The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster

SPEAKER_09: It's Kate and Oliver Hudson! Host of the new podcast, Sibling Revelry. We started this SPEAKER_09: show because you know what, no one talks about siblings and that dynamic. The siblings, they SPEAKER_01: know each other better than anybody. Yes. You know, listen to Sibling Revelry on the SPEAKER_09: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_06: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us again, which is fine because we're here to talk about the 2000 election. Jerry probably wouldn't want to hear about it. Can I tell the quickest story of my, how this went down for me? Sure. I was SPEAKER_00: moving to Los Angeles in November 2020. Uh-huh. You mean 2000? What did I say, 2020? Yeah. Yeah, SPEAKER_00: 2000. Weird that you had mentioned 2020 when you were talking about 2000. I know. So I was in a SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_00: big U-Haul, I was towing my car, my 75 Plymouth Valiant named T behind me. Nice. And I was somewhere in Texas, West Texas, when I spent the night and then woke up the next morning. It was kind of freezing cold in West Texas and I was documenting this whole trip via my Hi8 video SPEAKER_00: camera, singing songs into it and kind of documenting the journey. I'm gonna get all these tapes digitized soon. That's one of my Christmas break projects this year. But I very distinctly remember when I turned on the camera and got in that truck the next morning, I said, hey, SPEAKER_00: everyone. So, or I don't think I said hey everyone because I had no audience back then. Sure. So I think it said, hey, me. It's weird. I went to bed last night and the election had happened and I woke up today and no one knows who won still. And this is weird because we always know who won. I SPEAKER_00: guess I'll see what happens. And then I hit the road. Yeah. And what, 30 something days later, SPEAKER_06: it was finally decided? By the Supreme Court of the United States. Yeah. That was an interesting thing too that today you're like, yeah, I could see not knowing that that day. That seems a little quick, almost suspiciously quick. Now, at the time, it was like, what do you mean it's past midnight and we don't know who won? That's crazy. The 2000 election definitely started that whole thing. And the election, for those of you who don't know, was between Vice President Al Gore, who was vice president to Bill Clinton for both terms. He was looking to continue the Clinton legacy, I guess, as president himself. And he was running against George W. Bush, the son of George Bush, George H. W. Bush, and the brother of Jeb Bush. I think it's his older brother. And at the time Al Gore was viewed as this very wooden... I think Jeb's younger. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_06: Sorry. Jeb's the younger brother. And at the time Al Gore was viewed as wooden, unapproachable, very smart policy wonk who could not relate to the average person to save his life. And George Bush was viewed as just this complete dingus who was a part of a political legacy, whose family clearly viewed him having the presidency as his birthright. That was the selection that America had at the time. But this is all against the backdrop of the economy really doing nicely. And there hadn't been any really big problems or wars for a while. I can't really think of any direct war that the United States would have been involved in since Vietnam. Oh, like, you know, SPEAKER_00: big time war? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that. I think Vietnam was the last war we were in during SPEAKER_06: this election. Yeah. So, you know, if you were watching comedy shows, especially Saturday Night SPEAKER_00: Live at the time, you would get two things. You would, on one side, you would get, I can't even remember who played him, but this is how Al Gore was basically portrayed. Darryl Hammond. SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, that's right. I don't know. I'm like Bill Clinton without a scandal. That was Al Gore. And then, of course, I guess was Will Ferrell the first. And Bush, you know, through comedy and the media was, you know, that guy, I don't even care about being president. Yeah. I just want to make SPEAKER_00: Daddy happy. That was sort of the lay of the land pre-9-11 before, you know, a lot of the country rallied around Bush. And, you know, like we said, Gore was trying to get away from that Clinton SPEAKER_00: stank, such that he didn't even get Bill on the campaign trail with him that much. And it was also, I mean, this is a landmark election in a lot of ways, but it was also sort of the first big SPEAKER_00: election where you had someone saying, hey, Gore is the big Washington insider and I'm just this guy from Texas, like sort of rural versus urban power struggle. Yeah, that's where it generally began. SPEAKER_06: The Bush campaign really was doing what they could to kind of highlight that dividing line. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so at the time, Bush had been pretty far ahead in the polls in the summer. After the Democratic National Convention, Gore mounted a big comeback. And by fall, by September, a couple of months before the election, these guys were basically deadlocked and everybody was saying this is going to be a really, really, really close election. Hold on to your hats. Everybody knew that it would be close, SPEAKER_06: but no one had any guess that it would turn out as close as it actually did. But just the polling, poll after poll after poll showed like, oh, Gore's in the lead. Nope, Bush is in the lead. Gore's in the lead. Gallup found that the lead changed nine times just in the fall. The fall. Nine times. SPEAKER_06: Exactly. And so by Election Day, Tuesday, November 7th, a lot of people, including Tim Russert, rest in peace, had said, I think Florida is going to be the going to decide the outcome of this. Yeah. I didn't see exactly why. I don't know if it was a gut feeling or what the deal was, but there were there were a few people who were already pointing to Florida. And at the time, the news organizations, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and AP, all subscribed to a company called the Voter News Service, which had been set up in 1990, I think, by the big networks to basically pool their resources to pay for people who did exit polling. And they would give that data directly to the networks who would then use it to kind of like, you know, read the tea leaves as best they could to forecast who won. Because in 1980, NBC called Reagan at 8.15 p.m. and set up this huge competition among the networks. SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah. Like calling for calling the election was a big, big deal for a network. And so you found that great article where they were like, you know, after that Reagan thing, all the networks started spending a lot of money in the next cycle, you know, on their own exit polling data. And it was like millions and millions of dollars. So when they got together, basically, and said, hey, why don't we all just hire this one service so we can all save a lot of money? The downside of that was SPEAKER_00: they were all getting the same information, whether it was good or bad. And in this case, it turned out the information was not great. So Gore was doing pretty good, not just in the national vote, but electorally, too. We got SPEAKER_06: Pennsylvania, got Michigan and Florida was starting to come in. And apparently the numbers were up. The exit polling data for Gore was showing that he probably won Florida enough that NBC said, oh, we're doing it again. And at 7.49 p.m. on Election Day, NBC called Florida for Gore. They didn't go so far as to call the presidency for Gore, but the writing was on the wall. If Gore won Florida, that was that. And I guess about 15 minutes later, the rest of the news organizations had joined and said the same thing. Right. SPEAKER_00: So everyone's calling Florida for Gore publicly at this point that night. The VNS, that voter news service that was doing the exit polling for everybody, said, hey, news organizations, we've got some issues here with our data. SPEAKER_00: Like, for example, in this one county in Florida, it was supposed to be 4,302 votes that we saw. Someone added a zero to that and it was 43,020 votes. So maybe you should sort of hold off on calling this thing. And all the news organizations said, well, that's too late. SPEAKER_00: We've already done that. And at just before 10 p.m. at 955, CNN was the first to come on and say, hey, wait a minute. We jumped the gun here. Everyone else, of course, followed suit. And then at 2.15 in the morning, Fox News comes on and says Bush is going to be the winner, not just of Florida, but the whole thing. And then everyone else followed suit and said, and of course, this is overnight. So you wake up in the morning thinking that George Bush had won. Right. So. SPEAKER_00: Well, not quite, actually. Well, if you were saying that we'll see what happened between then and sunrise. Yeah. And I think a lot of people were staying up glued to the TV still at this point by the time Fox said that SPEAKER_06: Bush was the winner and the rest of the networks joined in with that. So that's three, three times now that they have made the projection because retracting a projection is a projection in and of itself. It's like Rush said. Even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. It's essentially the same thing. SPEAKER_06: And there's a quote from Donna Brazile, the disgraced Democratic operative who was running Gore's campaign at the time. She texted Gore on his Blackberry. SPEAKER_06: And I read the New York Times article about this. They felt compelled to explain that a Blackberry was an instant messaging pager. That's how 2000 this thing was. SPEAKER_00: By the way, really quick, I saw that movie, the Blackberry movie on a plane flight recently, and it's actually very good. Oh, I'm sure. Most I highly recommend it. Pretty good. SPEAKER_00: No, it's a movie movie. SPEAKER_06: Most movies are pretty good. SPEAKER_00: Anyway, recommended. SPEAKER_06: So she told she's running the campaign and told Gore, like, don't give up yet. This is every it's too, too weird, essentially. I'm paraphrasing here. Yeah, which is true. But despite that, Gore was like, I don't I think we lost. And so he even went to the extent of waking his wife, Tipper, who was not actually sleeping. She was under the blankets with a flashlight, making a list of bands that she didn't like. And they're kids and said, hey, I lost, essentially. And the kids started crying. So he started to get ready to do his concession speech. That's how close this came. He called he also called Bush called George Bush and said, hey, congratulations. You know, you're the winner, obviously. And he got into a limo to go give a concession speech in Nashville to his supporters. And on the way, the one of his operatives said, hey, I've been watching the the the secretary of state site in Florida and Bush's lead went from 50000 to 6000. I don't think we should concede yet. And literally this happened in the caravan on the way for him to give his concession speech at like three thirty in the morning. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And so because there were still some precincts that had been unreported. So they were like, slow your roll, Gore. So Gore called up Bush again, could not have been a fun phone call. No. Told them what was going on. Apparently, there are people that heard these calls and said Bush said, you know, are you really going to withdraw your concession? And Gore responded, quote, well, you don't have to be snippy about it. So Bush said, well, my brother's the governor of Florida and he said that he said I won. And Gore said, well, let me explain something. Your younger brother's not the ultimate authority on this. That that I think the year Al Gore finally came around at the end. SPEAKER_06: But George Bush, he sounded like a cross between Yosemite Sam and a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Yeah, that's about right. SPEAKER_06: Actually, now that you mention it, it's like dead on. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So it was I mean, between them interpersonally, it got a little sticky right at the beginning. Yeah, I think George Bush even said you can't you can't retract. SPEAKER_06: You're not allowed to do that, essentially. Daddy, can he do that? So, yeah, that was it was a really big deal. I don't think that it had actually happened before. SPEAKER_00: Not as far as I know, I think this was sort of the first thing. Yeah, there were a lot of first things in this election. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah, so by four o'clock, the networks all retract their calls. And basically, this is what, you know, younger Chuck wakes up to in West Texas, which is we don't know who won. Tom Brokaw gets on NBC and says, quote, we don't just have egg on our face. Oh, wait, that was Al Gore Lite. SPEAKER_00: I'm getting all confused now. I heard a little Brokaw in there. SPEAKER_00: I used to do Brokaw. We don't just have egg on our face. We've got a Hamlet all over our suits at this point. SPEAKER_00: And our faces and everywhere else. That was great. SPEAKER_06: That was a great Brokaw. SPEAKER_00: And he always sounded like he was out of breath. It wasn't that he got on Chuck. SPEAKER_06: This was 4 a.m. He was still on from when he got on at 7 p.m. Oh, yeah. This poor guy and Tim Russert, at least just on NBC alone, are like just dying here, but they've never seen anything like it. SPEAKER_06: And again, like as you said, this was a this is a big deal in that it was really embarrassing. It was a really big thing to call to be the network that called the presidency. So it was equally humiliating to be the network that had to retract it. And that happened to all the networks. But that also had a really big impact on public opinion. SPEAKER_06: At first, they were like, well, well, Gore won. So that means that if you guys called this it before 8 p.m. Eastern, there were still polls open in the West Coast. And how many Bush voters did you discourage from turning out? Because you'd said Gore already won. And then the opposite of it was that when they said Bush won, but then retracted it, people were like, no, Bush is the winner, which made it harder for Gore to get the public behind the recount that he had going. There is a lot of public opinion about this, a lot of like opposition, some manufactured, some genuine, as we'll see, that that really makes a big deal. SPEAKER_06: You think you think for a second, like, well, no, it just comes down to how many who got how many votes or who got how many electors from the Electoral College? No, like the public opinion has a lot of sway in a situation like this. So everything that happened publicly was a really big deal. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely. Livia, who helped us out with this, did a bang up job. Fantastic job. SPEAKER_00: It was keen to point out that there were, you know, a few states that they didn't have the full results about anyway. Oregon has very famously long had a vote by mail system. So it took a while to get all those votes in. It eventually went Gore's way. New Mexico was no one knew about New Mexico until December 1st. SPEAKER_00: That eventually went Gore's way as well. And the Republicans were like, should we get a recount going in New Mexico and Wisconsin and Iowa? But they basically because the margins were pretty low, not enough to trigger any kind of automatic recount. But they thought about contesting those. But they would have had to win all of the states that they were thinking about contesting. And the writing was on the wall that like, hey, listen, we're not going to win all of these. So we're not going to contest any of them. We'll just it's going to come down to Florida and we're going to put all of our eggs in that basket. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because Florida had 29 electoral votes and it could it would put either one of them in the White House. That's how close this race was. That those 29 electoral votes going either way did it for them. So in Florida, if you have a margin of victory that's under 0.5 percent, the total tally of votes, then there has to be a recount, a machine recount where basically you run all the all the the ballots through again and see what the count is. Right. That's just law. That's 0.5 percent. This was 0.01 percent difference. Out of six million votes cast in Florida in the 2000 general election, a few hundred votes separated one candidate for president from another. And again, because whoever won Florida became president, a few hundred votes is what it came down to to determine who would become president that time. SPEAKER_07: SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because of how it works in the United States, if you're not from the United States, you can go back and listen to our Electoral College episode. If you want to hear us angry. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_00: Because no matter how you count the votes, Al Gore won the popular vote just as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. In America, it doesn't matter who gets the most votes because we have the EC in place. But just a quick sketch of it, though, if anybody doesn't actually feel like going and listening to the episode again, Chuck's right. SPEAKER_06: It's it's worth listening to. But in the United States, in a state, whoever has the most votes gets usually all of the electors that that state has to offer. And so in reality, what you're really running for as president is electors. So you want to win states and you can strategically win some states over the others and lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College and still become president because you got more electors, even though more Americans voted for the other person. And that's the that's the big controversy because it's super undemocratic because the general population doesn't actually decide. Basically, strategy decides it doesn't always wash out to be the person who won the popular vote. SPEAKER_00: Well, since we're talking George Bush, should we say, strategic? SPEAKER_00: Again, you can go back and listen to that episode and we'll touch on that a little bit at the end. But that's either here nor there because we do have the EC and Florida was very, very close. And there were people in the I mean, we knew it was going to be a tough fight at that point because, A, Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida, Georgia's brother. The secretary of state in Florida, Katherine Harris at the time, was co-chair of the Bush campaign there. And the state attorney general was a Gore guy. Bob Butterworth was the head of the Gore campaign. So this thing was just fraught from the jump. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Well, Chuck, I think with that, it's a good place for a break. What do you say? All right, let's do it. SPEAKER_00: We'll get right back. SPEAKER_08: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. SPEAKER_05: We're full blood siblings, the only full blood sibling. SPEAKER_10: In our family. Well, not in the world. I mean, in the whole world. SPEAKER_05: That's just it. 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Listen to the award winning podcast InTrust on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: All right, so here we are. It's November. People don't know who the president of the United States is going to be yet. Things are starting to get pretty tense. And America is going to start learning some very specific terms and ins and outs as far as to how Florida conducted their elections at the time. They used in a lot of the counties a punch card system where you had a little card puncher and you would look at the candidate's name and there was a little perforated square beside that. SPEAKER_00: And you would use your little puncher to punch that thing out. The little square that gets removed is called a chad. And depending on how punched out this chad was, determine whether or not your vote was counted. And there were a bunch of terms at the time that sort of had to define what this all meant. A dimpled or pregnant chad, which means you tried to punch it and it was indented, but it was still fully attached, was a dimpled or pregnant chad. SPEAKER_00: You had the swinging door chad where two corners are attached. And then you had a hanging door chad or what eventually became known as just a hanging chad where you punch all the way through except one little corner remains attached. And if that's the situation that determines the leader of the free world, it's not right and weird. SPEAKER_06: But that was the situation under Florida law. If you are an elections board in a county, during a recount, you have to try to determine what the intent was of the voter based on the ambiguous ballot they turned in. Right. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which is huge. Like, again, the Florida law says the intent of the voter is what matters. Right. SPEAKER_06: And that the election board during a recount has to determine what the intent is. But there's no rules. There's no statewide rules. There's really no rules unless a Canvas board adopts them themselves to determine what a voter meant based on all those different types of chads. Right. So they made this up as they went along. SPEAKER_00: Or in some cases, counties already did have rules on the books as far as those chads go, like Palm Beach County. Yes. SPEAKER_06: Palm Beach County is a good example because Palm Beach County arguably is where the entire election flipped. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: But they had a policy that they'd had for 10 years since 1990 that said if you have a dimpled or pregnant chad, it doesn't count. It's a spoiled ballot and that vote doesn't count. But if you have any kind of partially detached chad, a swinging door, a tri-corner, a hanging chad, any of those, that counts as a vote. Like the person clearly meant to vote using that. They had, during the recount, they just abandoned that. And they tried something instead called the light test where you would, and there's pictures of people doing this, where you would hold the ballot up to a light source to see if any light shone through. And if you could. In the year 2000, this is what we're doing. SPEAKER_00: If you could see any light, then that counted. SPEAKER_06: And they realized that actually that totally went against the rules that you could have a type of hanging chad. It's light still not come through. So then that means you don't count that ballot. And they just gave that up and went back to the original rules. This was the kind of catastrophe that was going on during the recount in Florida. And everyone was reporting about every single minute of it. And the entire country was like, what is going on? And the people in Florida who were in charge of all the recounts are freaking out. Because if you read about these boards, they're like, they're not made for this kind of stuff. They're not, this is all totally new. And all of a sudden the New York Times and the Washington Post are standing over their shoulder watching them and reporting on it. And they're just flipping out. So they're doing just all sorts of goofy stuff that just doesn't make any sense because there's just like deer in headlights. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And these aren't huge boards. Like in one county, it was like three people. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I think that was Dade County where Miami is. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Which is just nuts. We should talk about the butterfly ballot for a minute. I don't know if I can. SPEAKER_00: This was the ballot in Palm Beach County. You sent me a picture of what this ballot looked like. I'm a reasonably intelligent adult human. And I looked at this ballot and it confused me a little bit. You should just look it up. Look up a picture of the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot Bush-Gore election. But what it is, it's candidates on two sides, like butterfly wings, all the way down. And in the center between all those are the little punch holes. With, but here's the thing is those, if you look at the two sides, they're not aligned all the straightaway across. One's a little higher on the left. One's a little lower on the right. And on the left, number one position is George Bush. Right under that is Al Gore. On the right, number one position is Pat Buchanan. But the way it aligns, and there are little arrows that point at the holes, but it's, it's confusing. And it's very, it would be very easy to think, oh no, I don't want to vote for Bush. I want to go down one and vote for Gore. But down one was actually on the other side, slightly lower. It's Pat Buchanan. SPEAKER_00: And it was just a very confusing ballot. And they found that Pat Buchanan got about four times the vote in that county than he did nationwide. And that alone, and I'm not saying no one knows what would have happened for sure, but it was a funky looking ballot. Pat Buchanan had a very highly skewed amount of votes. And those amount of votes would have firmly given Al Gore victory. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: And to, um, to make it even more confusing, the, the candidates were numbered. Didn't even start with one and two. It started with three and then Buchanan was four. Gore was five. McReynolds was six. McReynolds was a socialist. So there was one way that you could accidentally not vote for Bush. You would accidentally vote for Buchanan below him. There were two ways to accidentally not vote for Gore. You could accidentally vote for Buchanan above Gore or McReynolds below Gore. And like you said, Pat Buchanan is very instructive, the number of votes he got from the butterfly ballots, even comparing other Palm Beach County voters who voted by mail absentee ballot that wasn't a butterfly ballot. His numbers were way less compared to the butterfly ballot votes. So suffice to say that a lot of people accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan who meant to vote for Al Gore or George Bush, but probably more Al Gore because Palm Beach County is a strongly Democratic county in Florida. SPEAKER_00: All right. So in Miami-Dade, which I think you said was the most populous Florida county, initially that three person canvassing board said they were going to manually recount 650,000 ballots. SPEAKER_00: They realized that's overwhelming and probably impossible because it was a looming deadline. So they said, all right, why don't we just count the 10,750 ballots that the computer system rejected? Because those are the ones that are in question and we feel pretty good that the other votes had been counted properly because they were fully punched, no chat issues. The GOP leaders said, hey, canvassing board, you're trying to rig this in favor of Gore. SPEAKER_00: And they tried to get all the local Cuban Americans riled up and saying like, hey, this kind of stuff that happens under Castro. Like you need to come down here and stage a protest like this will not stand. And what ended up happening was what was called the Brooks Brothers riot because it was not local Cubans. It was not, in fact, in most cases, local Floridians that came to protest, but it was Washington, D.C. political operatives and insiders that came down and they gave themselves away by the clothes that they wore. That's why it was called the Brooks Brothers riot. People at the time were saying like, and they were trying to deny it, saying they were like local Floridians. And they're like, well, you're certainly not dressed like somebody from Miami. You've got a Brooks Brothers suit coat on, sport coat on. SPEAKER_00: In fact, most of you do. And they went down there and they were successful. They gathered in the plaza. They screamed voter fraud. They were banging on windows and handing out crying towels and saying you're a sore loser. SPEAKER_00: And it worked. They succumbed to the pressure and stopped the recount. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: So by the way, Ted Cruz is one of those operatives who was in the riot, this essentially fake riot. Although if you read an interview, there's a I think a Washington Post interview with Brad Blakeman, who is the guy who was responsible for for staging this protest and organizing it. That he sounds like he genuinely believed that this canvassing board was trying to throw the election to Gore and that that really fueled a lot of it. So it's difficult in that respect to fault him and his his group for for protesting like that. On the other hand, it's very clear that this this Brooks Brothers riot, they were accused of violence against election officials. They were at the very least very hostile and in your face. Again, these canvassing boards are not not cut out for this kind of life. They didn't know what the heck they were signing up for. And the Brooks Brothers rioters essentially intimidated them out of this very democratic process of recounting by hand ballots that had been rejected by the computer. There was no evidence whatsoever that the computer was selectively rejecting Gore ballots in order for him to to come in and clinch the presidency in a very dramatic win in Miami-Dade. SPEAKER_06: It doesn't make any sense that that that would have favored Gore. What they were doing was trying to stop the recount in the case. Bush was ahead. Because Bush was ahead. That was the entire point. On November 9th, the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, was trying to certify the election because Bush had 327 more votes than Gore. SPEAKER_06: And so what these Republican operatives were doing in the Brooks Brothers riot was trying to stop the count right there to keep George Bush's lead. That was their goal. So it seems like Blakeman's view that what they were doing was illegal may or may not be disingenuous. I'm not sure. SPEAKER_00: Right. Yeah. So these recounts are happening. And the Secretary of State Harris, like you said, all of a sudden, the Florida State Supreme Court got involved. And she wanted to certify, like you said, on the 14th. But the Supreme Court said, no, you have to count all the votes. You can't certify the election. You need to count them all. You can't just throw out the votes that are in dispute. So there are four counties that you need to do a hand recount on. And over the next month, between, you know, November and December, there were more than 50 lawsuits being filed by all sides. Everyone all over the place is filing lawsuits about recounting and counting and deadlines in different various counties across Florida. And eventually, on December 8th, the Florida Supreme Court came out. And this is very important. And ruled four to three that you have to count what's called the undervotes, meaning these votes that are unclear that the Bush campaign wanted to just throw out. You've got to count all these votes. And if you haven't done that yet in these counties, you've got to do it. The Bush campaign said, well, we don't want to count all the votes because we're ahead. The Gore campaign said, well, great, count all the votes. That's democracy at work. And so the Supreme Court of the United States gets involved. And all of a sudden, on December 11th, you're getting oral arguments on the Supreme Court of the United States about how, like, basically a lot of things. Chiefly, one of which is should the federal government get involved when states are supposed to run their own elections? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I say we take a little break and just prepare ourselves for the catastrophe that is Bush v. Gore. What do you say? SPEAKER_00: Let's do it. Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. SPEAKER_08: You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. SPEAKER_05: We're full blood siblings, the only full blood sibling. SPEAKER_10: In our family. Well, not in the world. I mean, in the whole world. That's just it. SPEAKER_10: Dive into family tales and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. SPEAKER_08: And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different siblings. SPEAKER_09: And it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_09: It's more than a podcast. SPEAKER_08: It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. Listen to Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: Hey, guys, Britton, Laurie here from Life on Cut podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships and pop culture. SPEAKER_04: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists because we both dated one, long distance fertility, communication and breakups. SPEAKER_03: And we talk to some people you might be familiar with, like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Stephen Bartlett, Joanne McNally and Mark Manson. You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life on Cut now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_02: Osage County, Oklahoma, is getting a lot of attention right now. It's the setting of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie is based on a book about the 1920s Osage murders when white men poured into Osage County and killed Osage people for their oil wealth. I'm Rachel Adams Hurd, the host of InTrust, a podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartMedia. For over a year, I was reporting a different story about other ways white people got Osage land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family in Osage County became one of the biggest landowners here. Their ranching empire was built on land that at the turn of the century was all owned by the Osage nation. So how'd they get it? Listen to the award winning podcast, InTrust on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_06: So Chuck, like you said, the Florida Supreme Court said, no, you need to hand count all of those ballots that the computers rejected to figure out who won. And the Bush campaign sued to get that stopped and got it picked up by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court on December 9th issued a stay. Very strange. That is very unusual for the Supreme Court to get involved in a state court ruling. Federalism basically says you don't do that. Stop. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. A stay was stop the hand count. Don't do that anymore. And then even more unusual, without the Bush campaign petitioning for the Supreme Court to hear the case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. SPEAKER_06: And what they did was take this up. SPEAKER_00: It sounds confusing. Yeah. But but yeah, no one no one in the Bush camp asked the Supreme Court to decide on the merits of the case. SPEAKER_06: And yet the Supreme Court decided to decide on the merits of the case. And again, this is highly unusual. A state Supreme Court's ruling for a state matter is pretty much sacrosanct in Supreme Court, like U.S. Supreme Court tradition. Supreme Court does not get involved in that kind of stuff. And they said, hey, let's get involved in this hornet's nest right now. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly. So what we ended up with were a couple of rulings. There was a 7 to 2 ruling that it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because the argument from the Bush side was, hey, listen, there isn't a codified statewide way that everyone has agreed to do these recounts. SPEAKER_00: And so that violates the equal protection clause. And on the Gore side, he was saying, well, there is a codified way, maybe not in the way they do it, but the law is intent to vote. And that's that's on the books. So that's how we should decide. Right. SPEAKER_06: And so the idea of applying the equal protection clause doesn't really make sense, because in America, every state has different ways of voting, not just among the states, but among the counties in an individual state. It's all over the place. Like it's up to the county to decide what kind of voting machines they want to use, how many to have. Like it's up to generally the county, if not the state. Right. So that's a really weird thing to say, no, this particular state is violating the equal protection clause. So we're going to say stop doing this hand count. We're going to rule in favor of that because of the equal protection clause. And then secondly, the other thing about the equal protection clause, Chuck, is what they were saying was everyone is not going to have their vote counted because it's because of the inequity in how you vote. So what we're going to do is just make sure we don't count some people's votes to protect them and keep them equal. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And on that first point, I believe it was either Breyer or Souter in the dissent said, kind of pointed out what you were saying, was saying like, well, hey, if this that means that that no state has a fair election. Right. SPEAKER_00: Because every single state and every single county, like you said, has different like Josh Clark will one day say, he said, has different ways of doing things. So if you say that about this, then no state has a free election or a fair election or whatever. Everything is called into question. Right. And that can't be the case. SPEAKER_00: The other concurring decision was even more important. And I think we said it was seven to two because Breyer and Souter actually, as, quote unquote, liberal justices sided with the, quote unquote, conservative side. Which is so weird because it's such a bad legal argument. SPEAKER_00: I know. I don't know. Well, it's interesting. Maybe it wasn't Souter or Breyer then that said what I said. SPEAKER_06: It was probably John Paul Stevens. Yeah, I think it was Stevens. SPEAKER_00: But the concurring and this is really the most important decision, which was a five four ruling on, you know, I know they're supposed to be impartial, but there were five conservative justices at the time, four liberal justices. SPEAKER_00: And it ended up a five four concurrent ruling that not only can you not do the recount, but like there's no time. And because of what's called safe harbor, which is this date, a deadline for states to resolve issues over the selection of their state electors. And that was approaching. Whereas the liberal justices said, well, hold on. That doesn't mean that's not when they cast their vote at the Electoral College. There's still six days after that. There's plenty, A, there's plenty of time to do that. And B, had you not issued a state to begin with, they would be done by now, probably, and we wouldn't have even been called on. So we ended up causing a problem with the stay that we are now ruling that we're now ruling on by instituting that stay. SPEAKER_06: They caused the problem. It's just perfectly put. They caused the problem that they were saying was the problem and the reason that they were saying you have to stop the recount. It's too late. Isn't that nuts? SPEAKER_00: Yeah. RBG and her very famously in her dissent usually say, I respectfully dissent. And she just said, I dissent, which was doesn't sound like a big deal, but those words matter and it was a big deal. And she was also like saying, hey, wait a minute, this contradicts all of our federalist principles that this is a state matter and that we shouldn't get involved with this to begin with. So it was a not only a landmark ruling, but one that was just fraught with upset on all sides, up and down the political spectrum and to the citizens of the United States. SPEAKER_06: Even more suspiciously, there's a really great article from the Nevada Law Journal from 2012 written by Marcus Brodin. And he points out there is a lot of books written about this afterward. And he said that at least three of the conservative justices had like personal, what is it called when you're supposed to recuse yourself? I guess conflicts of interest. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: One was that Scalia's son's law firm was arguing the case in front of the Supreme Court for the Bush side. Another was that Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginny, was looking for it was like accepting resumes on behalf of the Heritage Foundation to set up a Bush administration. SPEAKER_06: And then thirdly, I think Sandra Day O'Connor. Yeah, she was trying to retire, I think. SPEAKER_00: Yes, she wanted to retire. SPEAKER_06: So she didn't want Gore to win because she didn't want to have to stay on for four more years so that a Democrat wouldn't pick her replacement. So these three had like actual like personal vested interests in the outcome of this election. Three of the five did at least. And even putting that aside, the fact that the Supreme Court got involved in the first place was a terrible idea. The fact that they decided the election was a terrible idea. The legal idea that they ruled on was terrible. And then the idea that anybody had even an iota of personal interest in the outcome was a really big deal. And today, the Supreme Court is definitely under question as far as political activism is concerned. And I'm sure it has been for a while, but it really feels like common knowledge these days. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. In 2000, that was really new. SPEAKER_06: That was a really big deal. People thought very, very differently about the Supreme Court in 2000 compared to how they think about them today. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And on those a couple of things you mentioned, Scalia's son, who was part of the law firm that argued the Bush case, he very soon after the election was given a cabinet position. Right. Right. SPEAKER_00: And Sandra Day O'Connor, this isn't just speculation that she wanted to retire. Like, wasn't she it was either on tape or like people that were with her when they called it initially for Gore, like said she was like, oh, crap, basically. Yeah. Like, this means I got to work another four years. She said this was this is this is terrible. SPEAKER_06: And her husband explained that they had been planning on retiring, but now she couldn't if Gore won. SPEAKER_00: All right. So just want to clear up that wasn't just like, you know, some opinion that we're lobbying out there. SPEAKER_06: Right. And then sorry, there's one more legal thing that Gore camp really dropped the ball because legally, the Bush campaign had no legal standing in this matter. They weren't the injured party. The injured party was the potentially disenfranchised voters of Florida. Yeah. At the Bush campaign. So the Bush campaign had no standing to bring this case to the Supreme Court in the first place. And the Gore team didn't even mention it. And that might have been the thing that put enough public pressure on the Supreme Court to just toss it and say, no, whatever the Florida Supreme Court said stays. And they just dropped the ball that hard. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And this isn't surmising because we're not smart enough, legally speaking. Like, multitudes of legal scholars have come out and said, like, why didn't they argue standing? Like, that was what would have changed the outcome. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. It's crazy. How many just small things would have changed the outcome? Let's talk about that. SPEAKER_00: Sure. So Libya appropriately calls this autopsy report because after something like this, they don't just go, all right, well, that was that went as it should go. And everything was super smooth. I mean, regardless of who won or lost, if it would have been Gore, it would have been same thing. It would have been like, boy, what a mess. Right. This is not how elections are supposed to be decided in the United States. So afterward, there were all kinds of studies, all kinds of people writing legal papers and just really studying the data. SPEAKER_00: The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which is an independent organization, they did a review and they said, what we found out was that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore. But enough of them, like, you know, marked their ballots inappropriately. And that not only that, but like each side tried to do things that would have hurt their own camp. Like, I believe it was Gore was trying to get these four counties hand recounted. That actually would have ended up helping Bush. SPEAKER_00: And at one point, Bush was trying to make the detached at two corners vote count. That would have helped Gore. So it was just a big plate of spaghetti as far as, you know, the time because they were all just sort of very quickly in real time reacting to things that they never thought they would have to react to and sometimes doing things that would have even hurt their chances at winning. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And another study found that just in Palm Beach County alone, the overvotes, people who voted for more than one person where there were just two, the ones that went to that included Pat Buchanan, they decided about 75 percent of those were because of ballot design. And I think 2000 votes would have gone to Al Gore, which would have flipped the entire state because George Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Right. So it's not 100 percent clear what would have happened, because even if that recount would have gone on, other studies have shown like, no, actually, Bush might have still won based on the autopsy we conducted. So it's still in 2023 not clear who actually won the 2000 election. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And if you're asking yourself, like, all right, Florida had a law in place about intent to vote as like, that's what matters. One way that you can measure intent is like to look at that Chad and see, you know, was it clearly trying to be punched for a candidate? SPEAKER_00: Another way you can do that is as a right to remedy. You can get in touch with people and say, all right, you got another chance. Like, it looks like you marked your ballot in an inconsistent way. Try again. And they did this in different counties and in some counties in Florida, which it really helped. It led to an error rate of less than one percent. But in the only predominantly black county in the state of Florida at the time, Gadsden County, they did not allow them to remedy the ballots. And there was a 12.4 percent invalidated ballot rate compared to under one percent. So there was just hinky stuff going on all over the place. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And Bush v. Gore is like a toxic zombie legal case that won't die and should have never happened in the first place. But there is a really strange appendage to that that we've talked about before, I think in our Supreme Court precedent, judicial precedents episode. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so. Where they said that it's limited to the present circumstances. SPEAKER_06: And as that Mark Bowden guy wrote in the Nevada Law Review, they basically attached like a warning sign like warning, do not use this as precedent. Yeah. Essentially, the Supreme Court's just deciding the president here. And this doesn't apply to any other ruling because it shouldn't have happened anyway in the first place. Right. And yet it's still cited as precedent all over the place. It's cited by both sides, actually, even though it shouldn't be whatsoever. And that's just one of this kind of afterlife of the 2000 election that's still going on. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of things have changed since then. Ralph Nader for the Green Party certainly did not win any friends on the left because he got close to 100,000 votes in Florida, you know, most of which probably would have gone to Al Gore. And he ran again, even though everyone was like, I love you, Nader, but stop screwing up the elections if you're a Democrat. SPEAKER_00: Right. SPEAKER_00: And he was like, yeah, I don't care, you know, I believe in what I'm doing. And so he ran again in 2004. You know, as far as mounting a third party bid, that it certainly put a damper on that. A lot of people say the two party system being so locked in stone is one of the big problems in this country. And another thing that happened was states immediately were like, oh, boy, we can't do this again. SPEAKER_00: Florida for sure. And other states were like, these punch cards, like we got to get into the we got to get with the times here. And have a more secure way of voting than just people punching a card like it's, you know, 1875. Right. And you will see no more chads. All these changes sort of nationwide from state to state culminated in the most recent 2020 election, wherein Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said was the most secure election in American history, with no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes. SPEAKER_00: Changed votes or was in any way compromised. So, thankfully, so many changes were put in place to make sure something like this didn't happen again. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And the Electoral College is kind of this weird wonky thing that happened in the background in 2000 until 2000. And it really kind of brought to the fore, like what a potent and also undemocratic institution this is. And so a lot of people were like, we need to get rid of this thing. Apparently, in a 2020 poll by the Pew organization, 58 percent of American adults said they would support a constitutional amendment that said the Electoral College is nil and void. SPEAKER_00: Well, you're never going to get that on a ballot. SPEAKER_06: I don't know, man. I don't I don't know. I don't understand why it's not already. It is such an enormous problem. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I wish there were more. What do you call those? Referendums? Yeah. SPEAKER_00: Where they would just let human, the American public vote on things rather than people to decide the things. SPEAKER_06: Well, that's what's been going on with abortion access. They've been they've been strategically, purposefully getting them on ballots that don't have other politicians to get people to just vote on the one issue. Yeah. And it is a great idea because then you actually see what the people actually think about it. You know, it's I think that's a great idea, too, Chuck. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. SPEAKER_00: However way any of it goes, let people decide, because I think we've all seen that elected representatives, you know, they don't always necessarily reflect the will of their people. You know what I'm saying? No. SPEAKER_06: And another thing is, I mean, pretty much everybody on both sides can point to Congress and be like, you guys don't do enough these days. Yeah. If voters voted on referenda, then, you know, the voters could do the work that Congress is supposed to be doing, passing laws. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Well, they don't want to do that because one of those first referenda would be term limits. And they're like, oh, no, let's not do that. SPEAKER_06: You got anything else? SPEAKER_00: Oh, man, I got nothing else. Can't wait till next November. That's gonna be a lot of fun. SPEAKER_06: I don't know if I can do it, Chuck. Well, since Chuck just laughed at my pain, I think everybody it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_00: Oh, this one's a great one. This is from Dan Sheeflin. And Dan, well, I'm just gonna read it. It's pretty amazing. I hope you saw this one. If not, you should go look it up. Okay. Hey, guys, as I write you, I'm ensconced in the warm cab of a Caterpillar tractor jostling along the snow covered Ross ice shelf on my way to the Amundsen Scott South Pole station. SPEAKER_00: I did not see this. This is cool. He included a picture of this caravan. Five days ago when we left McMurdo Station on Ross Island, the starting point of the South Pole, traverse, we were 1038 miles from the South Pole. My current ground speed is 7.1 miles per hour. Which is a pretty good pace. Our speed can be much slower at times, depending on snow and a variety of other conditions. There are 14 of us who embarked on this 25 to 30 day journey, each in our own tractor hauling mostly fuel to resupply the South Pole station, but also cargo and the living modules where we eat and sleep and use the bathroom. Our toilet is called the Incinilette. And you guessed it. It's a turd burning rig, very glamorous. So they're in these tractors just slow rolling it to the South Pole to deliver supplies and fuel. SPEAKER_06: That's really amazing stuff. SPEAKER_00: And he had a picture of this caravan. It's so cool. As you can imagine, I have a lot of time sitting in this tractor and quite a bit of that time is dedicated to listening to podcasts, yours included. Been a faithful listener since 2010. We have a whiteboard inside our galley and I post daily a podcast recommendation. And today I put up naked mole rats, a face only a mother could love because that one blew my mind, guys. SPEAKER_00: How can they be so interesting? And that's from Dan Shifflin. And he says big shout out to his wife, Marcy, as well as the guys on the traverse. So you don't think about people out there doing these wacky jobs, but Dan and the gang out there on the on the slow train are doing it. SPEAKER_06: That's really cool. Thanks a lot, Dan. Shout out to Marcy for putting up with Dan driving around the South Pole on a slow train. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. SPEAKER_06: And thanks for the picture, too, Dan. I'm looking for I can't find it right now. So send it to me. Will you, Chuck? SPEAKER_00: I will. SPEAKER_06: If you want to be like Dan and just blow our minds with a picture of where you are or some info about what you do, we would love that. You can blow our minds by wrapping that information up into an email and sending it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. SPEAKER_12: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_08: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. Dive into family tales, explore the human mind and laugh with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. And it's fun because we've decided to open it up to really like all kinds of different siblings. SPEAKER_09: And it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_08: Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_02: Osage County, Oklahoma, is getting a lot of attention right now because of Martin Scorsese's latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, about the 1920s Osage murders. I'm Rachel Adams Hurd, the host of InTrust. For over a year, I reported a different story about other ways white people got Osage land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family became one of the biggest landowners here. Listen to the award winning podcast, InTrust on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: Hey, guys, Britton Laurie here from Life on Cut podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships and pop culture. SPEAKER_04: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists because we both dated one, long distance fertility, communication and breakups. SPEAKER_03: And we talk to some people you might be familiar with, like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Stephen Bartlett, Joanne McNally and Mark Manson. You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life on Cut now wherever you get your podcasts.