Jeb Bush, Palast found, had paid an outside vendor $4 million to take a felon list supplied by Texas and compare its names against the entire Florida voter database, using loose matches that didn't always involve middle names or dates of birth.
As a result, at least 22,000 Florida voters, most Black men with similar names to Black felons in Texas, were purged from the voting rolls just before the election. (His report for the BBC is at the bottom of this article.)
While the American public was largely unaware of this aspect of the 2000 election, the Florida Supreme Court approved an appeal from Florida Democrats and ordered a recount of that state's vote.
Roger Stone claims he helped organize the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot" in which staffers for multiple Republican lawmakers went to Florida and, along with local GOP activists, demanded that the State Supreme Court-ordered recount be stopped. It got nationwide news coverage, although it was presented merely as average Floridians expressing outrage.
Piggybacking on the apparent GOP outrage in Florida, five Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court stopped that then-already-ongoing recount of the Florida vote, something that had never before happened in US history.
In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount --and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:
"The counting of votes " does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."
Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.
And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia's son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida"which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.
As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of over-votes, Mr. Gore would have won."
That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.
How Republicans Tried To Pull It Off a Third Time in 2020The third time wasn't the charm.
Roger Stone and his friends pulled together another "stop the steal" event on January 6th to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president, using the same sort of rhetoric about "sore loser Democrats" that had worked so well for them in Florida 20 years earlier.
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