Chasing Catastrophe by Rick Leventhal

Author:Rick Leventhal [Leventhal, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637584958
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2022-11-16T13:07:33+00:00

If George W. Bush could have chosen any state in America to decide whether he’d be the nation’s forty-third President, it most likely would have been Florida, where his brother Jeb was governor at the time, and the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, was a big Republican booster and co-chair of Florida’s Bush for President election committee.

Jeb gave George a friendly foothold, and Harris would play a key role in some of the decisions that helped to shape the outcome of the recounts and court battles.

The morning after election night, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes, a margin of victory so close it triggered an automatic machine recount, which meant feeding every single paper ballot into the same machines that had read and spit them out the first time. The results later that week actually made the contest far tighter, trimming Bush’s lead to just 327 votes. This prompted a call by Gore’s camp for another recount, this time by hand, creating a tidal wave of challenges and sparking dozens of lawsuits, forty-seven of them before it was all over.

I was in Nashville on the night of the election to cover Gore’s victory (or concession) speech, and it turned into an extremely late night because of the mess in Florida. I was sent to Tallahassee the next day to help cover the ensuing shitshow, and I’d wind up staying for more than a month, reporting on one of the most challenging stories editorial-wise I’d ever been assigned.

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