I first heard this term in How I Met Your Mother when Ted dressed up as a hanging Chad for Halloween. I tried to look it up & Google basically just said that it was a voting ballot that people used to punch holes out of. But I feel like I’m missing something.. in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume
& would tell him that “the hanging Chad reference
Is very old” & that most people wouldn’t understand it. Which signifies some sort of inside joke or understanding, but I don’t get it. please! Thank you!
In: 373
In the 1999 election, the state of Florida was too close to call, and it was the deciding state
They did recounts, and the republicans challenged many ballets – because they were punched ballots, where the voter had not pushed the paper punch right through the ballot – the little circle that you punch out was hanging by a small bit of paper where the punch had not punched out the full circumference of the circle. They called that a “hanging chad”. Their argument was that you could not be certain that the voter intended to vote for the candidate with the hanging chad, they may have meant to not vote at all. There were committees of people ruling on how clearly each ballot had been punched. Most of the ballets in this condition were democratic votes because the older folks with weaker hands had voted mostly Democrat.
Eventually the Supreme Court called a halt to the recounts and demanded the state declare a winner – at which point in the process, George W. Bush was ahead by a few hundred votes and he was declared the winner. Al Gore, who most historians now believe would have won if the counts had been allowed to finish, was a loyal American who believed in democracy and the rule of law, so he accepted the result and conceded.
The “hanging chad” is how republicans tried to steal an election they very likely lost – though they did it with real legal cases argued in front of real judges, and it worked for them. It was very dirty pool, but not all the way to the traitorous nonsense Trump tried to pull. It was however, what gave Trump the idea that if he could create enough legal confusion, he might be able to hold on to power despite losing the election. He just needed the Supreme Court to rule a few states’ election processes were flawed, then uphold the precedent that there was a time limit on certifying a winner, and then the state assemblies could select electors instead of the voters – disenfranchising 7 or 8 million Democrat voters in half a dozen states in the process.
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