How many counties did the recount in Florida take place?
The mechanical recount reduced Bush’s margin to 327 votes. Gore had the right to request a hand recount in each of Floria’s 67 counties—the request had to be made county by county—but he asked for a recount in just four: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. All of them were populous and heavily Democratic. They were also counties where problems with voting had been concentrated. Bush’s post-election effort in Florida was led by the former secretary of state James A. Baker. Gore’s effort was led by the former secretary of state Warren Christopher.
How many votes did Bush have in Florida?
Two days later, on Sunday night, Katherine Harris certified the vote tally in Florida, and Bush’s lead stood at 537 votes.
What did the Bush camp do to stop hand recounts?
Legal actions went forward on many fronts; the chair of the Miami-Dade canvassing board referred to the proliferation of suits as “ musical courts .” The Bush camp sought to stop hand recounts, and lost, on constitutional grounds, in federal court. The Gore camp sought, in state court, to prevent certification of the results until hand counts in four counties were complete—and momentarily prevailed, in the Florida Supreme Court. Separately, the Gore camp won a ruling by a Florida judge, Jorge Labarga, that so-called dimpled chads could be considered by officials conducting recounts.
How many votes did the Bush recount reduce?
The mechanical recount reduced Bush’s margin to 327 votes.
What did Harris argue about the recounts?
Harris argued that challenges would be better afterward, statewide, in the “contest” period. Pressing for certification, Harris sought speedy completion of recounts, or an end to them.
Why was the butterfly ballot disqualified?
Ballots in Duval County also caused confusion; some 22,000 votes there were disqualified because voters chose more than one candidate.
Who was the recount aide for the Gore campaign?
Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): The Gore people were actually way ahead of us. They’ve got a plane with 70 lawyers. They’ve got all this preparation done. I arrived the day after the election, and Baker and [Bush campaign manager] Joe Allbaugh had come from Texas on a private plane.
How many ballots were unable to be counted in the Florida recount?
None of these findings are certain. County officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to the investigators that news organizations hired to conduct the recount. There were also small but measurable differences in the way that the "neutral" investigators counted certain types of ballots, an indication that different counters might have come up with slightly different numbers. So it is possible that either candidate might have emerged the winner of an official recount, and nobody can say with exact certainty what the "true" Florida vote really was.
Who won the recount in Florida in 2000?
The Associated Press reported the findings this way: AP: A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome – by the barest of margins – had he pursued ...
How much did the Florida ballot study cost?
The study cost nearly $1 million and was the most thorough and comprehensive news-media review of the Florida balloting. It was sponsored by the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, St. Petersburg Times, Palm Beach Post, Washington Post and the Tribune Co., which owns papers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. The news organizations hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to look at each untallied ballot. Trained investigators examined 175,010 ballots provided by local election officials. The media consortium then analyzed the raw data produced by NORC and drew conclusions. The result, released Nov. 11, 2001, was something of a muddle.
Who won the 2001 recount?
According to a massive months-long study commissioned by eight news organizations in 2001, George W. Bush probably still would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a limited statewide recount to go forward as ordered by Florida’s highest court.
Did the Miami Herald study come up with a third set of numbers?
Although their conclusions were similar, the Miami Herald study and the later and larger study came up with different numbers, evidence of the uncertainties involved. An official recount might well have come up with yet a third set of numbers.
What happened, Florida?!
Florida held elections on Tuesday, Nov. 6, like the rest of America, and more than 8.3 million ballots were cast. That night, this is what the results looked like:
Missing Votes
The differences and changes in vote margins were not the only discrepancies among Florida counties. There also were problems with people not having voted in some races, or having voted multiple times in the same race.
The Machine Recount
As they showed less than a 0.5 percent margin separating candidates in the first round of unofficial returns on November 10, machine recounts were ordered for the gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and agriculture commissioner races. Machine recounts generally don't show much of a change from initial results.
What Now?
Since there is greater than a 0.25 percent margin between DeSantis and Gillum after the machine recount, there is no manual recount and DeSantis still leads Gillum by more than 33,000 votes.
When is the first recount?
For the initial recount, the fifth day after a regularly-scheduled primary election and the ninth day after a general or special election. Additional deadlines for potential second recounts can be found below.
When is a recount required?
Automatic recounts are required if a candidate or measure is defeated by less than 0.5% of the total votes cast. The initial recount is conducted using automatic tabulating equipment and consists of all ballots cast. If the results of the initial recount show a new margin where a candidate or measure is defeated by less than 0.25% of the total votes cast, a second recount is conducted by hand. The second recount, if required, consists only of overvotes and undervotes. The second recount is not required if the total number of such votes is not large enough to change the outcome of the election.
Does automatic recount apply to presidential primaries?
Provisions regarding automatic recounts do not apply to presidential preference primaries and elections for political party executive committee members.
Does Florida require a voter verification?
Florida uses paper and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems for its elections. The state does not require a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) when conducting elections. According to the National Academy of Sciences, a voter-verified paper audit trail "consists of physical paper records of voter ballots as voters have cast them on an electronic voting system. In the event that an election recount or audit is called for, the VVPAT provides a supporting record."
What was the controversy surrounding the Florida recount?
From the beginning of the controversy, politicians, litigants and the press focused exclusively on the undervotes, in particular incompletely punched chads. Undervotes (ballots that did not register any vote when counted by machine) were the subject of much media coverage, most of the lawsuits and the Florida Supreme Court ruling. After the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations continued to focus on undervotes. Based on the review of these ballots, their results indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision), but that Gore might have won under other standards and scenarios. The post-controversy recounts revealed that, "if a manual recount had been limited to undervotes, it would have produced an inaccurate picture of the electorate's position."
What was the recount in Florida?
The Florida election recount of 2000 was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court .
What was the goal of the Florida recount?
The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes . The total number of undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The review's findings were reported in the media during the week after November 12, 2001, by the organizations that funded the recount: Associated Press, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and Tribune Publishing, which included the Los Angeles Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune.
What did Mark Herron do to challenge overseas ballots?
The Herron memo gave postmark and "point of origin" criteria that Herron maintained could be used to challenge overseas ballots. It was in line with a letter sent out by Harris stating that if a postmark was not present on an overseas ballot, it had to be thrown out. Meanwhile, Republicans relied on their own 52-page manual for the same purpose. But on November 19, 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. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore supporter, later told the counties to reconsider those ballots without a postmark. Before that, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce postmark requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots from overseas, which were predominantly for Bush. In contrast, Republicans pursued a strategy of disqualifying overseas ballots in counties that favored Gore and pressuring elections officials to include flawed overseas ballots in Bush counties.
What did Katherine Harris say about overseas ballots?
On November 8, Florida Division of Elections staff prepared a press release for Secretary of State Katherine Harris that said overseas ballots must be "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day. It was never released. : 16 Harris did send out a letter saying that absentee ballots without postmarks must be discarded, but Florida's Attorney General subsequently said they should not be. On November 13, Harris issued her first statement on overseas ballots, saying that they had to be "executed" on or before Election Day, not "postmarked on or prior to" Election Day. : 18 Over Thanksgiving, 14 county boards decided to include 288 overseas ballots that had been rejected days earlier, an act that was dubbed the Thanksgiving stuffing.
How many counties in Florida have a recount?
Florida Supreme Court order as being implemented: accepts completed recounts in eight counties and certified counts from four counties that refused to recount; applies the above "county custom standard" to remaining Miami-Dade and other 55 counties
When did the Florida election controversy start?
The controversy began on election night, November 7, 2000, 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 peninsula (in the Eastern time zone) but about ten minutes before they closed in the heavily Republican counties of the panhandle (in the Central time zone ). Later in the evening, the networks reversed their call, moving to "too close to call", then later giving it to Bush; then they retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call". Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the Florida count was.
Which counties in Florida have manual recounts?
The Florida Supreme Court eventually ordered a manual recount in four counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The Bush attorneys filed in federal court to stop the hand recount based, inter alia, on principles of equal protection.
When did the recount stop?
On December 12 – more than a month after the elections — the U.S. Supreme Court halted the manual recount. By a narrow 5-4 majority, the Justices ruled that the recount in four selected counties violated the principle that “all votes must be treated equally.”.
What counties did the Gore campaign challenge?
In each of the four counties where the Gore campaign had lodged challenges – Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Ventura, all populous and all with heavy Democratic voting – there would first be a test recount of three precincts selected by the challenger. The results would be compared with the machine recount that had been automatically run under Florida election law in an election where the margin of victory was within 1% of the total balloting
What time did Gore call Bush back?
However, Gore advisors continued to maintain that with a mere 600 vote margin, no clear winner had emerged. At 3:30 a.m., Gore called Bush back and retracted his concession. Ultimately the 2000 presidential election would hinge on the vote in Florida. The outcome was one of the closest in ...
How long did it take to count the 2000 election?
Everybody remembers the election of 2000. It took thirty-six days of counting mayhem after the November 7 vote before reaching the U.S. Supreme Court decision of December 12, 2000.
How many votes did Bush get in the 2000 presidential election?
The outcome was one of the closest in U.S. presidential history. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz) By November 10 th election officials calculated that Bush led by around 400 votes out of almost 6 million cast.
What was the presidential election in 2000?
The 2000 Presidential Election – The Florida Recount. The presidential election of November 7, 2000 was one of the most memorable – and controversial – in the history of the United States. It pitted Republican candidate George W. Bush, then governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W.
When was the recount of the Florida election?
Gore, case in which, on December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a Florida Supreme Court request for a selective manual recount of that state’s U.S. presidential election ballots. The 5–4 decision effectively awarded Florida’s 25 votes in the electoral college —and thus the election itself—to Republican candidate George W.
Why was a recount required in Florida?
Under Florida election law, a machine recount of all votes cast was required because the margin of victory was less than 0.5 percent. In this race, the gap appeared to be roughly 0.01 percent. Both campaigns immediately dispatched teams of lawyers to Florida. Charges of conflict of interestwere leveled by both sides—Bush’s brother Jebwas the governor of the state and Secretary of State Katherine Harris was cochair of Bush’s Florida campaign, while Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth headed the Gore campaign. By November 10 the machine recount was complete, and Bush’s lead stood at 327 votes out of six million cast. As court challenges were issued over the legality of hand recounts in select counties, news stories were filled with the arcanevocabulary of the election judge. County officials tried to discern voter intent through a cloud of “hanging chads” (incompletely punched paper ballots) and “pregnant chads” (paper ballots that were dimpled, but not pierced, during the voting process), as well as “overvotes” (ballots that recorded multiple votes for the same office) and “undervotes” (ballots that recorded no vote for a given office). Also at issue was the so-called butterfly ballot design used in Palm Beachcounty, which caused confusion among some residents who had intended to vote for Gore—leading them to inadvertently cast some 3,400 votes for an ultraconservative third-party candidate, Pat Buchanan, which amounted to about 20 percent of his total votes statewide.
What was the outcome of Bush v. Gore?
The U.S. Supreme Court ’s ruling in Bush v. Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the U.S. presidential election of 2000. With the election effectively ended, Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to George W. Bush, whose lead in the state stood at 327 votes out of six million cast after a machine recount in November. Florida’s electoral votes enabled Bush to win the presidency. His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, officially conceded on December 13 and stated in a televised address, “While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”
What did the Supreme Court decide in Bush v. Gore?
Gore? On December 12, 2000, in a 7–2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s decision that manual recounts of ballots should continue in some counties, holding that the various methods and standards of the recount process violated the equal protection clause of the U.S.
What did Bush and Gore say about the recount?
On December 11, the two sides presented their cases, Bush’s team asserting that the Florida Supreme Court had exceeded its authority by authorizing the recount of undervotes and Gore’s team stating that the case, having already been decided at the state level, was not a matter for consideration at the federal level.
What did the Florida Supreme Court decide in 2000?
Supreme Courtoverturned the Florida Supreme Court’s decision that manual recounts of ballots should continue in some counties, holding that the various methods and standards of the recount process violated the equal protectionclause of the U.S. Constitution. The court ruled 5–4 on the remedy of the matter, with the majority holding that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision had created new election law—a right reserved for the state legislature—and that no recount could be held in time to satisfy a federal deadline for the selection of state electors.
How many votes did Bush get in the recount?
By November 10, the machine recount was complete, and Bush’s lead stood at 327 votes out of six million cast. As court challenges were issued over the legality of hand recounts in select counties, news stories were filled with the arcane vocabulary of the election judge.
What Happened, Florida?!
Missing Votes
- The differences and changes in vote margins were not the only discrepancies among Florida counties. There also were problems with people not having voted in some races, or having voted multiple times in the same race. The most visible issue was the former, called undervoting, which occurs when a voter submits a ballot but doesn't choose a candidate in one of the races on that …
The Machine Recount
- As they showed less than a 0.5 percent margin separating candidates in the first round of unofficial returns on November 10, machine recounts were ordered for the gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and agriculture commissioner races. Machine recounts generally don't show much of a change from initial results. But in Florida, Democrats were especially hoping they would. The rea…
What Now?
- Since there is greater than a 0.25 percent margin between DeSantis and Gillum after the machine recount, there is no manual recount and DeSantis still leads Gillum by more than 33,000 votes. Since there is less than a 0.25 percent margin in the U.S. Senate and agriculture commissioner races, they are undergoing a hand recount. Not allvotes will be recounted again, only undervotes …
Summary of Recount Laws
- The list below shows answers to common questions regarding recounts in Florida. 1. Does state law require automatic recounts? 1.1. Yes, a machine recount occurs when the margin is less than or equal to 0.5% total votes for office. If the machine recount returns a margin of defeat less than or equal to 0.25% of total votes, a manual recount of over/under votes occurs. 1. When must an …
Florida Recount Procedures
- Automatic recount procedures
Automatic recounts are required if a candidate or measure is defeated by less than 0.5% of the total votes cast. The initial recount is conducted using automatic tabulating equipment and consists of all ballots cast. If the results of the initial recount show a new margin where a candid… - Requested recount procedures
Florida does not allow requested recounts. For more information about recount procedures in Florida, click here.
50-State Overview of Recount Laws
- The table below summarizes where state laws allow for automatic and requested recounts. Click "show" to view the table.
50-State Overview of Requested Recounts
- The table below summarizes how requested recounts are paid for and whether it is possible for candidates to request a partial recount. Click "show" to view the table.
See Also