* It would have been nice to count all of the votes. The decision of who won Florida was in the hands of Bush's Florida campaign manager Katherine Harris, who ordered a halt to the counting of votes and declared the state for Bush as soon as he was ahead of the votes and it was legally permissible for her to do so (some amount of time needed to have passed).
A consortium of newspapers did count all of the votes and prepared to announce the results on September 12, 2001. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they delayed the report for a few weeks and then declared it official that Bush won and was our legitimate President even though their numbers showed that Gore won by a negligible amount, fewer than 400 votes.
* Harris should have recused herself from her Secretary of State duties regarding the election for the obvious reason that she was the campaign manager for one of the candidates, but she did not.
* Harris had Republican-tied companies aggressively scrub the voting rolls of somewhere between 20,000 to 150,000 "felons" and people whose names resembled those of felons if they lived in a heavily Democratic area. Voters removed from the rolls were not notified of their removal and were simply turned away when they went to vote. This is why there are now "provisional ballots" for people who want to challenge their ineligibility. Also, about two-thirds of the people whose voting rights were taken away were black. The best source for this is Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
* Blacks were turned away from voting in some districts. This may be related to the scrub lists, with individuals being turned away from the polls, but there were also rumours of police blockades around polling places in Jacksonville and Orlando turning black people away while letting white people through. One of the alleged police blockades was later attributed to a traffic accident.
* The US Supreme Court decision forbidding the full count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was so ridiculous that the majority wrote in their own opinion that it should not be used as precedent in the future.
* One Republican county clerk took a list of 2,000 people who had not voted into his private office and came out with 2,000 absentee ballots voting for Bush.
* A group of Republican Congressional staffers from DC raided a polling place where votes were being counted in an attempt to show that public opinion was against counting the votes. They also tried to steal a ballot box from a county official carrying it.
* Punch machines in some areas were broken, producing the notorious pinhole, dimple, and hanging chad votes. These mostly occurred in areas where the Democrats were running the election system and can be blamed on their incompetence.
* The first picture of a "butterfly ballot" that I saw in the media had the left page misprinted at a slight angle so that the arrow or line by Gore's name pointed directly to the box for Buchanan. Every subsequent press report used a picture of a correctly-printed ballot with straight lines. Buchanan got the same amount of votes in that district as he did in the 1996 election, so it did not really matter.
* One Democratic lawyer attempted to challenge the legitimacy of a few thousand military absentee ballots that were technically invalid. The rest of the Democratic party convinced him to pull the suit.
* It would have been nice to count all of the votes. The decision of who won Florida was in the hands of Bush's Florida campaign manager Katherine Harris, who ordered a halt to the counting of votes and declared the state for Bush as soon as he was ahead of the votes and it was legally permissible for her to do so (some amount of time needed to have passed).
A consortium of newspapers did count all of the votes and prepared to announce the results on September 12, 2001. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they delayed the report for a few weeks and then declared it official that Bush won and was our legitimate President even though their numbers showed that Gore won by a negligible amount, fewer than 400 votes.
* Harris should have recused herself from her Secretary of State duties regarding the election for the obvious reason that she was the campaign manager for one of the candidates, but she did not.
* Harris had Republican-tied companies aggressively scrub the voting rolls of somewhere between 20,000 to 150,000 "felons" and people whose names resembled those of felons if they lived in a heavily Democratic area. Voters removed from the rolls were not notified of their removal and were simply turned away when they went to vote. This is why there are now "provisional ballots" for people who want to challenge their ineligibility. Also, about two-thirds of the people whose voting rights were taken away were black. The best source for this is Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
* Blacks were turned away from voting in some districts. This may be related to the scrub lists, with individuals being turned away from the polls, but there were also rumours of police blockades around polling places in Jacksonville and Orlando turning black people away while letting white people through. One of the alleged police blockades was later attributed to a traffic accident.
* The US Supreme Court decision forbidding the full count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was so ridiculous that the majority wrote in their own opinion that it should not be used as precedent in the future.
* One Republican county clerk took a list of 2,000 people who had not voted into his private office and came out with 2,000 absentee ballots voting for Bush.
* A group of Republican Congressional staffers from DC raided a polling place where votes were being counted in an attempt to show that public opinion was against counting the votes. They also tried to steal a ballot box from a county official carrying it.
* Punch machines in some areas were broken, producing the notorious pinhole, dimple, and hanging chad votes. These mostly occurred in areas where the Democrats were running the election system and can be blamed on their incompetence.
* The first picture of a "butterfly ballot" that I saw in the media had the left page misprinted at a slight angle so that the arrow or line by Gore's name pointed directly to the box for Buchanan. Every subsequent press report used a picture of a correctly-printed ballot with straight lines. Buchanan got the same amount of votes in that district as he did in the 1996 election, so it did not really matter.
* One Democratic lawyer attempted to challenge the legitimacy of a few thousand military absentee ballots that were technically invalid. The rest of the Democratic party convinced him to pull the suit.