A "real" stolen election?

   

      While the Trump supporters demonstrated in DC this past weekend about the election being stolen from Trump we should remember back 20 years when a presidential election was decided by one Republican vote.

     It might seem like ancient history today but it really was a case of how our electoral college can create a partisan election result in a close election.  First, we should remember that Al Gore received over 500,000 more votes than George Bush.  Florida came down to a statistical tie with only a few hundred votes separating the two candidates and many ballots were hard to determine correctly because of the ballots having a punch method of recording your vote.  This led to the possibility that voters may not have pushed the "chad" completely through in recording their vote. 

 The "hanging chad" became the difference in choosing our next President.  

    Because the vote was so close mandatory recounts were begun in various counties.  The Bush lead of over 1,000 votes started to decline to 543 votes as more ballots were closely examined by hand to determine if a "hanging chad" had failed to record a vote.  As this slow process proceeded the mandatory deadlines for recording a final vote count started to come up.  The two campaigns took the dispute to the courts.  The Bush campaign wanted the counting to stop and the Gore campaign wanted the counting to continue.  The Gore campaign won the case with the Florida Supreme Court but then the Bush filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court.  In a strictly partisan 5 to 4 verdict with the 5 Republican-appointed justices voting to support the Bush campaign's argument that the voting should stop and the election was over.  A swing of one vote and the recount proceeding might have change the election in favor of Gore in Florida.  One changed vote from a Supreme Court justice might have elected Gore instead of Bush.  This case has been used to make the case that justices can find a legal basis to justify their political beliefs.  I don't doubt that the vote would have been reversed if Bush was behind and wanted to have the counting continue.

     What is different that year is you had a losing candidate who put his country above his own personal ambition.  Gore didn't call out to his supporters to take to the streets.  Very different than our present narcissist who lost by 7 million votes and 74 electorial votes.