FACT BRIEF

Did overseas absentee ballots play a key role in the disputed 2000 presidential election?

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

By Esther Tsvayg

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YES

Late-arriving absentee ballots from overseas Florida voters played a key role in the dispute over the 2000 presidential election. Later reporting found that some of the ballots may have been counted illegally amid a dispute between the rival campaigns.

There was a "strikingly" effective "Republican effort to convince local election officials to count invalid ballots in Bush counties and not count them in Gore counties," according to Gary King and Kosuke Imai, political scientists who in 2004 published details of an analysis conducted for a 2001 New York Times article. On Election Day, Democrat Al Gore had been 202 votes ahead of George W. Bush, they wrote. "No partisan, pundit, or academic has publicly disagreed with [the Times] assessment" that 680 of the absentee votes were counted "illegally." Bush won the state, and hence the Presidency, by 537 votes.

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Sources

Harvard: Did illegal overseas ballots decide the 2000 US Presidential election?

Harvard: Did illegal overseas ballots decide the 2000 US Presidential election? (Full text)

New York Times: How Bush took Florida, mining the overseas absentee vote (July 15, 2001)

CNN: The military ballots that have divided Democrats for 15 years

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