Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.
That was a difference of around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million, which was around 0.009%. That's well within the range you can get with just the ordinary counting error. It is not at all uncommon for a recount to reverse a lead that small.
In addition, Florida at the time was using a lousy ballot marking system that caused many ballots to fail to register that the voter had tried to vote in the Presidential race. Neither side disputed this. The dispute was over how to address it.
Are you really comparing that to trying to challenge in several states where the difference is well outside ordinary counting error and there is no evidence of sufficient voting irregularities to come anywhere near changing the winner in those states?
There is a lot more to it than that. There had already been a machine recount in Florida, and Bush won that one as well. What Gore did was use a loophole in Florida law to pursue a dubious recount strategy. He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore. Even WaPo called out this strategy as obviously unfair: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2000/11/18/o...
> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.
> He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore
So recount all the counties.
But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted, and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
There's nothing like that for 2020, where Trump is claiming the vote was fraudulent but keeps failing to actually bring up any evidence in court.
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
> Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
The trump campaign is literally putting forth the unfounded conspiracy theory that Democratic-party-affiliated groups some how placed fraudulent ballots, and that this is the only reason Trump lost.
> Biden has very likely won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close.
There aren't actually. Biden doesn't need to carry any states with recounts to win. Pennsylvania isn't going to a recount, nor is Arizona. Even if GA and Wisconsin flip on a recount, Biden has carried the electoral college. All of the court cases so far have have been thrown out or withdrawn.
Despite this, Trump continues to claim that there was election fraud (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13277501276798894...), even after his own lawyers have dropped suits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and have yet to, in any suit in any state, provide an example of fraud. There's no substance to his claims, and when in front of a judge, the lawyers admit that. And yet.
comparing margins for EC and popular vote does not really capture how close a US presidential election was. you can easily have a blowout in the EC that was determined by a <1% lead in a few key states. popular vote is an interesting stat, but not very meaningful under the current rules.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.