Is Jack Smith’s Filing “Shocking”? No, It’s Just What Republicans Do.

The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote that year by a half-million, and that five Republicans on the Supreme Court—along with a crime committed by Bush’s brother—denied him the presidency.

Surpassing anything Trump could have pulled off, Florida’s then-governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush had his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the 2000 election, but then—when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won—she invented a brand-new category of ballots for the 2000 election that she wouldn’t have to count: so-called “spoiled ballots.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers it was part of finally recounted all the ballots: “While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.