Who was the rightful winner of the 2000 election?

[Nym90]

Gore.

[Nym90]

The election was called 10 minutes before polls in the panhandle closed. So it is highly unlikely that this had much effect on anything there. Everyone who was going to vote would likely already be in line, or at least on their way to the polls to vote, and thus probably were unaware of the call for Gore.

Even if they were, it is unlikely that this would affect most people's decision whether or not to vote (voter turnout doesn't drop that much in presidential elections in which the result is preordained versus those in which it is predicted to be close). The fact that people would already be on their way as opposed to sitting at home when they find out means that they would be much less likely than most voters to let this information affect their decision whether or not to vote.

Even if they did decide not to vote as a result of knowing this, this would affect both party's supporters roughly equally. (Yes, there are more Republicans than Democrats in the panhandle, so it still affects Bush's totals more, but not dramatically more).

Not to mention the fact that choosing to not vote at all is a very different thing than having a vote thrown out due to a defective or inaccurate voting machine (which raises an interesting point...if having different recount standards in different counties was a violation of the Equal Protection clause, why wasn't having different types of voting machines in different counties which can be statistically proven to have a higher rate of rejection of votes not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause?).

So I highly doubt this factor could have offset all of the other irregularities.

[Nym90]

Gore.  In recounts after the inaugration, if there had been a statewide recount, Gore would have won.

Where do you get this information from?  The recounts done by the NY Times (hardly a bastion of Republicanism) showed Bush the winner under the various counting methodologies.

Media post-electoral studies/recounts
After the election, USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes, that is, ballots which did not register any vote when counted by machine. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today [7], show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes. Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:

Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush won by 1,665 votes.
Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush won by 884 votes.
Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush won by 363 votes.
Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore won by 3 votes.
The study remarks that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore was surely the winner under the strict standard. It also remarks that there are variations between examiners, and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots which registered more than one vote when counted by machine.

The study also found that undervotes break down into two distinct types, those coming from punch-card using counties, and those coming from optical-scan using counties. Undervotes from punch-card using counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan using counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.

A larger consortium of news organizations, including the USA Today, the Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, the Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, under stricter standards for vote counting, Bush won, and under looser standards, Gore won. [8] However, a Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request.

According to the study, only 3% of the 111,261 overvotes had markings that could be interpreted as a legal vote. According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice-president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential race was split across two pages. Voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this error alone cost Gore the election.

Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:

Lenient standard. Gore by 332 votes.
Palm Beach standard. Gore by 242 votes.
Two-corner standard. Bush by 407 votes.
Strict standard. Bush by 152 votes.
In 2003, United States citizens living in the state of Florida were asked who they voted for in the 2000 Election as part of the Statistical Abstract Census. The results showed President Bush receiving more than 1000 votes more than former Vice President Gore. However this result was badly tarnished when it was discovered that the man responsible for this census had links to the original Bush campaign in 2000.


This is excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Presidential_Election

[Nym90]

Nader.

In all serious though, Gore didn't deserve to win. He was losing ground like wildfire in the polls. Had the election been a week later it would have been as sound a loss for the Dems as 04'. Gore lost the EC, thus he lost the election. The Gore-ons just need to move on.

The question isn't who deserved to win. Walter Mondale deserved to beat Ronald Reagan, but of course he didn't.

Walter Mondale didn't deserve the nomination as far as I am concerned. What convinced the Democrats that the Vice-President of a ticket that got landslided by Reagan could fair better as the head of the ticket?

Anywho, Bush won Florida. All 100,000 recounts conducted gave Bush the state. Conspiracy therios aside, Bush got the most votes in Florida. It's time the Democrats moved on. I will garuntee that if they lose 2008, they will find some way to crawl back to 2000 for a whine fest.

The official recount favored Bush. Most of the unofficial ones favored Gore. It all depends on what standard you use.

I agree that we should all move on, but the margin was so close, and the number of discrepancies and irregularities so large, that to say with any degree of confidence who actually won the state is delusional. I agree that conspiracy theories about Florida being stolen are wrong, but it's not at all unreasonable to feel, as I did, that Gore was the legitimate winner of the state, but that Bush ended up winning on a technicality.

[Nym90]

Bush.  It is now fact.  Move on.

^^^^^^

Bush won narrowly, but he did win fair and square. 

^^^^^^

Well I agree that Bush didn't cheat, but I do believe his victory was on a technicality.

It's sort of like saying OJ Simpson is innocent of murder. Legally, obviously he is, but that doesn't really change my opinion of what actually happened.