Something I recently posted to Slashdot. It's old news but I get tired of the misinformation around this.
They even had a non-partisan group do a recount after the fact, and the paper trail showed that Bush in fact did win Florida.
No.
As the Washington Post admitted (though only deep into an article whose headline and lead tells how recounts would have favored Bush):
Under several scenarios examined by the consortium, and using a standard in which two of the three reviewers agreed on the markings on each ballot, Gore emerged with more votes than Bush.
The overvotes that could have provided the margin for Gore were on ballots where voters tried to be extra-clear in their choice and ended up nullifying the vote. They filled in the oval next to a candidate and then filled in the oval for "write-in" and wrote the same candidate's name again.
...
The narrowest margin, according to the study, came under a scenario in which at least one corner of a chad was detached from punch-card ballots -- the prevailing standard across the state of Florida at the time -- or any mark on the optical scan ballots showing clear voter intent. In that case, the study showed Gore with 60 votes more than Bush.
Gore's margin grows under three other scenarios. Under the least-restrictive standard for interpreting voter intent, which counted all dimpled chads and any discernible optical mark (which in the case of optical ballots Florida's new election law now requires to be counted as votes), Gore had 107 more votes.
Gore's margin rose to 115 votes in the study under a tighter standard, calling for chads to be fully punched and a more restrictive interpretation of what constitutes a valid mark on optical scan ballots.
But this is one case where disagreements among the reviewers affected the outcome. Gore won under this scenario when two of the reviewers agree on the markings. Under a standard in which all three were required to agree, Bush won by 219 votes.
Gore's largest margin in a statewide recount involving all ballots comes under a scenario that sought to recreate the standards established by each of the counties in their recounts. In that case, Gore emerged with 171 more votes than Bush.
That's not even taking into account the inclusion of illegitimate absentee ballots that favored Bush, or the illegal disenfranchisement of likely Gore voters, or the poorly-designed and illegal "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach.
It also appears that, emboldened by their success in Florida in 2000, the Bush camp went on to conduct massive vote fraud in Ohio in 2004, quite possibly enough to steal the election there.
uh oh, forgot to put on the flame retardant overcoat before I said that
Not meant as a flame. The corporate mainstream media did in fact report as if the recount favored Bush, by focusing on what recounts were demanded under Gore's strategy rather than the question of what ballots were actually cast.
But it is clear that in Florida in 2000, more voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore; despite intimidation and illegal purges of the voter rolls, more voters got to the voting booth intending to vote for Gore; and despite bad balloting technology and practices (which disproportionately affected poor neighborhoods, making a mockery of "equal protection"), more voters voted for Gore than voted for Bush.
But the GOP played better politics than the spineless, gonad-less, soulless thing that is all that remains of the Democratic Party. And so came the point the historians will mark as the end of the "American Century": the subversion of democratic rule and the installation of the worst American "president" to date, who tore through civil liberties and led the nation into a war of choice that drained both its treasury and its store of respect from the other nations of the world.