Breaking Down the 2000 Election
Photo by Joe Ravi is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0
The 2020 presidential election was one of the most unique political moments of our lifetimes, but it’s not without parallels. If you are like me and restlessly (some might say insanely) watched television for 72 hours during the recent election, you heard many callbacks to the 2000 election. Bush v. Gore, James Baker, and the Brooks Brothers Riot have been hot topics and will be a focal point for analyzing the legal aftermath of this election. This is because the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and the political climate it occured in, have a lot to tell us about today. Election results have been publicly challenged and legal battles have begun across the country to determine who the next President will be. This is dangerous and wrong, but it is not new. We saw the same thing 20 years ago, and witnessed the effects of letting these challenges take advantage of partisanship. While our country feels more and more precarious every day and certainty is hard to find, the past can be a helpful roadmap to guide us in the right direction. We can and should use the 2000 election as a cautionary tale against bending the law to win an election. Now we know that challenges to elections should not be shrugged off, but scrutinized and respected as what they are: dangerous to democracy.
The 2000 battle for the presidency between Bush and Gore culminated in a race for Florida’s 25 electoral votes. After a mistaken television call for Bush prompted Gore to concede, the race suddenly tightened and the concession was called back. Once all the ballots had been cast, the race was too close to call and a recount began. The manual recount was expected to benefit Gore, as the actual design of the ballots came under scrutiny and votes that had been unclearly marked were heavily Democrat. “Hanging Chads,” the circular pieces of paper left after hole-punching, became an epicenter of controversy along with the confusing layouts of ballots. Because of these anomalies, Gore’s votes had been undercounted and a path to victory became available. However, Bush and his team (led by James Baker) sought to stop the recount and claim Florida’s electoral votes, and thus the White House.
The Brooks Brothers Riot was one of the first and most famous attempts by the Republican Party to stop recounts in Florida. Nicely dressed (hence the name Brooks Brothers) GOP staffers and lawyers flooded the Miami-Dade County recount office under command from higher-ups in both the Bush campaign and Republican Party, stopping inspectors from entering while causing general mayhem. They achieved their goal when Miami-Dade’s canvassing board voted to reverse course and stop the recount altogether. The Brooks Brothers Riot signaled that stopping recounts was becoming a systematic goal of the Republican Party and that the fight for a statewide referendum was far from over. It also demonstrated how influential mobilization can be, with a relatively small number of staffers in a lobby lighting a fuse that would make it all the way to the Supreme Court.
The main controversy of this election came in the form of Bush v. Gore, an appeal of a case in which the Florida Supreme Court ordered the manual recount to resume across Florida. The United States Supreme Court heard this appeal and in a 5 to 4 decision that reversed the Florida Court’s ruling, immediately stopping recounts and effectively handing the presidency to Bush. They ruled that the inconsistent nature of recounting from county to county violated the Equal Protection clause, which was grounds to call off the operation as a whole. This case was significant for many reasons, including the extremely unique nature of its decision. One of the most important aspects of the Supreme Court is that they set precedent. Their rulings represent the highest law in the land and act as guidance to the lower courts—except for Bush v. Gore. For this case, the ruling justices declared “[o]ur consideration is limited to the present circumstances,” making it a one and done case not to be used as precedent. This is often pointed to as evidence of SCOTUS partisanship, because if something was unconstitutional in 2000 it should still be unconstitutional the next day. The ruling went against that common sense in favor of securing the presidency for Bush.
So, why does an election that happened 20 years ago have so much relevance to our current situation? Broadly, it shows how much influence outside factors have on deciding elections. We like to think our election system is an impregnable fortress of democracy and rules, but 2000 showed us that this is not always the case. Under certain circumstances, forces like local organizers and SCOTUS justices wield loads of power in deciding how elections are called. In 2000, these circumstances were a contested vote count and a partisan Court. With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and Trump’s repeated public claims of election fraud, we could have been heading for the same type of collision all over again. Bush v. Gore displayed that even the counting of votes, a bedrock of democracy, can be legally overturned. It further exemplified that partisan operatives are able to impose their will on the ground processes of an election. And, perhaps most importantly, it revealed what can happen when government officials place winning over fairness.
Looking ahead to the coming months, these lessons may prove to be an invaluable tool in preparing expectations. Partisan attempts to discredit the results of an election are not meaningless and they cannot be ignored. The President’s repeated claims of election fraud, while baseless, still represent a very real danger. Any attempts to delegitimize election results should be seen as an attempt to subvert democracy, and claims otherwise need to be met with intense resistance from both parties. Things that were seen as unshakeable truths became distorted in 2000. Democracy is a delicate balancing act that requires diligent protection, not something we can just expect to happen. These are the lessons we must carry into the aftermath of the 2020 election as if the very essence of America is at stake, it was challenged in 2000 and it may very well be challenged again.