2000 election

Using the general link I learned that in the 2000 election the candidates were a president up for reelection and the current vice president.  George W. Bush had a 537 vote lead until the Florida Supreme Court called for a recount. His lead would have been at 1665 votes if the Supreme Court had not stopped the recount.  If a recount continued any votes that were not counted the first time because they were not all the way punched out, would be counted.  It seems like the media is the cause of the confusion and problems regarding this election. The night of the election Bush had an early lead. Then by 8pm Voter News gave Florida to Al Gore and the other media stations reported the same. By 10pm they put Florida back in the undecided column. Newspapers published early that Bush won when Florida was the real deciding vote and they kept pushing back announcing their votes.  Kind of like it was this year. The media kept giving electoral votes to certain candidates before the votes were even counted and announced If you watched certain sites when they updated they switched who got the votes. In this election they also announced who the winner was even before Florida was counted for, the difference was that even if Obama lost Florida he had enough votes to win the election.      

The real problem is that Florida wasn't the only state with invalid votes. If those votes that were just not punched all the way through were counted like they would have in a recount then it is possible and there are reporters that believe Al Gore would have won that election.  There are people who will not vote because they believe their vote won’t make a difference. There are those who stand strong and believe that there vote will make a difference and the system lets them down; because of technicalities and small errors a person’s vote can literally be thrown out.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/election2000/index.html