As Donald Trump continues his flailing, borderline incoherent attempts to overturn an election he clearly lost, it might be a good time to remember a past election that was, in my opinion, stolen successfully.
In the year two thousand, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W Bush were running neck and neck in the presidential election. Gore's years as Vice President under Bill Clinton had seen the country experience enormous peace and prosperity. But Clinton had also been impeached by the House of Representatives and had suffered withering attacks on his character (some reasonable, some not) from the Republican Party. George W Bush, meanwhile, was seen as an amiable dimwit who was lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family with a political legacy. And there was a viable third party candidate, Ralph Nader running on the Green Party ticket, that was siphoning votes away from Gore. (And whom I voted for, a vote I would later deeply regret).
An election as close as that one was, was sure to come down to the wire. In fact, it was a mess, as it all wound up in the state of Florida, which veered from one candidate to another as the election night wore on. At one point Gore called Bush to concede, and then called back to rescind the first call!
While there was all kinds of craziness going on in the recounts in that state, from confusing "butterfly" ballots that may have gotten voters to vote for the wrong candidate to election officials surveying ballots to try and discern the voter's intent, it was far from America's finest hour of democracy. As we all know, the supreme court stepped in and essentially gave the presidency to Bush by halting all the recounts. But was he really the candidate who won, or was it just close enough for him to steal it? I certainly think that it was stolen.
Why? Because, beyond the insanity, one chilling fact emerged after it was too late to do anything about it: many African American voters said that when they went to vote, they were told that their names were not on the voting list and they were turned away. While we don't know how many voters were wrongfully turned away, considering that the final vote count for George W Bush was a miniscule five hundred and thirty seven more than Al Gore's shows how easily the election could have turned to Gore.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People eventually sued the state, and during the investigation it was discovered that, because Florida did not let felons vote, a list of felons had to be sent to election officials to remove from the voting rolls. And the company that made that list, Database Technologies, overshot the list, putting names on that shouldn't have been for a variety of reasons. Edward Hailes, who was then the acting general counsel of the US Civil Rights Commission, said that the number of disenfranchised African American voters was in the thousands, and added that “We did think it was outcome-determinative.”
While these findings did lead to changes in the Florida voting process, it was, or course, too late to do anything about the outcome of the election. Putting it simply, the election was close enough for Bush to steal it in a state in which, it should be remembered, his own brother was governor of. And he was aided by a supreme court that had two members that had been put there by his father. It was almost a third world dictatorship level of corruption.
Not only would Bush prove to be a disastrous president, the legacy of the Florida debacle would live on in the Republican Party's repeated attempts to suppress the voting rights of non white voters (especially African Americans). From wildly overblown charges of voter fraud to Gerrymandering, the GOP will use almost any means possible to disenfranchise voters unlikely to vote for them.
And the legacy of voter suppression lives on now in Trump's wild rantings; along with crazy charges of rigged voting machines and lost ballots, he and his legal team have focused on trying to get votes thrown out of cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia. Cities that have, naturally, high African American populations. While there is virtually no chance that Trump and his legal team will prevail, the sad reality is that another stolen election could be on the horizon. There is simply no reason for the Republican Party to abandon their attempts at voter suppression when they have often proven successful; really, it's just the logical extension of the Southern Strategy that the party has been using to get blue collar white voters to vote for them for decades. Although I like to think that someday there will be a reckoning for the Republican Party's extremism that will cause them to have to be more open to compromise and move towards the center politically, given their ability to game the system for power, that day may not be for a while.
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