Recount In Political History

The race for the presidency in the year 2000 was very controversial. Now after watching the movie Recount it is obvious that George W. Bush illegitimately won the election. Firstly, older voters were confused on how to fill out the ballot, which ended up in a significant amount of dimpled chad that were not counted by the machines, therefore robbing thousands of people of their right to vote for the president they wished to be in office, not to mention that it may have costed Gore the presidency. When the chad were first run through the counting machine they would add 3000 votes to Bush and subtract 3000 votes from Gore. After it came to light that the votes in Florida were illegitimate, Vice President Gore recanted his concession to Bush. Furthermore, the fact that there were 2,909,135 votes for Gore and 2,907,351 votes for Bush indicates that it was too close not to do a recount and have absolute certainty about the legitimacy of the vote count. Not only that, but when it came to the topic of whether or not dimpled chad would be counted, the republican party fought against it—even though Governor Bush signed into law legislation as Governor of Texas that dimpled chad should be counted. Also, once the need for a recount was realized, 18 of the 67 counties did not do a manual machine recount, and instead did a memory retabulation. This meant that there was no possibility that dimpled chad which were not counted by the machines the first time would then be recounted. In other words, when you do a memory retabulation, the only votes that are retabulated are ones that come from chad that were already counted by the machine. As such, a million and a half votes in the form of dimpled chads were not recounted. In contrast to the dimpled chads, which were not counted due to less significant problems in how they were filled out, the military mail-in ballots were missing essential information. For example, many were missing a witness signature, while others were missing a date. Because of that, it was impossible to tell whether the mail-in ballots were sent in before the deadline. Despite this, …show more content…
The new deadline was November 23rd which meant they only had five more days to finish the recount. Secretary of State Katherine Harris also encouraged the company Database Tech to discount votes of non-felons if they had names similar to actual felons. The result was that 20,000 people were not allowed to vote. In one county, 697 people were labeled felons, while only 33 were actual felons; that is how immense the unbalance was. After the county of Miami-Dade abandoned their recount due to group of angry Republicans occupying a government building, all eyes then focused on Palm Beach County. There they sent a request for an extension on the deadline to finish their hand recount. Palm Beach County had already recounted 460,000 votes, but still had 1,000 votes they had not yet recounted. Of course their request was denied and due to this there was a lawsuit that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, named Gore V. Harris. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that Florida must recount all underhand votes, and said Florida had until December 12th to do