It was a controversy during the 2000 presidential election where ballots in Florida with hanging chads weren’t counted.

A hanging chad refers to a hole that isn’t all the way punched, leaving the punched part of the paper hanging, like a flap.

Picture an open trap door.

Ballots for the 2000 election were recounted numerous times, and it was really controversial. There were also pregnant chads and dimpled chads.

Kind of like when you’re using a Scantron and you don’t fill in the bubble all the way, so the system might read an error.

In major elections it is necessary to count a very large number of votes. Doing this manually is time consuming and expensive. One option to avoid this is to make machine-readable ballots. In this case a hole is punched out of a piece of paper corresponding to the preferred candidate. The machine can then see where the hole is and count the vote. A hanging chad occurs when the hole is not punched cleanly and leaves the offcut paper attached. The machine may read this incorrectly.

The 2000 US Presidential election (between Bush and Gore) was very close, and came down to a recount in Florida, which was using such a system. There was a legal case about how hanging chads should be counted, and the outcome of this legal case effectively decided the election.

So the reference to hanging chads was a reference to the 2000 election, which was presumably some time before the relevant episode aired/was set.

“Chads” are the pieces of paper removed when using a hole puncher. A “hanging chad” occurs when the piece does not fully separate. They were particularly notable in the 2000 US presidential election, in which some districts (especially in south Florida) used punch-card ballots. This made counting ballots difficult, since a ballot counting machine might not count a ballot where the hole is not fully punched. Neither Bush nor Gore had enough electoral votes to win without Florida (making it very important to know who won), and the vote was extremely close (so even a small error could change the outcome). Recounts (and arguments over what should count as a vote) continued until mid-December, when the Supreme Court stopped the recount with Bush ahead (in Florida) by 537 votes, giving him Florida’s electoral votes and therefore the presidency.

What was headline news for two months in late 2000 had become far less relevant by late 2005, nearly a year after another election had been held.

(FWIW, a post-election recount by the University of Chicago found that a recount of *all* of Florida’s ballots would have resulted in a Gore win. However, a statewide recount was not attempted; the Gore campaign only asked for recounts in four counties, and recounting only those counties would have still allowed Bush to win.)

When you use a hole-punch for paper, the little circle that gets punched out is called a ‘chad’. A “hanging chad” is one that doesn’t completely get separated from the paper.

This caused a problem in the 2000 US Presidential election, specifically in the state of Florida. We were still primary using paper ballots and mechanical voting machines at the time, which would punch out a hole to mark the selection on the ballot. It was deemed that a “hanging chad” was an incomplete ballot, and was not counted as a valid vote. There were thousands of them. Enough to affect the outcome of the election.

Everyone here has explained the hanging chad, part. But not the why the joke is funny. The joke is funny because of two parts:

– 1 It’s funny to me and the characters because I am (like the characters) old enough to remember the 2000 election and how ridiculous the situation was, so making a costume about that situation is funny. It would be like if you dressed up for Halloween as Kevin McCarthy’s gavel. Funny because of the current political debacle.

– 2 It’s also making fun of Ted for being old. You not understanding why it’s funny because you’re too young to understand why … is exactly the joke. He’s trying to be young and cool, but he’s wearing a costume that tells everyone: He is not young. And he is not cool.

Enough people are explaining what a “chad” is that I won’t bother, but…

If you ever saw the episode of the office where Micheal dressed up as Monica Lewinsky for 3 Halloweens in a row, stretching into the mid 2000’s, it’s the same type of joke. Guy takes a once relevant political joke well past the point where anyone gets it or finds it funny anymore.

Ah, the joys of the English language. “Chad” is a word that has like 10 different completely unrelated definitions. One of those definitions refers to the empty space left in a piece of paper when you punch a hole in it.

In the context of HIMYM, it’s a reference to the 2000 US Presidential Election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which ultimately came down to an almost unbelievably close election in the state of Florida. Ultimately the election was decided by 537 votes (out of over 6 million cast in the state), or 0.009%.

Needless to say the election was *highly* contested (massive understatement). In Florida that year, ballots were cast by the voter physically punching a hole in the ballot next to the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for. This was to make it easier for machines to read the ballots by looking for the holes (or “chads”).

Except people are imperfect and sometimes didn’t punch a clean hole all the way through the paper. This left a little dangly piece of paper where the hole should have been, which is called a “hanging chad.”

Normally such discrepancies would be ignored, but in an election as close as that one, every vote mattered, so what to do with ballots with hanging chads became a hot button topic for debate. And so there was, basically overnight, a whole lot of discussion on the news about “hanging chads”.

People thought that sounded funny so it became fodder for a lot of wordplay-based jokes such as the one you saw on HIMYM.

[**THIS**](https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/oi0rvo/picture246537123/alternates/LANDSCAPE_1140/0102132504.JPG)

I don’t understand why more people don’t use images to explain things.

Some voting booths, you cast your vote, and the machine punches holes in a card. That card then goes off to the state capitol or wherever, and put in another machine that reads the punch holes, and that’s how the votes are tallied.

But if your machine is a little uncalibrated, it will punch the hole, but it may not punch all the way through. Now you have a hole with a little tidbit of paper still hanging on.

It’s inconclusive, isn’t it? Could the hole be a mistake? What should the card reader do in this case?

The bit of paper is a “chad”, and it’s hanging because it’s still partially connected to the card.

In the 2000 election, the race was VERY close, and literally every single vote counted. A big argument was started over how to count those cards with hanging chads. And because the race was so damn close, this became a big debate and a big meme.

It goes back to the 2000 election. Some voting machines used to punch holes in a piece of paper or had you do it through a grid. Sometimes the piece of paper you punched didn’t completely fall off, this was called a Hanging Chad. There was debate as to whether or not they should be counted, especially with how close the state of Florida came, which determined the outcome of the election. Especially when you consider the Hanging Chad were not counted and a recount was prevented by Florida Governor Jeb Bush to the benefit of his brother who then won the ent8re election.

I believe that episode takes place in 2007, so it’s already a 7 year old joke at that point, and I’m pretty sure those types of ballots haven’t been in use for a while since then