'Connor did not reach this issue.</li>

</ul>

=

wiki

The 2000 United States presidential election in Florida took place on November 7, 2000 as part of the greater 2000 United States presidential election.

Florida, a swing state, had a major recount dispute that took center stage in the election. Thus, the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election was not known for more than a month after balloting, because of the extended process of counting and then recounting of Florida presidential ballots. State results tallied on election night gave 246 electoral votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush and 255 to Democratic nominee Al Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call that evening. The arithmetic of the available electoral votes in all three states meant that at that point, the result in Florida was all that mattered, and even when both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of the eventual loser Gore over the following few days, the drama in Florida uniquely dragged out for several weeks before eventually settling the election for the entire nation.

After an intense recount process and the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, Governor George W. Bush officially won Florida's electoral votes, by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost 6 million cast, and as a result, the entire presidential election. The process was extremely divisive, and led to calls for electoral reform in Florida.

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Campaign" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">1 Campaign</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Recount" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2 Recount</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Election_night" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.1 Election night</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Recount_irregularities" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.2 Recount irregularities</a>

<li class="toclevel-3 tocsection-5" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Controversial_issues" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.2.1 Controversial issues</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-3 tocsection-6" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Palm_Beach_County.27s_butterfly_ballots" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.2.2 Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Timeline" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.3 Timeline</a>

<li class="toclevel-3 tocsection-8" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Florida_supreme_court_trials" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.3.1 Florida supreme court trials</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-3 tocsection-9" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,2000#U.S.Supreme_Court_Proceedings" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2.3.2 U.S. Supreme Court Proceedings</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-10" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Final_certified_results" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3 Final certified results</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-11" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Results_breakdown" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">4 Results breakdown</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-12" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#By_county" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">4.1 By county</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-13" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#By_congressional_district" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">4.2 By congressional district</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-14" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Post_election_studies" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">5 Post election studies</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-15" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Florida_Ballot_Project_recounts" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">5.1 Florida Ballot Project recounts</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-16" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Media_based" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">5.2 Media based</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-17" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Opinion_polling_on_recount" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">5.3 Opinion polling on recount</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-18" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#Electors" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">6 Electors</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-20" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#References" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">8 References</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-21" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000#External_links" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">9 External links</a></li>

</ul>

Campaign[

florida had been considered a reliable red state.[citation needed] It was governed by Jeb Bush, a staunch conservative and George W. Bush's brother. Nonetheless the Republicans appear to have focused significant advertising resources in the large state, and later polls indicated that the state result was very much in play as late as September 2000.[1] Some late momentum for Gore and his Jewish running mate Joe Lieberman may also have come from the significant Jewish population.[2] Also various Northern-born population from reliable blue states in the Northeast have been migrating to Florida in the past few decades since the 1950s, as well as a large growing Asian and Hispanic immigrant population have been moving into Florida, thus supplanting Republican gains in the state, and making the state in general a swing state in 2000.

In 1996, exit polling showed 42% of the state were made up of voters older than 60 years old, thus making social security and Medicare the top issues in Florida. Polls showed older voters favored Gore 51% to 37%.[3]

In late October, one poll found that Gore was leading Bush and third parties with 44-42-4 among registered voters and 46-42-4 among likely voters.[4]

Recount

The controversy began on election night, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling, first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the eastern peninsula (which is in the Eastern time zone) but before they had closed in the heavily Republican counties of the western panhandle (which is in the Central time zone).

Once the polls had closed in the panhandle, the networks retracted their call for Gore, calling the state for Bush; then retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call".[5] In an editorial for National Review magazine, Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center, claimed that the media's premature call for Gore's victory in Florida might have disenfranchised many pro-Bush voters in the Panhandle;[6] however, this claim was deemed "extremely unlikely" by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watch group.[7] Gore made a concession phone call to Bush the night of the election, then retracted it after learning just how close the election was.[8]

Bush won the election night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. Florida state law provided for an automatic recount due to the small margins. There were general concerns about the fairness and accuracy of the voting process, especially since a small change in the vote count could change the result. The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes, making it the tightest race of the campaign (at least in percentage terms; New Mexico was decided by 363 votes but has a much smaller population, meaning those 363 votes represent a 0.061% difference while the 537 votes in Florida are just 0.009%). Most of the reduction in the ensuing recount came from Miami-Dade county alone, a statistical anomaly.

Recount irregularities

"Butterfly ballot"

The Florida election has been closely scrutinized since the election, and several irregularities are thought to have favored Bush. These included the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot," which produced an unexpectedly large number of votes for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan. Also noted was a purge of over 54,000 citizens from the Florida voting rolls identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-Americans. The majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.[9] Additionally, there were many more 'overvotes' than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval county (Jacksonville), where some 27,000 ballots showed two or more choices for President. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County 'butterfly ballot,' the Duval County ballot spread choices for President over two pages with instructions to 'vote on every page' on the bottom of each page.[10]

Controversial issues[edit source | editbeta]

Following the election a number of studies have been made of the electoral process in Florida by Democrats, Republicans, and other interested parties. A number of flaws and improprieties have been discovered in the process. Controversies included:

All five major US TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) made the incorrect assumption that all of Florida's polls closed at 7:00 p.m. EST, which was not the case. All five of them reported this incorrect statement at the top of the 6:00-7:00-hour. Westernmost counties in Florida had polls open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they were part of the Central Time Zone. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. Because of the above mistaken assumption, some media outlets reported at 7:00 p.m. EST that all polls had closed in the state of Florida. Also, significantly, the Voter News Service called the state of Florida for Al Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000, which theoretically reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes;[11] a study by John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes.[12] This survey assumes that the turnout in the Panhandle counties would have equalled the statewide average of 68% if the media had not incorrectly reported the polls' closing time and if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. This opens the possibility that Bush would have won by a larger victory margin and controversy would have been avoided if the networks had known and reported the correct poll closing times, and called the state after all polls were closed. Some individuals made public statements to the effect that they would have voted for Bush, but did not vote because of the poll close time confusion, or the Gore call.

In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the premature calls for Gore's victory ranked #2 on a list of TV's ten biggest "blunders", and is blamed for ushering in a new era of public distrust of the media.[13]

Florida Supreme Court

Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, was governor of Florida, leading some Gore advocates to make various allegations of impropriety, especially due to their joint campaigning for the Republican vote in Florida and Jeb Bush's assurances to George W. Bush that the Republicans would win Florida. While it is typical for sitting governors to campaign strongly on behalf of the candidate with the same party affiliation, it is unusual for the governor to be related by blood to the candidate.

Democratic State senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up road-blocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election.[14]

Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo distributed to Democratic election canvassers on how to invalidate military absentee ballots. The Herron Memo stated postmark and "point of origin" criteria Herron maintained could be used to invalidate military ballots. However, the Herron Memo was in line with a letter sent out by Secretary of State Katherine Harris which stated that if a postmark was not present on the military ballots that the ballots had to be thrown out. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore backer, later told the counties to go back and reconsider those ballots without a postmark.[15]

The actions of the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who was in charge of state election procedures, also came under fire, due to her status as a Bush state campaign co-chairman, her involvement with the "scrub list", and her behavior during the recount crisis. In particular, democracy advocates have taken issue with her antagonizing of Democratic lawyers, her dispatching of a lawyer to Palm Beach county to convince the voting board of voting down a manual recount[clarification needed] (despite thousands of protesters within the county including 12,000 with affidavits), and in particular her collaboration with Republican party advisers (at one point housing them).

There were a number of overseas ballots missing postmarks or filled out in such a way that they were invalid under Florida law. A poll worker filled out the missing information on some absentee ballot applications; the Democrats moved to have the returned ballots thrown out because of this.[citation needed] These disputes added to the mass of litigation between parties to influence the counting of ballots.[citation needed] The largest group of disputed overseas ballots were military ballots.[citation needed] On November 19, 2000, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Up until that point, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce those requirements disqualifying illegal ballots and reducing votes from overseas, which were predominantly cast for Bush.[16]

A suit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the United States Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment. Settlement agreements were reached in this suit.[17] However, a systematic investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice found no evidence of racial discrimination.[18]

Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, contracted with a new company (DBT Online Inc.), at an increase of $4.294 million to have the "scrub list"'s re-worked. Nearly 1% of Florida's electorate and nearly 3% of its African-American voters - 96,000 citizens were listed as felons and removed from the voting rolls. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, some listed "felonies" were dated years in the future, and some apparently were random.) In a vast minority of cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and some successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, most were not told that they weren't allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls. The company was directed not to use cross-checks or its sophisticated verification plan (used by the FBI).[19]

People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen (1 p.25), have argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states), to request clemency and a restoration of their rights, from Governor Bush, in a process which might take two years and ultimately was left to Bush's discretion. One should note Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) which ruled that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.

A full cousin of George W. Bush, John Prescott Ellis, was analyzing data from the Voter News Service for Fox News and had several times contact by telephone with both George and Jeb Bush that night. It was his decision to call Florida for Bush, with Fox being the first network to do so. However, Fox had also incorrectly called the state for Gore before the polls had closed, like the other networks, and retracted around the same time they did which was at around 10 p.m. that evening. Fox only called the state for Bush at 2:16 a.m., shortly after the famous Volusia error was introduced. This error took 16,022 votes away from Gore and added those votes and more to Bush, producing more total votes in the precinct than there were registered voters. The other major networks announced the same totals within minutes. The error was corrected quickly and the calls retracted one by one.

Xavier Suarez, who was ousted as mayor of Miami in 1998 on charges of absentee voter fraud, was later elected to the Executive Committee of the Miami-Dade Republican Party. Suarez helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County for the 2000 presidential election. “Dade County Republicans have a very specific expertise in getting out absentee ballots,” Suarez is claimed to have remarked. “I obviously have specific experience in this myself.”[20]

The Brooks Brothers riot: the manual recount in Miami-Dade County was shut down shortly after screaming protestors arrived at Miami's recount center. It turned out that these protesters were Republican Party members flown in from other states, some at Republican Party expense.[21]

The suppression of vote pairing. In brief, web sites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas: the Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore and the Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This would have allowed Nader to still get his fair share of the vote and perhaps get into the Presidential debates, while also allowing Gore to carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the web sites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them reluctantly to shut down. The ACLU got involved to protect the web sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Bill Jones two years later, but by then the election was over. The vote pairing web sites tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who vote paired for Gore, and if only a few more of the 97,421 people who did vote for Nader in Florida had known about vote pairing, the election might have had a different outcome.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots

Much evidence suggests that many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore or Bush actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots, because of a confusing layout of the ballot.

The number of ballots marked for Buchanan in Palm Beach County was oddly large. Early reports had Buchanan receiving about 0.8% of the vote in Palm Beach County (a total of 3,407 votes), significantly outperforming his state-wide vote share of 0.29%. Furthermore, absentee ballots from the same county showed far less support for Buchanan than election day ballots, even normalizing for the difference in choice shown by absentee voters in the neighboring county. Finally, an unusually large number of ballots were spoiled because of two votes in the same race, and one of those two votes was for Pat Buchanan with the other being for Bush or Gore.

Representatives of Buchanan's campaign and the Reform Party estimated Buchanan's true vote total at between 400 and 1,000 votes.

One theory is that voters might have accidentally voted for Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore on a so-called "butterfly ballot". In this ballot format used in Palm Beach County polling places (but not absentee ballots or other counties), the Democrats are listed second in the left-hand column; but punching a hole in the second circle actually cast a vote for Buchanan, first listing in the right-hand column. If the machine loading the ballot did not line it up with the candidates properly, then it became confusing for the voter to discern where they should punch the hole. Voters who punched the second hole would have ignored an arrow on the ballot showing which hole was to be punched if the arrow did not line up with the hole correctly due to machine error, because the design of the ballot neglected the effects of parallax due to the center row of holes being in a different plane from the two columns of printed names, and the ballot being viewed at an oblique angle.[22]

A later review of discarded ballots in Palm Beach County by the Palm Beach Post showed that 5,330 ballots were spoiled with votes cast for both Gore and Buchanan, and 1,631 for Bush and Buchanan. These could have indicated voters misunderstanding that the Buchanan hole applied to the right side of the ballot and punching what appeared to be multiple holes for their true candidate of choice. A counter theory says these voters were not confused by the ballot but simply believed they could vote for two candidates. But it would be rare for someone's two candidates to be Gore and Buchanan, considering how unlike the two candidates were.

Other statistical studies looked at what parties a voter voted for in other races when the voter selected Buchanan and his Reform Party for president. They showed that these Buchanan voters tended to vote Democratic, not Reform or anything closer to Reform. This provides further evidence that voters were confused by the butterfly ballot and intended to vote for Gore.

Buchanan said on The Today Show, November 9, 2000:

When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore.

He, unlike the voters, did not see the ballot before Election Night. Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9, 2000, "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there", Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, responded, "That's nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded, "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said, "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."

The ballot was redesigned earlier that year by Theresa LePore (Supervisor of Elections, and member of the Democratic Party).[23] She said she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger so the county's elderly residents could more easily see the names.[24]

Prior to the election, unusually substandard paper ballots, including misaligned chads, were manufactured by employees of the Sequoia Pacific company, out of normal specifications and failing quality testing, prior to shipping to Palm Beach County. (see http://election-reform.org/dan_rather.html#palm_beach)

Timeline

Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida law mandated a statewide recount. In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts.[25] The county canvassing board would then decide whether to recount as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts.[26] If the board discovered an error, they were then authorized to recount the ballots.[27]

Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. The Bush campaign hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee their legal team, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The canvassing board did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial mandated recount.

The Bush campaign sued to prevent additional recounts on the basis that no errors were found in the tabulation method until subjective measures were applied in manual recounts.

The Gore campaign, as allowed by Florida statute, requested that disputed ballots in four counties be counted by hand. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and, when it became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline, both Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have their deadlines extended.

Florida supreme court trials[

Main articles: Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris (Harris I) and Gore v. Harris (Harris II)

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris became a controversial figure during the Florida election controversy

The trial of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris was a response from the Bush campaign to state litigation against extending the statutory deadlines for the manual recounts. Besides deadlines, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily-Democratic counties would be unfair.

Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court which ordered the recounting process to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore.

At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of disputed ballots in all Florida counties and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live world-wide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The Court further ordered that only undervotes be considered. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 14 tally.

U.S. Supreme Court Proceedings[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: Bush v. Gore

The recount was in progress on December 9, when the United States Supreme Court 5-4 (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting) granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount, which had an unofficial lead of 154 votes for Bush.[citation needed]

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. Five justices held there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped and Florida be allowed to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. The 5–4 decision became extremely controversial due to the partisan split in the decision and the majority's irregular instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore publicly disagreed with the court's decision, but conceded the election.

This ruling stopped the vote recount, allowing Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify the election results. This allowed Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him the winner.

Final certified results[edit source | editbeta]

Federal official vote for the state of Florida (25 electoral votes)

Presidential candidate Vote total % Party

George W. Bush (W) 2,912,790 48.847 Republican

Al Gore 2,912,253 48.838 Democratic

Ralph Nader 97,488 1.635 Green

Patrick J. Buchanan 17,484 0.293 Reform

Harry Browne 16,415 0.275 Libertarian

John Hagelin 2,281 0.038 Natural Law/Reform

Howard Phillips 1,371 0.023 Constitution

Other 3,028 0.051 —

Total 5,963,110

Source: 2000 official presidential general election results

Results breakdown

<div class="timestamp" style="margin-top: 15px; font-weight: bold;">October 19, 2007</div>

<h1 style="margin-top: 3px;"><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Confronting Ghosts of 2000 in South Carolina</nyt_headline></h1>

<div class="byline" style="font-weight: bold;">By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/jennifer_steinhauer/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Jennifer Steinhauer" style=" color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">JENNIFER STEINHAUER</a></div>

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "><nyt_text /></nyt_byline>

CHARLESTON, S.C. — When Senator <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_mccain/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about John McCain." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">John McCain</a> and his wife campaign in <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/southcarolina/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about South Carolina." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">South Carolina</a> these days, people pull them aside to apologize for what happened during the presidential primary here in 2000.

With its early date, Southern location and reputation for road testing conservative credentials, the South Carolina primary is a proving ground for any Republican who longs to be president.

But as Mr. McCain seeks the Republican nomination again, the state is also a painful symbol of the brutality of American politics, the place that derailed his 2000 bid and, ultimately, helped reshape him into the candidate he is today.

“He would tell you he’s the same guy and they’re over it and I think on many levels they are,” said John Weaver, Mr. McCain’s former chief political strategist. “But it changes you.”

A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000 here had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question.

In the years that followed, many around Mr. McCain said, the South Carolina ghosts were not easily exorcised for Mr. McCain or the people close to him. Just a few months ago, at the onset of this campaign, Bridget, now 16, summoned Mr. McCain’s aides and asked them to explain in detail what had happened in South Carolina and to give assurances that it would not happen again.

Mrs. McCain was also unsure about another run. The ultimate decision was in her hands, she said, and she was deeply influenced by the feelings of Bridget, who only learned about the events of 2000 when she Googled herself last year.

“She was a very important part of the process in deciding if we were going to run,” Mrs. McCain said. “She wanted to know the whole history of it.”

On the campaign bus, Mrs. McCain spoke recently of the people from across South Carolina who had made a point of apologizing to her about the pain her family endured in 2000.

As the McCains traveled throughout the state that year, they began to feel, aides said, as if they were being pelted by hail from an underground whispering campaign of unknown origin — a telephone call from a push pollster here, a nasty anonymous flier there — that they could barely keep pace with each attack.

“But we’re past that,” Mrs. McCain said, catching her husband’s eye. “We’ve moved on.”

Mr. McCain, in a recent interview, said that after losing the South Carolina primary he felt sorry for himself and was angry.

“You know, How could this happen? Woe is me!” Mr. McCain said. “Then, after a couple of days, I thought, Look, I’m the senator from Arizona; the people of Arizona expect me to represent them in the Senate, not feel sorry for myself because of something that happened in a political campaign.”

In his efforts both to fight back here in 2000 and to reconcile his loss to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about George W. Bush." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">George W. Bush</a>, Mr. McCain saw his reputation as a reformer and an outsider — one he had solidified in his stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary just weeks before — lacerated.

The bruising episode left him rancorous toward Mr. Bush, yet schooled in what it takes to win. Mr. McCain fell into a “very dark place,” in the words of one acquaintance, re-emerging as a more pragmatic, traditional Republican who now regularly reaches out to many of Mr. Bush’s allies, speaks comfortably to religious conservatives and has all but abandoned the maverick story line of 2000.

“He regrouped, and he dug real deep to figure out how to make the best of that situation,” said the acquaintance, Ed McMullen, who heads a South Carolina public policy group.

Several top campaign aides cited a single moment that marked a turning point in the South Carolina campaign, and in Mr. McCain himself. In an effort to fight back, the McCain campaign had gone negative, broadcasting a television advertisement that accused Mr. Bush of twisting the truth “like Clinton,” a reference to President <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Bill Clinton." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Bill Clinton</a>.

At a town-hall-style meeting in Spartanburg after the advertisement ran, a woman stood up, her voice shaking. She recalled how her 13-year-old son had received a phone call from a push pollster calling Mr. McCain a liar and a cheat.

“‘A man got on the phone and talked about how dishonest you were,’" Mr. Weaver recalled her saying. “‘My son had admired you, and now he doesn’t know what to believe.’”

Afterward, on the bus, Mr. McCain, who was shaken by how negative a turn the primary had taken, instructed his staff to pull the negative advertisements and “stop trying to defend ourselves,” Mr. Weaver said.

“We tried to talk him out of this,” Mr. Weaver said. “But John was so impacted by that woman’s comments, we just did it.”

Nancy Snow, a volunteer on the McCain campaign, was at that meeting, too, and remembered seeing the life drain from Mr. McCain’s face.

Ms. Snow said of Mr. McCain’s expression: “He looked like he felt terrible, and terrible for that boy, because he knew he had so many young people supporting him before that. It was kind of like the air had gone out of the room.”

In the process, Mr. McCain changed from an underdog Republican seemingly determined to remake his party in his own image — one that would be divorced from religiousness and without dogmatic socially conservative notions — to a candidate who now claims that he prefers a Christian in the White House.

Right after his bitter loss in 2000, Mr. McCain stood before an audience in Virginia and said defiantly: “We are the party of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ronald_wilson_reagan/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Ronald Wilson Reagan." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Ronald Reagan</a>, not <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/pat_robertson/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Pat Robertson." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Pat Robertson</a>. We are the party of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/theodore_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Theodore Roosevelt." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Theodore Roosevelt</a>, not the party of special interests. We are the party of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincoln/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Abraham Lincoln." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Abraham Lincoln</a>, not Bob Jones.”

The latter was a reference to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/bob_jones_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Bob Jones University" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Bob Jones University</a>, where Mr. Bush had kicked off his South Carolina campaign and which, at the time, did not permit interracial dating on its campus.

Last year, by contrast, Mr. McCain said he would consider speaking at Bob Jones University. Further, while Mr. McCain denounced<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/jerry_falwell/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Jerry Falwell." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Jerry Falwell</a> in 2000 as one of the United States’ “agents of intolerance,” he eagerly accepted Mr. Falwell’s invitation last year to be the graduation speaker at Liberty University, which Mr. Falwell founded.

And Mr. McCain, who always seemed uncomfortable in 2000 making statements about his own religious beliefs, recently told a reporter he would prefer a Christian as president of the United States over someone of a different faith, saying the affiliation would be “an important part of our qualifications to lead.”

As the South Carolina primary loomed in February 2000, aides to both Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush were regrouping from the outcome of the contest on Feb. 1 in New Hampshire. Mr. McCain won by an astonishing 18 points.

The Bush team, stung by the New Hampshire blowout, knew that South Carolina could not be lost, and while the McCain campaign was celebrating, the Bush team was shifting into high gear.

Even as Mr. McCain’s plane was aloft over the state from New Hampshire, Bush supporters had taken to the airwaves, accusing Mr. McCain of having accomplished little as a senator and suggesting he was out of step with conservative South Carolina.

“I remember thinking,” said Roy Fletcher, who was Mr. McCain’s deputy campaign manager, “these people knew they were going to get their butts pounded and they already had this attack planned.”

Evidently unnerved, the McCain campaign stumbled. Addressing the issue of the use of the Confederate battle flag — a subject of passionate debate in South Carolina — Mr. McCain vacillated. He called the flag “offensive” and a “symbol of racism and slavery,” but later backed off those remarks, referring to it as “a symbol of heritage,” the same language flag supporters used in explaining why it flew over the statehouse.

“I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” Mr. McCain later conceded. “So I chose to compromise my principles.”

Perhaps most significantly, though, an underground campaign was bubbling all around.

People in some areas of South Carolina began to receive phone calls in which self-described pollsters would ask, “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

It was a reference to Bridget, who was adopted as a baby from an orphanage in Bangladesh and is darker skinned than the rest of the McCain family. Richard Hand, a professor at Bob Jones University, sent an e-mail message to “fellow South Carolinians” telling recipients that Mr. McCain had “chosen to sire children without marriage.”

Literature began to pepper the windshields of cars at political events suggesting that Mr. McCain had committed treason while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, that he was mentally unstable after years in a P.O.W. camp, that he was the homosexual candidate and that Mrs. McCain, who had admitted to abusing prescription drugs years earlier, was an addict.

“You had a sense of besiegement daily,” said Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Mr. McCain.

The McCain team had trouble nailing down the origin of the dirt.

“One time in Hilton Head, we chased these punks down the block who were handing them out,” said State Representative James H. Merrill, the Republican state majority leader, “and when we got to them and asked them where they got them, they said some guy in a red pickup truck said, ‘Hey do you wanna make $100?’”

<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/karl_rove/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Karl Rove." style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Karl Rove</a>, Mr. Bush’s political adviser, and the entire Bush team strongly denied involvement, though it was clear Mr. Bush was the beneficiary of the campaign. When the McCain camp did fight back, it chose Mr. Bush as the target — and a method that backfired.

After promising a positive campaign, Mr. McCain’s campaign put together two negative advertisements, including the one accusing Mr. Bush of twisting the truth “like Clinton.” The advertisement offended many Republicans in the state, who considered a comparison to Mr. Clinton, then president and unpopular among Republicans here, beyond the pale.

“We pulled the pedestal right from under him,” recalled Dan Schnur, a spokesman for the campaign in 2000. “That negative ad turned him into just another career politician. Once we took that halo off of him, there was no way to get it back.”

Charlie Condon, a former South Carolina attorney general who supported Mr. Bush in 2000 and is now co-chairman of Mr. McCain’s South Carolina committee, said the downward spiral the contest took was not surprising.

“Our primaries have a way of doing that,” Mr. Condon said. “There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works.”

He added, “There are no regrets about 2000. To this day I don’t have one. If someone did those things, shame on them. But I did see that there was a need for bringing up issues.”

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