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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

How does this election relate to the 2000 election when all media called Gore the winner, but then in December, Bush became the president elect?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/11/04/the...

"On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount."

Can this happen again this time?

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What do you mean "all media called Gore the winner"? I can't find any evidence of that. According to Wikipedia [1], "on November 8 ... the networks declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore been elected president. ... after all votes were counted, ... the networks retracted their declarations that Bush had won Florida and the presidency".

Also, note that Gore privately conceded the election that night, but retracted it after further counting due to the <1000 vote margin.

So in fact major networks (including CNN, ABC, FOX) initially called Bush the winner, but retracted that afterwards due to the possibility of a recount.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

Amount of misinformation coming out is really concerning. SharpieGate, fake videos of ballot stuffing, more votes than registered voters etc.

How do you determine what is misinfo and what isn’t? Honest question.

Trust cooroborated stories across multiple competing and ideologically different institutions.

Here https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001108/apon...

Those networks called Florida for Gore, not the whole election.

One and the same though.

No, not at the time of retraction.

A few differences:

* In 2000 it was one tipping-point state. Here, Biden has multiple states putting him over the top.

* The margin in those states is larger than in Florida. The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes.

* 2000 involved a recount of legitimately questionable ballots. Trump's legal cases (thus far) have been judged by experts to be far less serious.

* Trump (so far) is not challenging enough ballots to give him the lead in the tipping-point state.

2000 also had the "hanging chads" issue and confusing ballots that potentially caused people to choose a different candidate from what they wanted.

The big difference is that 2000 revolved around a disputed recount, in a race with a margin of fewer than 1000 votes. There will be recounts in this race, but:

(1) There's no reason to believe they'll change the outcome much (recounts in 2016 didn't) --- states have learned since 2000 and have moved away from faulty ballot designs.

(2) The recounts will be occurring in multiple states, and Trump needs to sweep them.

(3) The margins in those recounts are much bigger than in 2000 --- tens of thousands of votes, not hundreds.

The biggest factor in Florida is that the ballot marking system that Florida used at that time was extremely prone to failure, especially with regards to machine reading of ballots (which itself could cause an apparent mark on the ballot!). This means that trying to divine whether or not a ballot recorded an intent to vote for a candidate can be subjective and depends on the exact standard you want to use, which Florida didn't specify (and the Florida Supreme Court ruled was ultimately too vague).

Since 2000, most states have switched to optical scan ballots as their paper records. These ballots have much lower error rates, closer to 1 error per million votes. I don't think there's been a single race using optical scan ballots where a recount actually caused a winner to switch.

Another thing that complicated this was that the way you punched the ballot resulted in the chad going into a waste bin. Those waste bins would fill up to the point where it would physically prevent you from being able to punch out your chad.

That election and SCOTUS ruling was a mess, and as a consequence did a lot of damage to this countries institutions.

It's more nuanced than that. Gore wanted some select counties recounted, bush wanted no counties recounted, but if there was going to be a rexound then bush wanted the whole state recounted. In the end the SCbrules that the 14th amendment said that including votes with "hanging Chad's" and other clear intent required the whole state to be recounted. Gore conceeded because there wasn't enough time and he believed that a whole state recount wouldn't have favored him in the end. History reflects that it may have been a bad strategy for Gore to try and recount just some counties because he may well have won if he argued for a state wide recount from the beginning.

No. For the many reasons others have noted and the elimination of the "hanging chad". [0]

[0]https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812854/the-florida-recount...

Look at it logically. Bush was ahead by 537 votes. The court wrangling happened for so long and there were so many delays that it was impossible to do a recount in time for the legally mandated date of certification.

Biden is ahead here. Even if you remove PA or AZ, he'd still have enough electoral votes to win.

He's going to be President. The only person who doesn't get that at this point is Trump, and everyone around him is just bowing to his whims.

The Associated Press, who called the election this year, and who has been calling US elections since 1848, didn't call the election for either side in 2000:

"AP did not call the closely contested race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore – we stood behind our assessment that the margin in Florida made it too close to call."

https://www.ap.org/en-us/topics/politics/elections/how-we-ca...

The sad part is that the popular vote has a much cleaner margin, and going forward this is what medias should report if people want change.

No. Biden is likely to win across multiple states by a large margin, notably in PA where he is above the point that would require a recount.

The media also called Tilden over Hayes in 1876 and Dewey over Truman in the 1940s. Its almost as if they're not the ones to decide the winner of an election.

Yes, at least in theory. The simple reason is that in the end not the media, but the courts will decide.

I think this is all anyone is really asking for.

As yet, no court is adjudicating an issue that impacts a large number of ballots.

State election systems will decide the election.

Most are asking for the people to decide.

And if the people truly and directly got to decide the president, this post would have been made on Wednesday morning.

That's not realistic because the fate of the country would be decided by a handful of cities, all sharing a same culture.

Having lived in 3 different cities let me tell you: they ain't got anything close to the same culture. Seattle, NY, and Atlanta are as disparate physically as culturally.

And the majority of Americans don't want a rural minority dictating the "fate of the country" either.

Courts do not typically decide elections.

Bush v Gore ordered that the recount be stopped.

And that was an atypical event, unique in American history.

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