Why was there voting controversy in the 2000 Presidental election?

Why was there voting controversy in the 2000 Presidental election?

Thea Brodkin (Voter Service Chair) gives expert video advice on: What should I look for when filling out a ballot?; What should I look for when using a touch-screen voting machine?; How can I ensure that my provisional ballot is counted? and more...

The biggest nightmare an election official could have is a close election. They go to bed before an election, they pray that there is no close elections, because then every vote is looked at, individually, to see if it was counted correctly. And when the Presidential election in 2000 was so close, and certain counties in Florida looked like they were having problems: people said they were voting for one candidate, but the machine was marking another candidate. Because the way the ballot was designed, people were saying that their names were not on the registrars because they had purged the lists and not notified them that they weren't registered voters anymore, there were problems in Florida. And I'm not just saying that's Florida, that could be anywhere, but because of the closeness of the election, all that was looked at under a microscope. And you realize that there's a lot of human error in elections. As long as elections are run by humans there will always be some small margin of error. What amazes me is how small that is in the United States, that people really care how secure ballots are, and there's a lot of thought going into how secure our ballots are. Of course the different parties had different ideas of what should go on after the election. The Democrats obviously wanted to continue the investigation in looking at ballots, the Republican Party wanted to close it. They went to the court because they didn't know, and the state legislature of Florida got involved in making decisions for their election officials. "You have to hand count them," "You can't hand count them," different people were making different decisions county by county, whether they were going to recount, whether they were going to look at each ballot individually, whether they were allowed to remove the chads behind the holes, and stuff like that, all those became big issues. And it went to the Supreme Court to make the final decision to stop the process of arguing between the parties.