[Page 2: Dysfunctional Performance: The U.S. Voting Machine Debacle and the Machinery of Democracy]

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"Florida"

November, 8, 2000, U.S.A.: election day. With the majority of electoral votes already decided, whichever candidate won the state of Florida and its 25 electoral votes—whether it was standing Vice President Al Gore or Governor of Texas, George W. Bush—would win the U.S. presidency. At 8 p.m. the television networks called Florida, and the election, for Al Gore. But the Bush camp refused to concede—Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother of George W.) insisted that despite numbers suggesting otherwise, his state had in fact been won by the Republicans. An hour later the networks retracted their earlier statement and soon thereafter called the election again, this time for George W. Bush. By 4 a.m. everyone conceded that the race was too close to call.

The legal and cultural battles that ensued over who actually won Florida (and thus the presidency) have been called variously "The Florida Moment," "The Florida Debacle," "The Floridization" of politics and, simply, "Florida". No fewer than thirty lawsuits were filed in State and Federal court over whether and how Florida would conduct a recount of the historically close election. These lawsuits culminated in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, in which what is considered a conservative (and thus traditionally pro-states'-rights) 5-4 majority took an uncharacteristically Federalist position, taking away Florida's right to call its own election in what one dissenting opinion called "the interest of finality"(5)—not democracy. It was only the second time in U.S. history that a president was chosen by the intervention of the Supreme Court and the fourth time in U.S. history that a candidate was elected president with the electoral college majority but not the popular vote. According to the vote count ratified by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush won Florida (and the presidency) by a majority of 537 votes out of nearly 3 million cast statewide, while Gore won the overall popular vote by over half a million nationwide (6).