December 13, 2000: A date that will also live in infamy

SCOTUS said that the rules in a federal election could not be changed in mid count and all the counties had to apply the same standard. Sounds like good rulings both.
I cannot imagine the disaster that would have come about had the inventer of the internet, the huckster of carbon credits and the user of far more energy than I ever will in my lifetime had become president. Common sense court decisions unwittingly prevented this triple barrel FUBAR.

I remember that night. I was working at my job at my church that evening when he made the announcement. I was watching it on the TV in the nursery. Even though I wasn't political when I was 16 I knew it was historic.

Good follow up Jan, I was counting on you! :)

I'm still not convinced that Gore was the best candidate that the Democratic Party could field. To me he lacked something. I voted for him anyway, but I don't know he lost and maybe we should move on from that point .

I'm not convinced that Gore had exhausted all his options. He could have fought this, but apparently didn't want to rock the boat. I remember reading somewhere that he said he decided to concede in the interest of national unity and stability. Gore did not really find his true voice until after this defeat. What a shame. If he was as good a speaker then as he is now, he would have been President. I still think that if Gore had become President, the attacks of Sept. 11 would not have happened.

I was incredibly happy just knowing he had won the election. When I watched him give that speech I knew something was terribly wrong, that the nation that I grew up with and believed in had changed; was broken and maybe never would be right again. Even when I see him on TV now, I still get that little twinge or whatever you call it, that reminds me that he should have been the President and things would be so different today...not sure how, because it wasn't just Dubya that was screwed up, the system was self destructing before our eyes. There was just a huge national shrug and everyone walked away...pretty sad in retrospect...

I was driving to work the morning that I heard the USSC appointed Bush. My first words were "god help us all". I wish I had been wrong!!!

I wrote the following under kennymotown's Bush thread--

"I almost puked watching this. Our country hasn't been the same ever since. We should've had a Occupy movement then, already! Occupy DC, Florida, and the Supreme Court. Demand, demand, demand....like we do now."

This video of Al Gore I can not bear to watch. Too painful. A movie that I did view during the 2008 election year was "Recount." It was a great HBO movie about the 2000 election and did a very good job in pointing out what went on that year. That was tough to watch as well....bought back all the pain and anger of that year. As Bill Press said in one of his books I have...."The uncounted votes from 2000 are STILL sitting somewhere in boxes." That is one of the many reasons why I did all I could with Peace Action to get Bush/Cheney impeached. What they did was treason. You can also thank that bitch Sandra Day O'Connor. She was supposed to be the swing vote to let the recount continue but she didn't. I guess that was her "thank you" to ole Ronnie. And by her doing what she did in 2000, that erased any good she did for women's rights.

Thanks for posting this!

Every time I watch this my stomach turns and I get very nauseous. Not just for the speech but the fact that Americans let this happen. We have no-one to blame but ourselves. We should have been in the streets but we sat on our asses and let it happen and now it maybe too late to affect change. Too damn bad we let our apathy destroy our future.

I know it's like they made treason chic.......

(actually both of them, seemed to be a concerted effort on both parts....)

It Was a coup, nothing short of it! Thanks for the recap, JanForGore; we can never allow this to happen again. Every Democrat should have taken Dec. 12th's grand theft to the streets!

Cont..

One of the main reasons why so many votes were lost, was due to the collusion between Katherine Harris and Choicepoint, a company that is located in Atlanta, Georgia, which provided certain data base lists for Florida in the 2000 election. Investigative journalist Greg Palast did much work regarding this part of the coup (unfortunately, the page is no longer linked.)

Here is also some background on Choicepoint:

In 1998 the state of Florida signed a $4 million contract with Database Technologies (DBT Online) which later merged into ChoicePoint, for the purpose of providing a central voter database listing of those restricted from voting. Florida contracted with DBT in November 1998 as a result of a controversial Miami mayoral race of 1997. The 1998 contract with DBT was worth $2,317,800, and was a no bid contract. Sound familiar?

Allegations surfaced in 2000 regarding listing voters as felons for alleged crimes said to have been committed several years in the future. In addition, people who had been convicted of a felony in a different state and had their rights restored by that state were not allowed to vote despite the restoration of their rights. Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) however, had 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. It was also noted that people were listed as felons based on a coincidence of names, despite other data (such as date of birth) which showed that the criminal record did not apply to the voter in question.

It was estimated that 57,700 people (15% of the list) primarily Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent, were incorrectly listed as felons and barred from voting. Greg Palast estimated that 80% of these people would have voted, and that 90% of those who would have voted, would have voted for Al Gore. The official (and disputed) margin of victory, in the election, was 537 votes. So, we have approximately 51,930 votes vs. 537 votes. Coincidence?

ChoicePoint Vice President Martin Fagan also admitted that at least 8,000 names were incorrectly listed in this fashion when the company passed on a list given by the state of Texas. He described the error as a "minor glitch". Imagine that. To these people, Democracy is a “minor glitch.” Also FYI, ChoicePoint as a matter of policy does not verify the accuracy of its data and claims that it is the responsibility of the user to verify accuracy. In this case, the “user” certainly wasn’t interested in verifying the information. Choicepoint also has a history of less than admirable practices.

On April 17, 2000 at a special Congressional hearing in Atlanta, ChoicePoint Vice-President James Lee testified that Florida had ordered DBT to add to the list voters who matched 80% of an ineligible voter's name vis a vis , middle initials and suffixes were to be dropped, while nicknames and aliases were added. Also, names were considered reversible. Ruth Frank could be added in place of Frank Ruth. On February 16, 2001, DBT Senior Vice-President George Bruder testified before the US Civil Rights Commission that the company had misinformed the Florida Supervisors of Elections regarding the usage of race in compiling the list. (BTW, Harris and Jeb Bush signed off on this outside of court, because they didn't want the truth to be known as they were both running for office under the same system they decried.)

Greg Palast concludes, "An African-American felon named John Doe might wipe out the registration of an innocent African-American Will Whiting, but not the rights of an innocent Caucasian Will Whiting." He believes that 80% of the 57,700 people he argues were illegally barred from voting were African-American.
In January 2000, Pennsylvania terminated its contract with ChoicePoint after alleging that the firm had illegally sold citizens' personal information. This is then just the tip of the iceberg.

We haven’t even touched on the butterfly ballots, the “intent of the voter” bs excuse used, hanging and pregnant chads, forged absentee ballots by the GOP, the statewide recount Gore requested on national television that was refused by Bush, and the fact that the same standards employed in Florida for manually counting ballots were also employed in 33 other states in 2000 ( hmm, even in Texas) without any intervention from the USSC no matter how pregnant their chads were or which way they were hanging.

But ahhhh, Florida was a “special “ case. Florida was the state in which Bush’s Governor brother had promised to “deliver it for Bush.” And deliver it he did, in violation of every election law there was. They sued first to prevent manual recounts. They deliberately fixed felon rolls to keep African Americans from voting. They designed ballots meant to deliberately confuse people to steal votes and they stretched the interpretation of Florida law to favor "their " candidate over what was legally right to do for this country. Events like this where there are so many abnormalities do not happen by chance, they happen by design.

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And we must never let it happen again.

Gore pussed out and quit. He should have allowed it play out and he had the deciding vote as vice president because it would have been decided in the senate, what a chump. Thanks Gore.

This was how I wrote of the beginning of this on another blog of mine:

November 7, 2000 was a brisk sunny day in the Eastern United States. I had awoken with a sense of hope in my heart that finally, the man I had waited to see on the ballot for President would be President after this day. I remember going to my voting station so happy, and placing my vote next to this man's name not because I was voting for the "lesser of two evils" as so many claim they do, but honestly and with a clear conscience voting for a man I truly respected and had faith in. A man who I knew would be a President this country would be proud of.

That night I waited anxiously with my family as news reports trickled in regarding who was leading. It quickly became clear to me however, that this night was going to be unlike the one I had planned on, nor did I have any idea that it would stretch for 36 torturous days. But I suspected there were those involved in this who knew exactly what was about to happen.

The Voter News Service, (VNS, which no longer exists (no need to wonder why)) had called Florida for Al Gore initially, then for Bush hours after the polls had closed (and thankfully, Al Gore took back his congratulatory phone call to Bush... he and his team were smarter than they had planned on which is why they hate him.) Then it was recalled entirely due to the closeness of the outcome which then spawned an automatic recount as was the law in Florida. The outcome was still within that percentage of closeness as a result of that automatic recount, therefore, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law (F.S. Ch. 102.166) at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts.

Gore was within his rights under Florida law to do this and to call for a manual recount as long as the request was received within 72 hours by the canvassing boards, which it was. The county canvassing board then decided whether or not to recount (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 4) as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts. Repeat, it was the canvassing board, not Al Gore who got to choose the method of counting, but the way RW banshees like Sean Hannity were going on in their attempt to spread their propaganda, you would think Gore wrote the law, which he did not.

If the board then discovered an error, they were then authorized to recount the ballots (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 5) but remember, even if they didn't find a tabulation error a candidate still had the right to request a manual recount, which I believe had been used not too long before that election by another candidate in another race in Florida. The canvassing board claimed they did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial automatic recount (this BTW, was not the manual recount the Gore camp had requested, but the state mandated recount automatically started when the votes came within .001%.)

Therefore, the manual recounts were still requested, which was the law. Again the Fascists thought Gore would stop there, but he wanted confirmation of the count (based on butterfly ballots and other abnormalities) which was his right, and which is what I too would have done and I assume Bush would have done had he been in Texas where the same procedures were outlined.

However, putting themselves above the law and before this country, the Bush campaign then sued first to prevent additional manual recounts from happening in the first place on the basis that no errors were claimed to have been found in the tabulation process. In other words, they wanted to circumvent the law (F.S.Ch.102.166) and prevent Gore from asking for a manual recount simply because the tabulation method (which we now know was erroneous) didn't at that time show a discrepancy, even though it was within the margin of closeness that would spawn an automatic recount. Well, actually, they didn't want the Florida law adhered to in the case of manual recounts because they knew what it would show... The coup had begun. cont.
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I think we need to remember this because as we now see, this system has not changed.

I was in FL, voted in Orange county.....I was 26 years old and even I knew that there is NO WAY you could get away with letting your brother count the tie breaking votes. My heritage is west African and our whole family laughed because even Africans know when their elections are a sham, Americans however, didn't know they were living a 3rd world dictatorship.

Tens of thousands of Florida voters -- primarily Black and Hispanic -- were denied their voting rights because they were "mistakenly" listed as felons on the computers. Gee I wonder how THAT happened???
Had Gore served as President there never would have been a concocted 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the economic collapse of 2008. Most importantly we would be 10 years closer to sustainable energy in America.
This was one of the worst tragedies in our history!

And yes I still cry watching this. We should have OCCUPIED America then!