LIE: Al Gore would have won the 2000 U.S. Presidential election if the Supreme Court wouldn’t have stopped the record
TRUTH: Even if the recount continued, Bush would have won
While we think of recently elections as being problematic, the 2000 U.S. Presidential election was as close as a race can be. George W Bush won by about 500 votes in Florida in a win that reminds people that every vote counts. After the election, some districts in Florida were so close that ballots needed to be manually counted and this is where thing take a turn and many Democrats started to believe that Al Gore really won the election.
Prior to the 2000 election voters had become accustomed to hearing who won the election by the next day but the closeness of the vote in Florida prevented the public from knowing the outcome. The closeness triggered manual recounts which started within days of the election. Some Florida counties were using punch cards requiring the voter to punch a hole in the card. In some cases the hole wasn’t clear and this brought many cards into question and lawsuits were filed to determine how the cards should be counted.
After several weeks of counting and re-counting based on the outcome of different court cases, the cases were elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the counting should stop with the closest counties and not include a statewide re-count. This is where the belief that the Supreme Court decided who will be President and that Al Gore was the winner begins.
Here are some examples calling the results into question:
- https://time.com/archive/6917762/bush-would-have-won-or-would-he/
- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2000/12/01/many-question-bush-or-gore-as-legitimate-winner/
In the months after the election a consortium of newspapers kept counting the punch cards. They used a number of counting schemes and in every single one Bush won the 2000 election.
- “Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore.”