The nation could see a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount saga that left the next president unknown for 36 days, and with disputed vote counts in multiple states, says a former Federal Elections Commission chairman.
Lee Goodman, who headed the FEC in calendar year 2014 and was on the elections body for a bit over four years, says the record number of mail-in ballots expected in this presidential election cycle ups the chances that lawsuits will be filed in several states.
Twenty years ago, only one state was in dispute. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in favor of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee, over his Democratic rival, Vice President Al Gore. Bush was up by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast when the Supreme Court, in Bush. vs. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court.
Bush’s win in Florida gave him a majority of the votes in the Electoral College and the victory in the presidential election.
This year, Goodman noted, about 75% of U.S. voters will be able to receive a ballot in the mail, the most in the country’s history. As many as 80 million mail ballots are expected to be cast this cycle. That is more than twice as many ballots that were cast by mail in the 2016 election, when President Trump narrowly beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“We are going to witness an unprecedented number of mail ballots in this election. Many election offices will not have experience in processing these unprecedented numbers of mail ballots,” Goodman told the Washington Examiner.
“The deluge use of mail ballots in the election is going to stress our election processes,” he said. “And we are seeing circumstances that will give rise to potential litigation post-election. And it is quite possible that we would see a replay of the Bush v. Gore scenario played out in more than one state.”
The mass mail-in of ballots, spurred in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, brings about a problem related to the standards by which the ballots are processed.
During the Florida recount, ballot counters decided which ones to reject or accept based on whether it was fully punched through. Incompletely punched holes became known in popular culture as “hanging chads” or “pregnant chads.”
During the 2008 recount of the Minnesota Senate race, then-Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was ahead by 725 votes the morning after the election, only to have it shaved down to a 215-vote lead by the time the hand recount started two weeks later.
Ultimately, when the recount ended and the state’s canvassing board reviewed challenged the ballots, the result of the race was reversed. On Jan. 5, 2009, Franken won by 225 votes. Coleman, however, to this day believes he actually won the race.
“In addition to the large numbers of mail ballots to process and short time frame for election officials to prepare, interested parties might litigate the standards applied by state and local election administrators to validate mail ballots as well as the procedures by which defective ballots are rejected,” Goodman said. “Signature and witness standards might be challenged. There might be litigation to require election officials to afford each voter an opportunity to fix ballot imperfections.”
