We received a count of approximately 400 news vehicles, that were parked In the area.

CNN had four crews that, to my knowledge, we had four crews that stayed there the whole time.

It was just electric.

We would have a bum rush of 100 reporters.

Are the chads clearly punched out, like what are chads?

That was the beginning of the end for the open government.

We were watching history.

It was, interesting times.

Those comments are from both locals and outside media who lived and worked in close proximity to the 2000 election recount.

Their recollections are colored by their views of the events and the jobs they were performing during those 36 days in Tallahassee.

That election put Tallahassee on the world stage and the area around the Capitol.

The Florida Department of State and the Florida Supreme Court would become ground zero for world news media for almost six weeks.

Those 36 days in Tallahassee changed America, and they are our local history.

The presidential candidates were George W Bush versus Al Gore.

Across Florida, turnout was heavy.

David Folsom was a sergeant in the Tallahassee Police Department supervising the traffic unit.

On the night of the election.

We knew that the election results were coming in, and we expected it late.

We usually work till 11 or 12:00.

And at first, we were getting word that Florida was delayed.

To my knowledge, we weren't actually following the election on television, per se, because we were working.

Rick Flagg was a syndicated news reporter for radio stations across all of Florida.

There had been a lot of election stories.

You know, it's it's inevitable, especially when it's that close.

And we were we were doing the election night returns at my local station because, you know, that's what I did.

And as the results came in and as nothing happened, it's like finally we realized we weren't going to be able to call it.

We weren't going to be able to say anything.

And just get out of the studio, get down to the Capitol and find out what's going on.

Bob Brooks was the Florida based regional manager for Conus, a nationwide satellite TV newsgathering organization.

I had been in Miami covering a football game in Miami, but knew I had to be in Nashville on Tuesday for...at Gore's headquarters for the election night.

I was figuring it'd be one and done.

Hit and run.

Go home.

I was wrong.

By 1 or 2, we saw that this was going to be a really tight race.

Florida had no early voting at the time.

When the sun came up on November 8th.

George W Bush was leading the count, but the outcome was so close, an automatic machine recount was mandated by Florida law.

Ian Sancho was the Leon County Supervisor of Elections and the Florida Supreme Court appointed technical expert for Judge Terry Lewis.

During the court ordered recount of the Palm Beach and Miami-Dade ballots.

We have to put this into context.

Florida did not have good election laws.

Florida did no training of supervisor of elections on a on a regular basis.

And so the combination of bad laws, poor training of election officials, no training of the canvassing board.

And you've got to remember that votes are actually officially tabulated in a county by a three member board called the Canvassing Board.

Each county has a canvasing board.

The canvasing board is chaired by a county judge.

There's a county commissioner and the supervisor of elections.

The county judges and the county commissioners had not a clue how to count votes, but yet they had a majority of the three member board.

That led to a host of problems across the state.

Donald Gaspard was a satellite truck operator contracted to CNN for their election recount coverage.

I was actually in Austin, Texas, at the Capitol, and I was working for Nippon News.

So the Japanese news network, all news, and I was working for those guys.

Elections over.

Everything's finished.

We wrap it up, clean it up.

I'm in the truck and I'm heading back to where I live, which is here in Lafayette, Louisiana.

And I get a call from Mike Stone.

He says, we'll swap bags and you come in this way.

Okay.

What's happening?

And he tells me about the recount.

The first visual cue to residents that something big was going on was the swift proliferation of satellite trucks stationed downtown around the Capitol complex.

We started having arrival of some press trucks, and we probably only had a handful, maybe three, four, that were showing up and setting up and doing stories.

Pretty soon, trucks started coming in from other places.

They were parking them down the down one lane of Duval.

And probably over to my memory over the next 2 or 3 days after that.

All of a sudden, the population was exploding of news and journalists.

And then all of a sudden it was two lanes of Duval.

And then they were, they went up Madison to Adams and then Adams in toward the Capitol building.

Andy Reise owned a popular restaurant adjacent to the Capitol on Adams Street called Andrew's Capitol Grill.

I would get into work and I would talk to my crew right away, the guys in the kitchen, and I say, oh, man, there's satellite trucks all around the Supreme Court.

I'm seeing it on TV.

I couldn't find a parking space this morning.

We're going to get busy.

We were originally going to do some live shots from the courthouse across the street from the Capitol, not the Supreme Court, but on the opposite side, the the eastern side of the Capitol.

And, we did a couple of things there.

And then I got parked on the corner of Duval Street there between the county courthouse, which was, what, a block, block and a half away.

And the Supreme Court, which was about a block, block and a half away.

And the entire world started to focus on Tallahassee, Florida.

Well guess what?

We were the most popular place to eat and drink.

So our first concern was security for the building.

We were talking with the, staff at the secretary of state's office.

First one, they wanted to lock the building down, and they had a lot of work going on and keeping people from going in the lobby.

Second was the traffic in the area around the building.

But it didn't take a day or two to realize, oh my God, this is crazy.

And it wasn't just a day or two.

It kept going.

Florida had a mishmash of voting technologies across its 67 counties.

Some of it more modern and accurate than others.

The first problem that emerged was in Palm Beach County, when individuals started to realize that they may have voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore on something called the butterfly ballot.

And that led to an immediate lawsuit in Palm Beach County, which, quite frankly, nothing could be done because the votes had already been counted.

And once you drop a marked ballot into the ballot box, you can't really reach in and pull it out.

But that was the initial concern was, in fact, what was going on in Palm Beach County.

That led to a whole host of other suits.

Then that started generating out of other counties Seminole County, Saint Johns County.

Absentee ballot issues started popping up.

The machine recount saw al Gore tighten the gap.

Discrepancies were starting to surface.

Both the Bush and Gore campaigns lawyered up.

And so there was a whole host of of different local legal issues.

And sadly, the main question was never really addressed.

Are we going to count all of the legal votes in Florida that got lost in this milieu of legal battles and political battles that immediately erupted?

Some Florida counties had progressed to hand recounts.

Meanwhile, campaign strategies were taking shape for Bush.

Stop all counting.

Run out the clock for Gore.

Keep counting and recounting.

More than two decades later, a fact that is often overlooked is that not all of the ballots had even been counted once at this point.

There were still thousands of outstanding overseas absentee ballots that hadn't even arrived yet.

Across the country, Americans were seeing images of election officials peering up at computer punch cards and hearing about chads hanging Chad, dimpled Chad.

...Chad, Chad, Chad.

Just a brief examination into the history of punch card voting clearly indicated the shortcomings.

Not only in the state of Florida, but all around the nation with lawsuits being filed by minorities, by elderly individuals on the same kinds of complaints that, unfortunately, we have heard in this election.

But less talked about was improper recount protocols in more than half of Florida's 67 counties.

Things like over votes under votes and chads were completely foreign terms to Americans, American voters.

And sadly, the American media didn't really try to clarify that.

They focused on the controversy.

This heavyweight fight between Bush on one side and Gore on the other.

This political fight.

Excuse me?

What was what was ignored was what was the law.

And is Florida going to be allowed to count all the legal votes cast by legal Floridians.

As election irregularities showed up?

The Gore campaign requested more manual recounts.

And the Bush campaign would sue to stop the recounts.

This became a recurring theme throughout the recount.

The law read back then that you pick a smaller jurisdiction you recount there, and if there is an error in that, then you can order a recount in the entire county.

There was no law under chapter 102 that required any kind of a state recount at all.

So again, Gore tries to follow the law and gets accused again through Fox News and the Republicans of cherry picking.

You're cherry picking.

Well, excuse me, that's Florida law.

But what the law was, was not discussed.

The political ramifications of what the law instead became the big debate.

Once the courts were involved, every decision would be met with some kind of appeal.

These legal tactics consumed precious time leading up to state and federal election law deadlines.

The recount lurched on.

They were just making statements.

They were not really going into the details behind the statements, and they were just trying to placate us.

And what advance, whatever the mood of the day was, whatever the message of the day was, and it got to be real annoying.

When these out of town lawyers were speaking for state lawmakers and were speaking for state officials.

On November 18th, the Tallahassee Democrat printed an illustration of the key places in the capital city where recount news was being made.

There was a Supreme Court, there was 1 or 2 locations inside the capital.

A lot happened out here on the Senate portico.

There were cables everywhere.

They set aside the Senate office building as an area where they would do press conferences and stuff.

And they filled it with flags.

It's like you would go in there and look like there are four flags.

You go in the next day and there are five flags.

You go in the next day.

There are 20 flags.

It was all theatrics.

It was all about theatrics.

And they would have their lawyers up there spouting whatever to the point of the day was.

And that was it.

That's all you could get.

You couldn't take someone aside later and say, hey, what's really going on?

Because the lid had been closed.

The Capitol building and the Supreme Court building and Duval Street and everything there was, we were in our own little bubble.

You know, the world was contained within this four block bubble where we were at.

Anything that happened outside of that, if we didn't see it coming in on a camera for our return, you know, we didn't know what was going on.

November 20th, the Florida Supreme Court heard arguments pertaining to manual ballot recounts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

There was no question in the board's mind that, given the figures that they had seen, that the full manual recount was the proper decision for them.

They made that decision.

And then of course, it the full manual recount was stopped when the attorney, when the Secretary of state said that there was no basis for it.

But the appellants are asking this court to do and in fact, what the court must do in order to arrive at the conclusion that they seek is read a statute that says that returns must be filed by a date and time certain, as though it said may be filed to read a statute that says that the Secretary of State may accept late filed returns as though it says must accept late filed returns.

To disregard a statute that says that the Secretary of State's opinion, as to election matters is binding upon all those officers and agents within the election system.

The following day, they unanimously ruled that those manual recounts should continue and should be included in the certification.

The court also set 5 p.m.

on November 26th as the earliest possible target for state certification.

The Bush team immediately appealed to the U.S.

Supreme Court, saying the Florida Supreme Court had rewritten election law after the vote.

This would later prove to be a pivotal moment in the recount.

We weren't schooled in, in, in legislative matters or legal matters or so.

We were just kind of like holding on, waiting for somebody to tell us where where the next event was going to happen.

Elected in 1998, Katherine Harris was Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 election.

She also served as George W Bush's honorary campaign co-chair in Florida.

Previous secretaries of state have always essentially allowed the operation of the Division of Elections to be more or less independent of the political machinery that the rest of the Secretary of State's office participated in.

That has been changing over the past few years, and that's not a good sign.

One of the supervisor of elections now is not really a partner of the Secretary of State Division of Elections office, and in many cases, it's turned into an adversarial role.

Sunday, November 26th, the state canvasing board declared George W Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes.

It was, and it remains my opinion that the appropriate deadlines for filing certified returns and this election are those mandated by the legislature, and it remains my opinion that the proper returns in this election are the returns that were certified by those deadlines.

The the Florida Supreme Court, however, disagrees.

The court created a new schedule for filing certifications and conducting election contests rather than implementing the schedule enacted by the legislature.

And that is the schedule that we're following tonight.

Remember who was secretary of state Katherine Harris and Katherine Harris was as partisan a politician as could be.

Prior to certification?

There's one matter I wish to discuss concerning the returns in accordance with the direction of the Supreme Court.

My office accepted amended returns until 5 p.m.

today, and these amendments are reflected in the statewide canvass returns, copies of which will be available.

Palm Beach County has submitted a document that purports to be an amended return, but contains two different compilations of the presidential vote.

One set of numbers is identified as a partial.

One set of numbers is identified as a partial manual recount that fails to comply with the provisions of section 102.166.

The other set of numbers is identified as the as the machine count required by law in this election, and these numbers are identical to those that were certified by the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on November 14th.

These latter numbers on the numbers included in the statewide canvass.

The declaration was immediately challenged in the circuit Court, with Gore's team arguing the thousands of ballots from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties had not been counted.

The outcome of the election was far from over.

On Tuesday, November 28th, after hearing arguments pertaining to Gore's appeal of the state canvassing board declaration, Circuit Court Judge Sauls ordered the 13,000 contested ballots from Palm Beach County be brought to Tallahassee.

The next day, during a hearing, he ordered all ballots, 1.1 million of them from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, be brought to Tallahassee.

They would arrive three days later.

But yeah, it was a it was a caravan and we had to escort it into town and, and, you would think it came out of Fort Knox.

The security on those ballots.

That's when we realized that it's really hit the fan.

You know, when you had a truck drive all the way from what was South Florida up to here with ballots in the back, and it's followed by helicopters doing the live shot like it's an O.J.

Chase or something like that.

That's when you knew something really weird was going on.

On Friday, December 1st, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments questioning actions taken by the Florida Supreme Court related to the recount.

After its November 20th hearing.

It was an historic day for the nation.

The United States Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of George W Bush versus the Palm Beach County canvasing board.

It's hard to say how the U.S.

Supreme Court justices will rule in this case.

Harder still to know exactly when the court will issue an opinion.

But with the presidency hanging in the balance, it's likely the justices won't wait for long to put out a ruling.

In the meantime, a number of challenges continue to move through lower courts in Florida as attorneys.

Florida was about to lose control of its own election.

In Tallahassee, the lawyers, the media and the satellite trucks continued their daily routine of press conferences, live shots and waiting.

On Tuesday, December 5th, Gore lost in his circuit court appeal to continue recounts of Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County ballots.

While other suits move forward.

He immediately appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.

Wednesday December 6th.

the Republican led Florida Legislature called a special session to convene on December 8th.

The purpose would be to vote on a slate of state electors if a resolution had not been reached by December 12th.

We are here today to begin a journey that has not been taken by any state legislature since the late 1800s.

No one should confuse my cautiousness and my deliberate approach in evaluating this issue with timidity.

The commonly perceived mechanism for electing this country's leaders may be about to fail.

In essence, this meant the state legislature would decide who would be awarded Florida's 25 electoral votes.

Partisan.

politics.

was like the 800 pound gorilla in the 2000 election.

It crushed everything in its path.

Also on Friday, December 8th, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount of under votes in all of Florida's 67 counties where it also allowed 383 votes for Gore that had been identified in Dade and Palm Beach counties.

Bush's lead had shrunk to 154 votes.

Additionally, the court ordered that 9000 disputed ballots from Dade County be examined manually for presidential votes.

Hello, I'm Craig Waters, spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court.

The court today has issued its opinion in the case of Albert Gore Jr versus Katherine Harris, George W Bush and others by a vote of 4 to 3.

The majority of the court has reversed the decision of the trial court in part.

It has further ordered that the Circuit Court of the Second Judicial Circuit here in Tallahassee shall immediately begin a manual recount of the approximate of the approximately 9000 Miami-Dade ballots that registered under votes.

In addition, the Circuit Court shall enter orders ensuring the inclusion of the additional 215 legal votes for Vice President Gore in Palm Beach County and the 168 additional legal votes from Miami-Dade County.

In addition, the Circuit Court shall order a manual recount of all under votes in any Florida county where such a recount has not yet occurred, because time is of the essence, the recount shall commence immediately.

In tabulating what constitutes a legal vote, the standard to be used is the one provided by the legislature.

A vote shall be counted where there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter.

The following day, Saturday, December 9th, the U.S.

Supreme Court issued a stay on the State Supreme Court's just ordered continued recount.

They stopped the December 9th recount at around two in the afternoon.

And I would tell you that the local judges that were recounting the ballots in the Leon County Library were shocked, as most legal experts were at that time.

The Supreme Court interfered in a state counting its ballots for the first time in history.

And again, Florida is the only state in history ever not to complete an actual election recount in a presidential election.

And we remain such today.

So the Supreme Court said there's an equal protection argument, and they enjoined the state at that point, they froze everything.

So there was no recount of the Miami-Dade ballots at all, and not a complete recount of Palm Beach ballots, either.

They were never, never counted.

On Monday, December 11th, arguments were given in Washington, and on December 12th, the US Supreme Court came back in favor of George W Bush Al Gore conceeded the election the following day.

after 36 days in Tallahassee.

The election had been decided and the world's gaze turned away.

Later on, though, we found out that there was a even a larger error, and that was... that 36 of the 67 counties did not know and follow proper Florida law on the issue of an over vote.

I'm glad we've never had a repeat.

But at the same time, I don't think we'd even get to that stage nowadays.

It's like it would be called.

Can you imagine if there was an election that was only 500 votes in today's environment?

Oh my God.

The parade of people and, you know, and and, it was fun.

It was an urban feeling that downtown Tallahassee rarely gets.

The city wasn't ready.

The capitol wasn't ready.

I mean, nobody.

I mean, you you do what you have to do in the moment.

But no, nobody was ready.

You know, I wasn't ready.

We all got along.

I mean, we was there.

We had to do a job.

Personally, I learned a lot.

But I think, overall, we were able to assist, the journalists and the newspapers and the media to get the stories they needed.

I think we were successful at that.

We need certainty.

We need certainty in elections.

We need accuracy in elections.

And that exists.

If we can keep some of the partisan rhetoric out and let election professional election administrators do their job the way they trained and to follow the law.

That's the thing.

That is the number one thing that I want to reiterate.

We must follow the law.

The rule of law is all we have to keep this society on track.

When we depart from the rule of law, then we are really off the track.

It's an American democracy.