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Michael T. Moreno Poly Sci Final Exam # 6 Aug. 1 2003 The 2000 Presidential Election has been nothing short of a fiasco on many levels. Historical in the sense that this has never happened in the United States before, but a fiasco, nonetheless. The popular vote showed Gore as winning the election, however, the popular vote did not determine the next tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That was the job of the Electoral College. The winner of Florida’s electoral votes, and apparently of the election was Bush. Bush had won Florida’s 25 electoral votes, however, reports of voting irregularities, problems with the “butterfly ballot” and voters allegedly being turned away from the polls, raised concerns as to who the actual winner of the crucial Florida electoral votes was. The popular vote was so close that it required a recount, effectively taking the electoral votes, the election and the Presidency away from Bush for a short time. The 2000 Presidential Election has done nothing, but raise serious questions about our election process. Lack of standardization in the voting process, methods of vote tabulation and the media’s role in determining the outcome of an election have all come under scrutiny. The question raised most often, however, seems to be about the Electoral College, and it’s validity as part of the election process in the 21st Century. In the short term, however, the entire political system is entering a kind of recovery period after undergoing an extraordinary series of shocks and stresses. As the conflict between the two candidates and their legions of surrogates careened from one battlefront to another, it engulfed virtually every component of that system, first in Florida and then on the national level. The institution that arguably suffered the most tarnish was the judiciary. Called upon to referee a raw contest for political power according to laws that were often ambiguous or flatly contradictory, the courts struggled, stumbled, overruled each other - and ultimately issued divided judgments that many perceived as political acts cloaked in legal attire. The court with the biggest credibility problem is the nation's highest, the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally settled the conflict with a late-night ruling halting further recounts in Florida and effectively freezing Bush's narrow lead in perpetuity. The bitter division on the court, with five conservative justices combining to stop the recounts and four liberal justices issuing caustic dissents, provoked fury from Gore supporters and dismay among less partisan observers. Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at Washington's American Enterprise Institute, said the roles played by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia to galvanize the majority invited comparisons with a long-dead predecessor, Joseph Bradley.
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