On March 7, 2000, the Florida State Capitol was the scene of one of the largest political demonstrations in Florida’s history. As many as fifty thousand protesters, led by the ubiquitous Reverend Jesse Jackson, marched down the Apalachee Parkway to the capitol complex, singing spiritual anthems and chanting, No more Bush!

The chant was double-barreled, directed at both the Bush who was running for president, George W., and the one who was running Florida, his brother Jeb. As the march arrived at the capitol, Governor Jeb Bush was inside, delivering an address in which he was unveiling his agenda for the year, including the item that had inspired such massive opposition: his proposal to repeal racial affirmative action programs.

Jeb had given his plan the deceptively unifying name “One Florida.” Its most divisive element called for replacing affirmative action policies at state colleges and universities with a program that would offer automatic admission to the top 20 percent of graduates of all public high schools, regardless of their color. Bush argued that the program would admit just as many or more minority students without using race as a basis. But many Black people in Florida, all too familiar with their state’s long history of officially sanctioned racism, were not buying the governor’s color-blind line. At the protest, some waved signs reading, “Jeb Crow.”

“Maybe when you inherit a name,” Jackson preached to the throng in front of the capitol, “maybe when you inherit legal protections, maybe when you inherit wealth, maybe when you inherit skin color, maybe when you inherit your parents’ friends… Maybe you just don’t understand.”

Jackson was accustomed to dominating the conversation whenever the issue of race arose in America. Born to an unwed teenager in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, he had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and had barged to the front of the civil rights movement after MLK’s assassination, which he witnessed. He was a TV celebrity who had twice run for president in the 1980s, rattling the white liberal establishment and winning votes across racial lines, showing how it might be possible one day for a Black candidate to win it all. He had once been a rhyming rabble-rouser in a daishiki who flirted with Black nationalism, but had long ago made an uneasy peace with the Democratic Party and an alliance of convenience with the centrist President Bill Clinton who had enlisted the reverend as his spiritual advisor—and a spirited defender—during the sex scandal that led to his impeachment. Jackson’s egotism and prolix speaking style made him a favorite target of Republicans. (On the campaign trail in 1988, George H.W. Bush had called him a “Chicago hustler.”) Much of the white liberal intelligentsia regarded Jackson’s brand of racial politics as retrograde and self-defeating. But Jackson hoped to one day be vindicated by history. “The moral arc of the universe is long,” he often said in his presidential campaign speeches, quoting Dr. King, “but it bends toward justice.”

Still, in 2000, Jackson could sermonize all he wanted, but the tide of events was moving against him. The political realignment that had begun with the civil rights movement and the election of Richard Nixon was all but complete. The day that Jackson led the march in Tallahassee was also Super Tuesday, when George W. Bush had a chance to lock up the Republican nomination with primary victories across the south. The future appeared to belong to the conservatives. In Florida, Republicans ruled both houses of the state legislature. Jeb’s election, two years before, had given them complete control.

The One Florida initiative, however, had inspired a fierce backlash among Black voters, who typically turned out in low numbers in Florida. The Bush campaign had reason to fear that it posed a real danger. “Can you imagine,” a Black congresswoman shouted outside the capitol, “what it would be like on November 8 to wake up and open the paper and see that George W. is president of the United States? That is my worst nightmare. We have to go to the polls!” Another civil rights activist exhorted: “Register to vote and get your grandmother and grandfather to vote!”

The Republicans could see this was going to be a problem. Somebody would have to fix it.

Jeb personally attended an affirmative action forum in Miami, where thousands of Black citizens waited in a long line in the rain to file inside an auditorium and voice their opposition to his One Florida plan.

“This is an attempt to return to the dark days of the past,” one female activist shouted at the governor, as he listened impassively. “We have been bought, sold, raped, beaten, executed, and excluded. The word unfair isn’t adequate to explain our plight.”

Jeb was shaken, but his mind was set. “What I concluded was that the things that were being said were not particularly rational,” he said later, reflecting on the meeting. “It was raw emotion.” In his view, his critics were all mixed up—it was racial preferences that were unfair. “It is wrong to discriminate. It is wrong,” he told the Herald. “I’m going to keep at this and the emotions will subside at some point. People will see this for what it is, and when they do, they will embrace it.”

The opposition had no hope of stopping the repeal. Their rallying cry, instead, was “Remember in November.” Outside the Miami forum, local Democrats were registering people to vote as they stood in line. Al Gore was campaigning in Black communities all over the state. “I am for affirmative action because it’s still needed,” he said at a town hall in Tampa, held as McCain and Bush were battling in South Carolina. “I’m not like these Republican candidates who say they’re scared to say anything about the Confederate flag.” Jesse Jackson would return to lead a voter registration bus tour through ten cities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Jacksonville. Gore’s path to victory, if there were to be one, followed the same route.

Of course, registering people to vote was one thing. Actually voting could be quite another. 

The “Remember in November” voter registration drive was a resounding success. Nearly 60,000 new Black voters were added to the rolls in Florida after the protests over the One Florida plan. And on Election Day, November 7, people of color turned out in Florida on a scale that neither party had anticipated.

Early that evening, around the time that everyone in New York and Washington was starting to think Gore would be the next president, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Janice Kelly was desperately trying to cast her ballot in Jacksonville. There were long lines everywhere. Kelly couldn’t find her polling place. Finally, she pulled up to the right site, a church, with a few minutes to spare. Polls closed at 7 p.m. At the door, she found a line of grumpy people who were being blocked by a gray-haired poll worker. “Polls are closed,” said the woman at the church door. “It’s seven o’clock.”

A woman waiting in the line looked at her watch and showed it to Kelly. It said 6:55.

Kelly thought she knew what was going on. She looked at the people in line. They were Black, like her. She looked at the woman guarding the door. She was white, as were the rest of the poll workers, who had been hired by surrounding Duval County, which was Republican-controlled. She looked inside the polling place. There were white folks inside, and they were still voting. Kelly was outraged.

“I wasn’t allowed to vote, and that’s it, bottom line,” she later testified in a civil rights lawsuit. “I didn’t see white people going out the door. All the Blacks were being turned around.”

Maybe it was all in her head. Maybe she was just an unlucky victim of America’s buggy electoral system, which always failed some voters. And maybe it was just one of those things that in Duval County, more than 20 percent of the votes in majority-Black precincts ended up being invalidated that day because of technical errors; and maybe it was a coincidence that similar things were happening in Black neighborhoods all across Florida. And maybe it was just a mistake that, in Jacksonville, a Democratic congress- woman had to wait more than two hours to vote that morning because of a bureaucratic glitch; and maybe it was yet another mix-up that caused a combat veteran named Willie Steen to be told, when he showed up at his Tampa-area polling place, that he could not vote because he had been purged from the registration rolls as a felon, even though he had never been arrested and had been deployed overseas at the time of his alleged conviction.

Maybe it was just an unavoidable tragedy that one in seven ballots cast by Black citizens of Florida on Election Day in 2000 would end up being discarded.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t entirely an accident.

On the morning of November 8, though, neither party was thinking about history or compromise. Bush and Gore were separated by 1,784 votes, out of almost 6 million cast in Florida. Two days later, a statewide machine recount would bring the difference in votes down to 327, a lead of .005 percent—the equivalent of one-fifth of an inch on a football field; one and a half verses in the whole King James Bible; twenty- six minutes in a calendar year, not enough time to finish a broadcast episode of Friends.

The Democrats had a compelling slogan: “Count every vote.” But those were just words. Legally, the dispute was more complicated. There was no mechanism to call for a full statewide recount. Everything had to start at the county level. 

“Ask Black people,” one top adviser told Gore at a crucial strategy session at the vice president’s residence a few days after the election. “They get screwed every day.”

So, the Democrats decided to narrow their focus, concentrating on ballots that had not registered a valid vote on Election Day. There were an astounding 175,000 of these statewide, and because of the way they were geographically distributed, it seemed likely they would favor Gore. But the vast majority of these uncounted ballots were “overvotes,” on which people had selected two or more candidates for president. How could the lawyers prove that these voters really meant to choose Gore? The Gore team decided to focus on a smaller subset of ballots, the “undervotes”—ones that did not record any presidential choice. There were around 64,000 of these in total. A large percentage were in three counties where Gore won a majority: Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward, which was home to Fort Lauderdale.

The nightmare scenario for the Bush team was that some county would turn up enough Gore votes to put him in the lead, even for a moment, inverting the presumption of victory. Both sides agreed that the most likely place for that to happen would be Palm Beach, where Gore had won 62 percent of the vote and where there were some 11,000 undervotes. The Republicans adopted a strategy they called “mudballing.” They objected to everything, argued about everything, trying to delay the process until Gore ran out of time.

Then Jesse Jackson came to town.

He rolled up to the Palm Beach County government center in a chartered bus, and for a moment, the protesters and counter-protesters in front of the building ceased their shouting matches, and county workers came to their windows to listen. Jackson led a group into the building’s courtyard. “In Selma, it was about the right to vote,” he preached. “Today, it’s about making votes count.”

An analysis by the Palm Beach Post found that in the county’s majority-Black precincts, voters were 139 percent more likely than average to see their ballots invalidated. In the poor Black towns near Lake Okeechobee, nearly a quarter of all ballots were tossed out. There was a technical explanation for the disparity. Palm Beach County used two different brands of voting machines, and Black precincts often ended up with the cheaper model. But Jackson mused about a conspiracy. “Something systematic was at work here,” he said. “It was large and systematic.”

Jackson spent the next few weeks shuttling all over South Florida, holding meetings at Black churches and seeking to make common cause with Jewish retirees who were complaining that they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, whose most notable previous contribution to the 2000 campaign had been writing a book that sought to rehabilitate the isolationists of the “America First” movement of the 1930s. (Buchanan’s unsuccessful opponent for the Reform Party nomination, Donald Trump, had attacked him as a “Hitler lover” after the book came out.) “You are in the middle of a political storm that could define our democracy for years to come,” Jackson told a group of senior citizens at a gated community called Century Village.

Jackson announced that he would be staging a protest march through West Palm Beach. “There is a cloud over Florida,” he said. “To surrender without a count would be unpatriotic. It would be treasonous.” Bush supporters vowed to shut the protest down. The police closed off streets, and schools and businesses shuttered for the day. Jackson, wearing a dark silk shirt, led the marchers north along a palmy waterfront boulevard that looked across an inlet to the marinas and mansions of Palm Beach Island. Police and news helicopters hovered overhead. At the county government center, in front of the stage where Jackson was to speak, an unruly group of counterprotesters was waiting. One heckler, a former grand wizard of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, held a sign reading, “I Support Sec. Harris and Florida Law.”

Go home, Jesse! the Bush supporters shouted.

The chants drowned out the speakers at the rally. The police started to fear a riot. After about ten minutes, officers pulled Jack- son from the stage and bundled him into his limousine.

For the Bush recount team, it would go down as a famous triumph. “We ran Jesse Jackson off!” a staffer would reminisce decades later. “We stopped him from speaking and ran him to his car!”

In Washington, Al Gore was not happy with the whole distasteful spectacle. He was holed up in his residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, which his aides took to calling “the bunker.” Gore did not want street protests. He was determined to stick to a strategy that was orderly, logical, systems-oriented.

“Anger is not… what would be the point of feeling that?” Gore told a 60 Minutes interviewer who asked about his feelings in the midst of the recount. “I’m concentrating.”

Gore did not want to be perceived as playing the “race card,” which at the time was considered—at least by the people who ran Washington and edited newspapers—the most divisive thing a Democrat could do. In mid-November, Gore gave an interview to the popular Black radio host Tom Joyner. “There are a lot of people—I’m serious—who are starting to look at this and see this election about to be stolen,” Joyner said.

“I would discourage the use of that word,” Gore replied. “However it comes out, we’re going to come [together] behind the winner.”

Gore was especially reluctant to associate himself with Jackson, a rhetorical bomb-thrower and publicity hound whom many white liberals regarded with snide condescension. He tried to pass word to Jackson, through his campaign manager, that he wanted him to get out of Florida. 

There were some on the Democratic side—most prominently, Bill Clinton—who thought that Gore was making a critical mistake by downplaying allegations of disenfranchisement. The Democrats were not even trying to contest the results in Duval County, which included Jacksonville and its suburbs, where 27,000 ballots had been invalidated, nearly as many as in Miami and Palm Beach. Once again, there was a technical reason: another design flaw. The ballot in Duval had the candidates on two consecutive pages, with Bush and Gore on the first page and minor candidates on the second, causing many people to mistakenly vote twice. Around 9,000 of these overvotes, a third of all the county’s spoiled ballots, occurred in just four majority-Black districts.

Thousands of Jewish retirees voting for an accused Nazi apologist? That was a crazy plot twist. Thousands of Black citizens losing their votes? That was just Election Day.

Later on, one choice more than any other ate at the conscience of some of Gore’s advisers: the strategic decision to downplay claims of racial suppression. A federal civil rights commission held investigative hearings in 2001. It issued a report finding a “strong basis for concluding” that voting rights violations had occurred in Florida, but determining that there was no proof that “the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters.” The problem was systemic, the commission decided, not a product of conscious racism. The Republicans on the commission dissented from its report, placing the blame on voters. “We know that some Americans today, regrettably, find it extremely difficult to understand even the simplest written instructions,” the Republicans wrote. “And, unfortunately, this group is disproportionately black.”

The federal commission’s report did not put an end to the suspicion that Florida’s failures were the product of deliberate design. The recount would instead become a fixation of conspiracy theorists, who spun real evidence of dysfunction and injustice in Florida into a nefarious heist plot. “What would we say…” a much-forwarded mass email asked, if this happened in another country, and the guy was the son of a president, and that president previously was in charge of the intelligence service, and his other son governed the state where the disputed vote happened, and so forth. Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, delved into Florida conspiracy theories in the opening scenes of Fahrenheit 9/11, the highest-grossing documentary of all time. A muckraking leftist journalist would write a book on the 2000 election, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, attacking the “docile sheep” of the American media and the “shepherds of the New World Order” who employed them for ignoring the “theft of the presidential race.” (A copy of the book would be found a decade later in Osama bin Laden’s library at his compound in Abbottabad.)

In the coming years, many Republican-controlled southern states conducted registration purges and enacted laws that effectively curtailed Democratic representation and participation. “You can trace it all back to Florida,” says John Lantigua, a journalist who investigated the 2000 election for The Nation. But the mainstream press showed diminishing interest in the story after the Supreme Court issued its decision. Gore gave a graceful concession speech, affirming his belief in the democratic process and the rule of law. Bush was now president. It was time to leave Florida behind. 

One very loud voice, however, continued to call for resistance. The day after Bush v. Gore was decided, Jesse Jackson led a small march through the streets of Tallahassee and called for “disciplined, massive, nonviolent demonstrations around our nation.” Even after Gore conceded, Jackson wanted ​​to keep fighting. “There is something afoot in Florida that does not pass the smell test,” the reverend said after filing a lawsuit over racial disparities in the rates that votes were thrown out in Jacksonville.

“None of this was an accident,” Jackson told a reporter from the Palm Beach Post one day in late 2000 as he rode around Florida in the backseat of a limousine, working several cell phones.

The Post had recently published a series of stories about the state’s purge of felons from its voter rolls. No one seemed to know exactly how many registered voters had been removed, and it was impossible to say whether those people would have voted for Gore. But one thing was clear: a disproportionate number of them were Black. To Jackson, it was part of a generations-long pattern. “It is a loss of our franchise,” he told the reporter. “You had intimidation of African Americans at or near the polls by the police, thousands of ballots left uncounted, obsolete voting machines placed in targeted precincts. Where was equal protection? And for the entire month since the election, Jeb Bush took a hike. He did not recuse himself. He reclused himself.”

The Post reporter was skeptical. Was Jackson really trying to say that there was a conspiracy, that Republicans had thought this all out, devising a plan to distribute faulty voting machines in Democratic precincts, designing ballots that were deliberately confusing, somehow knowing far ahead of time that a few thousand miscast votes would change the result in Florida?

“We may never know what was said at some meeting, but I believe there was a meeting, or meetings took place,” Jackson replied. “This many votes, this quantity, in numbers and geography, is not accidental. It is part of a scheme to suppress votes. It is not a gut feeling. We will have the data.” The NAACP was preparing to file a class action lawsuit. On Inauguration Day, Jackson was going to appear at a rally in Tallahassee to publicize his allegations of voter suppression.

Even if nothing could stop George W. Bush from becoming president, Jackson vowed to unearth the real story of his election. “History,” he said, “will answer the questions.”

The week of the inauguration, the Drudge Report started to drop hints that Jackson was hiding his own secret. Soon, the latest issue of the National Enquirer hit the supermarket checkout aisles. “JESSE JACKSON’S LOVE CHILD,” read its front page, trumpeting its “world exclusive.” The tabloid reported that, even as Jackson guided Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis, he had been conducting his own affair with an academic who had written a biography of him. Jackson had given her a job and paternity payments and had even taken her to visit Clinton in the Oval Office at the time she was pregnant. On January 17, Jackson released a statement to the press, acknowledging that the story was true and announcing that he was retiring from public life.

His enemies, in both parties, were overjoyed. “Jesse Jackson’s long reign of terror in the Democratic Party may be finally over,” gloated Mary McGrory, the voice of the liberal establishment, in her Sunday column in the Washington Post. Jackson skipped the inauguration rally, staying secluded in his home in Chicago. He soon announced a comeback, but he would never again occupy the same place in the political firmament.

From THE YEAR THAT BROKE AMERICA: An Immigration Crisis, a Terrorist Conspiracy, the Summer of Survivor, a Ridiculous Fake Billionaire, a Fight for Florida by Andrew Rice. Copyright ©2022 by Andrew Rice. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article included a quote that was incorrectly attributed to Gore.

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