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by fsck--off 3732 days ago
Why is the 2000 election a disingenuous example? Bush lost the overall popular vote and it is almost certain that a majority of people tried to vote for Gore in Florida.
2 comments

We also don't elect presidents based on who people "tried to vote for." Bush won the first count, and he won the automated recount. It should never have progressed further than that. 7 of 9 justices agreed that the ad-hoc recount that applied different standards to different counties violated the equal protection clause.

Moreover, we have no way of knowing whether Bush or Gore "won" Florida. Voting is a mechanism for measuring something. Like any method of measurement, it has a margin of error. The margin between Bush and Gore was so close that it was almost certainly smaller than the error in the voting mechanism itself. The scientifically right answer would have been to exclude Florida (and, in fact, several other states decided by very small margins) from the sampling process.

The butterfly ballot funneled thousands of votes to Buchanan. Recounting miscast votes would not have helped.
An electoral college winner losing the overall popular vote has happened much more than once. Florida was more or less a coin flip that landed on its edge and stayed that way.
It's happened four times, of which the first went to the House to decide, and the 1876 and 1888 were in a time of widespread corruption, but nonetheless it's still very rare, especially in the modern day, and I wouldn't expect it to happen again in our lifetimes.