Guess Who Else Refused to Accept the Results of a Presidential Election?
Americans face a stunning situation this morning: a presidential candidate who refuses to accept the results of a presidential election.
I’m speaking, of course, of Hillary Clinton.
As Jim Geraghty notes in National Review this morning, Hillary told fundraisers in 2002 that George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” in 2000.
If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been a recurring theme for Democrats for almost 16 years now. It’s a mantra that has been repeated by everyone from Joe Biden (who said Al Gore “was elected president of the United States of America”) to Jimmy Carter (who said there is “no doubt in my mind that Gore won the election”) to Jonathan Chait (who wrote a piece titled “Yes, Bush v. Gore Did Steal the Election”).
Yes, Democrats have been rewriting the 2000 election for years, saying that Al Gore really won. But until the last 12 hours or so, I never heard their new revisionist history: that Al Gore in fact graciously surrendered power. The very same Chait who still alleges fraud in 2000 is claiming that Al Gore conceded, end of story:
In 2000, there was an automatic recount. GOP blocked it. Gore conceded. They call him a sore loser anyway. https://t.co/Yz9n3VKrgy
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) October 20, 2016
Um, no.
Here’s what actually happened: news media called the election for Gore about an hour before polls closed in Florida, depressing turnout of the Republican vote in the panhandle, which was in a different time zone and heavily populated by Bush voters. Then the media retracted their call and very late that night awarded the contest to Bush. Gore called Bush and conceded.
Then he retracted it.
After automatic machine recounts showed Bush still winning, Gore sought manual recounts. But despite his rhetoric about “counting every vote,” Gore did not ask for a statewide recount of all votes, but a recount only in four Democratic counties that were more likely to favor him. As recounts proceeded, shenanigans were happening in these Democrat-controlled counties, with standards shifting constantly in ways that benefited Gore. Here’s a passage from the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore:
As seems to have been acknowledged at oral argument, the standards for accepting or rejecting contested ballots might vary not only from county to county but indeed within a single county from one recount team to another.
The record provides some examples. A monitor in Miami-Dade County testified at trial that he observed that three members of the county canvassing board applied different standards in defining a legal vote. 3 Tr. 497, 499 (Dec. 3, 2000). And testimony at trial also revealed that at least one county changed its evaluative standards during the counting process. Palm Beach County, for example, began the process with a 1990 guideline which precluded counting completely attached chads, switched to a rule that considered a vote to be legal if any light could be seen through a chad, changed back to the 1990 rule, and then abandoned any pretense of a per se rule, only to have a court order that the county consider dimpled chads legal.
It was chaos, and utterly . . . rigged. Yes, that term is a fair description of what Al Gore tried to do. He tried to steal the election, by having selective recounts and supporting an absurd and partisan “counting” process . . . and failed.
Ultimately, Gore conceded when he had to, and not one second before. And, as Sean Davis from The Federalist notes, Gore grudgingly conceded only the “finality” of the outcome while still disputing the correctness of the Supreme Court’s decision. And he spent years implying that he had really won. I watched him do it, on talk shows and in other appearances.
And Hillary Clinton pushed that same line, too. Which makes it ironic that she is getting on her high horse about Trump’s refusal to validate the fairness of an election that hasn’t even happened yet. An election where James O’Keefe has revealed Democrats acknowledging Democrat voter fraud, and inciting violence and pretending it resulted from “spontaneous” demonstrations . . . that DNC officials linked to Hillary actually orchestrated. An election where the DNC put its thumb on the scales for Hillary in the primaries. An election against a party, the Democrats, with a long and storied history of stealing elections, from LBJ’s first Senate race to JFK in 1960 to Al Gore’s attempt in 2000 to Hillary’s nomination this year.
Trump is wrong to claim that the vote counting process is rigged against him. He has no evidence of that. But he is not wrong to refuse to agree to concede the fairness of an election that has not even occurred.
And Hillary Clinton is wrong to refuse to concede the fairness of an election that did occur.
But good luck reading any of this anywhere but conservative blogs.
[Cross-posted at RedState.]
Well, we’ll see the “not wrong to refuse…” and “Hillary Clinton in wrong…” of that on the Trump-supporting blogs, too.
CayleyGraph (353727) — 10/20/2016 @ 10:12 amPatterico, it really does seem sometimes that we live in bizarro world. Your “recounting” of the events of 2000 are exactly like mine; my memory of the events are still fresh.
Yet all over the web today I see others telling a false narrative, one that many people alive simply don’t have the knowledge to refute.
I would only add that, as a Floridian, I recall that additionally, the Democrats vilified Katherine Harris for the awful crime of complying with State Election law, something she was required to do.
I fear it is hopeless, but let’s keep trying to roll that rock up the hill again, shall we?
Pious Agnostic (fc15f6) — 10/20/2016 @ 10:25 amInteresting footnote to history: as Al Gore cried ‘count every vote’, his team made successful legal arguments to not count overseas military ballots. No one questioned these ballots’ authenticity, but the stamps on the package were incorrect. At this time, after the election, while legal fees stacked up for both sides, donations were sought.
Donald Trump donated to Al Gore’s team as they fought against our troops having a vote.
So at least Trump’s been consistent about this.
Dustin (ba94b2) — 10/20/2016 @ 10:33 amDonald Trump gave a better answer to the question today (a speech excerpt was broadcast on the rush limbaugh show) still not really ghood enough, and he couldn’t remember whether the case wa scalled Bsuh v gore or Gore v Bush and used both of them.
Websites like Salon and the Huffington Post are saying there’s no comparison: Gore didn’t raise any issue like this before the election.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 10:45 amThe better answer would have noted that the peaceful transfer of power is from the elected president to the president-elect as #1 did. So is #44 prepared to accept the results if punkin head wins?
crazy (d3b449) — 10/20/2016 @ 10:56 amAnd if it had been Patterico who was asked that question, his answer would have given him a 5% boost in the polls.
What it all comes down to is that Trump is an inarticulate jackass. (And a lousy lay according to his first wife.)
nk (dbc370) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:01 amWhat was the most important thing that happened in Florida is still going unnoticed. The seven Florida State Supreme Court justices (all Democrats) voted to allow a recount even though, under the Florida Constitution and Florida Election Law, they did not have the authority to allow a recount. That is why, in a highly unusual vote, all nine United States Supreme Court Justices ordered the recount stopped.
Michael Keohane (947544) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:04 amThank you for posting this, Patterico. I does me good to see reason.
I so hate the hypocrisy and am sick at heart.
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:17 amGore was very much trying a selective recount, and treated taht like just another kind of campaign strategy.
There is another thing: Gore really lost between the time voters went into the polls and the time they left, but these things couldn’t be recounted.
But it was Democrats who made all the mistakes in running the election system.
1) The counties that used a system of punching out chads to cast votes had more Democratic voters in them overall than Republican voters – that is those counties combined had a Democrartic bias.
And in any place where punching out chads was used, about 1% or 2% of the votes cast were regularly lost. The chad system had been developed by IBM for cmmercial purpoises and rejected, and then salesmen quit IBM and sold that flawed tabulation sysetm election boards.
The same system was sold to Chicago. Democrats were sabotaging themselves for years in statewide elections in some states.
2) In Palm Beach county, there was the “butterfly ballot” (the ballot had names both to the left and the right of the holes to be punched) which caused some voters to cast votes for Pat Buchanan, and some others cast double votes, thinking maybe they were voting separately for Vice President, which rendered the ballot invalid.
Because of the order of the names on the ballot, (Bush was listed first) and because the county tilted Democratic, Gore probably lost more votes than Bush, who was listed first.
It was a Democratic election official who designed that ballot.
3) In Jacksonville, the local Democratic Party distributed some flyers in heavily Democratic black precincts urging people to vote on every page. There were two pages of presidential candidates.
Some people, especially those new to voting, indeed voted on every page and invalidated their ballot for the office of President. (or actually fro Electors)
4) Some people marked Write-in – and then wrote in Al Gore, as well as voting for him separately. that constituted an overvote. I am not any write-in counted. There the intention of the voter was clear, but it wasn’t legally cast. I think there were more such write in Gore+Gore votes than write-in Bush+Bush votes. And in soime other cases, James Baker was quite insistent taht they couldn’t guess the voter’s intent.
In addition, the Gore campaign figured two other factors lost him the election:
1) Ralph Nader running on the Green party ticket. This could be said to have cost him Florida, if a substantial majority of the Nader voters would otherwise have voted for Gore.
2) Al Gore giving up campaigning in New Hampshire, with 4 Electoral votes. He lost New Hampshire by a small margin. If he would have carried New Hampshire, he would have had 271 Electoral votes, and won the election even with losing Florida. One caveat: there were several places theer might have been a Republican challenge to the statewide results, I don’t remember, maybe Iowa. New Mexico was also very close.
All three of those states, New Hampshire (4) Iowa (7), and New Mexico (5) flipped in 2004, (New Hampshire REP -> DEM and Iowa and New Mexico DEM -> REP for a net gain to Bush of 8) and that (plus the advantage of & Electoral votes Bush gained in reapportionment between 2000 and 2004) was the only difference between the 2000 and the 2004 presidential election results in the Electoral College.
Bush gained about 3% more in the popular vote in 2004 over the year 2000, but Ralph Nader wasn’t running in 2004.
In addition Al Gore lost Tennessee because of the issues of coal mining and gun control, and being against tobacco didn’t help either.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:22 amThe lawyers in the Florida recount case were batting things back and forth between each other for a long time and never cut to the chase. The Supreme Court stopped the recount, but the recount, under the rules, would have turned out for Bush.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:24 am* …plus the advantage of 7 Electoral votes Bush gained in reapportionment between 2000 and 2004
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:25 amPlease no more punching chars sammeh, I’m getting flashback. That was when I learned to loath tapper in the pages of salon. It was a perfect storm, a poorly designed ballot, negligent election supervisor like sancho in Hillsborough.
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:27 amIf we had the Maine-Nebraska electoral vote system in place nationwide, not only would the Florida problems of 2000 have been avoided, but the networks wouldn’t be calling whole states — save those with just one congressional district — before the polls close in parts of the state.
New Mexico was even closer than Florida in 2000, but nobody cared because switching New Mexico wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
The Dana who remembers (f6a568) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:29 amIf we had just stuck with the franchise the Framers intended, where only white male property owners could vote, many of our recent problems would have been avoided.
The sexist pig Dana (f6a568) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:32 amThe networks also started reporting the FL vote when the polls were still open for another hour in the NW panhandle and meanwhile the dems went to court to keep their favorite precincts open due to “long lines” at closing time. I expect they’ll do much the same this year nationwide.
crazy (d3b449) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:32 amSammy, it should also be noted that the networks called Florida for Gore before the polls closed in the very conservative panhandle, which is in the central time zone.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:34 amAt the very least, that probably depressed Bush’s turnout by a few tens of thousands.
Historical election results:
http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/timeline/
You can look at any year from 2012 going back to 1789. Before 1960 Alaska and Hawaii simply disappear from the map,. For 1908 andnd earlier places taht are not states are shown blank grey. Also places that were not yet part of teh United States 1848 and earlier.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:35 amIt is said that people standing in linein W Florida may ahve gone home. Not sure.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:36 amBob wexler’s public relation campaign expanding the ‘voted for buchanan’ squirrel was significant.
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:40 amWhy would Maudie agree to accept the results of an event which has not occurred yet?
Oh right: bad judgement.
“Dewey Defeats Truman” – incorrect banner headline, front page, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1948
DCSCA (797bc0) — 10/20/2016 @ 11:47 amFive days off, 90 minutes on TV, then another day off. Seems Maudie has the work schedule of Saturday Night Live.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 10/20/2016 @ 12:13 pm@adjectival Dana:If we had the Maine-Nebraska electoral vote system in place nationwide
then we’d have Florida recounts in potentially every Congressional district where it was close.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:07 pmYou know, on SNL they had Al Gore hosting one time, and they did a skit on how great everything would have been if Gore was recognized as President.
G (f85a02) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:09 pm@G: they did a skit on how great everything would have been if Gore was recognized as President.
I think the skit was, they WANTED to do that, but he was distracted by the Oval Office set and they couldn’t get him out of it.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:17 pmAt this time I’d like to remind everyone about a true heroine from the 2000 drama: Katherine Harris, then the Secretary of State of Florida. Under intense pressure to bend to the will of the White House, the news media that spread baseless DNC smears that she was engaging in an extramarital affair with Governor Jeb Bush, and the entertainment industry that made fun of her looks (Laura Dern won an Emmy for her over-the-top caricature of Harris in Recount), she stood by the letter of the law in Florida.
I still remember the moment she took the podium at that press conference. I was driving home from work, listening to the bulletin on the radio. The expectation was that she was going to agree to withhold certification of the official count — which, of course had Bush winning — and allow Gore, the Clinton Administation, and the Democratic Party legal team to do their worst to engineer a victory out of whole cloth. Even though I wasn’t particularly enthused about GWB, I knew Gore couldn’t be trusted, and after Clinton slithered his way out of removal from office in the Senate, I was in despair. “They can’t be stopped,” I remember thinking. Then she said the following:
I felt a rush normally reserved for comeback victories of my favorite teams, such as Dwight Clark’s “The Catch” or Joe Morgan’s home run that eliminated the Dodgers from the Western Division race in 1982. I lost control. I honked my horn and shouted out the window. It was very important that Harris certified the vote before any of the court challenges, because the Dems were strategizing how to get Gore’s vote count over Bush’s, and only then insist on certification.
After the good will caused by her stance kicked in, Harris ran and won a Florida Congressional seat, but then made an ill-fated run at the Senate, and dropped off the radar. But I remember her, and that shining, historic moment.
L.N. Smithee (b84cf6) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:21 pm25. I thought Niedenfuer’s worthlessness (he gave up the Morgan homer) only dated back to the ’85 NLCS. He belongs in a Hall of Shame with George Frazier, Byoon Hun Kim, and Jerys Familia.
urbanleftbehind (5eecdb) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:51 pmJohn Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post that there was actually a point in the debate where Donald Trump effectively conceded the race, and acknowledged that he is going to lose the election:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119039
John Podhorezt interpreted that as meaning Hillary would be doing things as president.
That’s probably not actually what it meant, but he was at least claiming he could not change the bad results he predicted.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 10/20/2016 @ 1:52 pmTrump is such a know-nothing that he has a difficult defending himself against unfounded attacks, like this, or baseless arguments like Hillary’s Heller/toddlers conflation.
Of course, he’s hardly the first numbnuts to run for office.
ThOR (c9324e) — 10/20/2016 @ 2:27 pmCrazy noted:
In Kentucky, the polls are open from 6:00 AM through 6:00 PM, and Kentucky is virtually always the first state to report. Trouble is, west of Louisville, the state switches to te Central Time Zone. I’ve seen times when Kentucky’s vote was reported before 7:00 PM Eastern.
Of course, the Bluegrass State will go Republican again.
The Dana who grew up in the Bluegrass State (1b79fa) — 10/20/2016 @ 3:18 pmForget it Jake, it’s ALL Chinatown now.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 10/20/2016 @ 3:33 pmTrump is such a know-nothing that he has a difficult defending himself against unfounded attacks, like this, or baseless arguments like Hillary’s Heller/toddlers conflation.
Sarah Palin would slaughter him on Jeopardy!
Kevin M (25bbee) — 10/20/2016 @ 3:34 pm(And a lousy lay according to his first wife.)
Perhaps, but Melania is going to be one heck of a rich 40yo.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 10/20/2016 @ 3:37 pmWell, if you want “thumb on the scales”, the news here in New Zealand reported the story about the Dems causing violence, and the fact that Evan McMullin is winning Utah…
Just kidding, those are real stories. They ran a report that Obama gave a snarky speech about Trump.
scrubone (c3104f) — 10/20/2016 @ 3:59 pmSo the Phillipines announce a split from the U.S. at a presser in Beijing?? (MacArthur is definitely rolling over in his grave, JR.)
And America’s media is hyperventilating over “election rigging?” Something both these lousy political parties have been up to since the days of Lincoln???? W.T.F.
The return was for naught, Doug. The ungrateful bastards.
“The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.” – General Douglas MacArthur
DCSCA (797bc0) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:19 pmit’s a mad mad world, when cockburn’s protege, is more sensible than your typical commentary scribe lately, adjusting for ambient noise,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/20/illusions-of-democracy-in-vegas/
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:37 pmhere’s another bit of counterintuitive thinking,
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/10/20/the-roof-blows-off-the-echo-chamber/
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:40 pmAll the “media” today skipped over the fact that it took this ludicrous recount over the period of weeks before Gore conceded.
Does America care? I just don’t know any more.
Is it just “where my check at?”
Patricia (5fc097) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:48 pmtrente y siete dias, thirty seven days, patricia, and in that interim, and the delayed transition, the hijackers were moving into position in florida and other places,
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:49 pmThe Democrat Party has a long history of ballot box stuffing; their assertion that there aren’t any cases of vote fraud should be answered “Of course there aren’t. Every time somebody turns up persuasive evidence of it, you do everything you can to make sure the investigation is scotched. Because, somehow, every time there appears to be evidence of vote fraud, it benefits YOU.”
C. S. P. Schofield (99bd37) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:51 pmyou would think they would have a half way competent representative, but that is the nature of the combine,
https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/789221816506064896
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 4:58 pmapparently it was a habit that died hard, for red queen,
http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2009a/08/127830.htm
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 5:04 pmNot to mention that every time the Miami-Dade and Broward election staff handled the ballots more chad “fell out”, thus converting invalid ballots to valid ones.
I have little doubt that had the Supreme Court allowed the recount to proceed, Gore would have won. By which I mean that although, as we now know, at the moment the court froze the process there were slightly more Bush ballots than Gore ones, if the process had continued there would have been more Gore ones. And if there still weren’t enough, Gore would have tried for yet another count, and another chance to add some more ballots to his side. Which was precisely why the Court had to freeze it.
Milhouse (e9b6f1) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:06 pmNot to mention that GOP “riot” when the Democrat officials took the ballots into a locked room where they would be able to do anything they liked to them without being observed. Dems still yell and scream about that one, without once mentioning why it happened.
Milhouse (e9b6f1) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:09 pm40. Between O’Keefe and Wikileaks Brazile is looking pretty harried, narciso.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:09 pmyou don’t say,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/20/isil-bomber-who-committed-suicide-in-german-prison-may-have-been/
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:36 pmNo, we wouldn’t, because (1) in no one district would there be enough at stake to justify the sort of resources poured into Florida; and (2) by definition, in close districts the count is unlikely to be controlled by a machine like those in Miami-Dade, Broward, King County WA, etc, able to “find” the necessary votes to push their candidate over the line. Districts with such machines would not be close, so there’d be nothing for the machine to do. In fact if governors and other statewide offices (including US senators) were elected on such a system, there would be little point in building such machines in the first place. Which is not to say that such a system would be fair.
Milhouse (e9b6f1) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:51 pmdems will turn every standard to serve their purpose, the butterfly ballot was poorly designed they allowed illiterate voters, and ineligible ones to vote, they purged overseas veteran votes, they created ‘the voted for buchanan’ dodge, then they pushed for electronic voting machine, but they didn’t the result, so they created the ‘black box’ fiction,
narciso (d1f714) — 10/20/2016 @ 7:55 pmWhat an impressive group of letters by many.
I remember the WSJ making mention of this situation but not with the detail as letter #9. Mr. Finkelman and others: how enjoyable and refreshing to read your comments. Thank you all.
Sincerely, Roger Smith
Roger Smith (5e8d08) — 10/21/2016 @ 8:43 am