The 2000 U.S. presidential election was a harbinger of things to come.
It featured a voting machine glitch, a bogus voter purge, narrative warfare, Karl Rove, and a manufactured “riot” orchestrated by Roger Stone.
By Jennifer Cohn
December 23, 2021
The 2000 presidential election was a “watershed moment” for U.S. elections and “harbinger of things to come,” as Jonathan Simon, a seasoned election-security advocate and author, remarked when I interviewed him last year. The election, he explained, was marred by “counting issues with [voting machine] memory cards,” a thwarted manual recount, and “ massive purging of voters who were absolutely entitled to vote.” All of these issues favored the GOP, but unscrupulous Republican “fixers,” including Roger Stone, deflected by falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. In the years since, these same fixers have emerged again and again to deceive voters with faulty narratives that have helped empower right wing extremists, including the Religious Right.
During the 2000 general election, then Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat and environmentalist, ran against former Texas Governor George W. Bush, an oilman and self-proclaimed evangelical Christian. Bush had won the Republican presidential nomination after an unusually brutal primary against Arizona Senator John…
