Eighteen years after a chaotic recount, debate still rages over whether the antics went too far.
November 15, 2018
Protesters shout outside the Miami-Dade County election office Nov. 22, 2000. (Colin Braley/Reuters)
It was the day before Thanksgiving, but the 2000 presidential election was far from over in Florida, where the tortured tug-of-war over a recount was about to trigger a melee.
On election night two weeks earlier, news anchors had awarded the Sunshine State’s crucial 25 electoral college votes to Al Gore, then to George W. Bush, before finally admitting that Florida was simply too close to call.
Gore had phoned Bush to concede only to recant as the gap between the candidates shrank to several hundred votes in the state, with thousands of “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” and “dimpled chads” and “pimpled chads” to contest.
[...]
But now, 15 days after the last vote was cast, the post-election battle for the ballots grew even uglier.
As the most populous of the four Florida counties where the vote count was fiercely contested, Miami-Dade was the front line for recount efforts.
Joe Geller was deep in the trenches. The county’s Democratic Party chairman was worried that thousands of Miami-Dade ballots might have been affected by a voting machine glitch, potentially costing Gore the election. So on Nov. 22, he headed to the drab government high-rise in downtown Miami where a manual recount was underway.
But when he arrived, he found the lobby and elections office filled with several dozen protesters —
many of them in suit jackets and button-down shirts.
Geller had walked into the “Brooks Brothers riot,” a protest organized by Republican campaign operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers.
When Geller asked election officials for a sample ballot to test his voting machine theory, the GOP operatives suddenly surrounded him, accusing him of stealing ballots to try to influence the election, he told The Washington Post in a telephone interview this week.
“This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” recalled Geller, who is now a state legislator. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”
Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative who proudly admits to coordinating what he prefers to call the “Brooks Brothers Rebellion,” denies that things got violent.
“That’s all bulls---,” he told The Post. “There was no violence. There was no threatening behavior.”
Yet the two men agree on a couple of key points.
First, that
the episode played a key role in clinching the election for Bush.
And second, that
the situation in Florida today is eerily similar to that of 18 years ago.
But because they brought all their California money with them, our "leadership" caved to their demands. Now to me, THAT is something worth going to war over 
