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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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
The actual 5 year old answer:
When you punch a hole out of paper, the little piece of paper that came out is called a “chad”. In the presidential election in the year 2000, both candidates got a lot of votes, and they were trying to find ways go to get ahead. One was to say that if someone didn’t punch the chad all the way out of their voting card (to indicate which person you voted for), it didn’t mean the vote counted. So, the “chad” was “hanging” by a little piece of paper when you’d hold the paper up, hence the name.
A presidential election that was in the news for 18+ months (and wiki ever since) is not an “inside joke”. Toss in the fact it went to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis.
You can use the website Urbandictionary.com for up to date definitions of new words and terms.
I don’t know what to tell you. Even if you just went to the first google result, which was the wikipedia entry, it would have explained the 2000 US Presidential Election.
So did you just read the blurb under the first google result and decide that was enough research for the day?
The hanging chad is specifically a reference to the 2000 election between bush and Al gore. That’s why they made fun of him for the old reference.
Florida used paper ballots. Voters used a little tool to punch a hole in the paper next to the candidate to indicate their choice, and a machine would scan the ballot and read the holes. The little bits of paper punched out of the holes are called “chads” (just like the tiny circles of paper created by a paper hole puncher). It turned out these chads didn’t always fall off cleanly and would still be stuck behind hanging on the ballot, causing the machine to miscount the vote. The ballots had to be recounted by hand which took a long time and the election was super close and the Supreme Court had to get involved so it was a big deal at the time as you can imagine.
Further to the explanations, I remember reading – in an Al Franken book, I think – that the issue with hanging chads was already well known and they were most common in voting machines that were older and more worn. Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida, contrived to ensure that these older, less reliable machines were used in strongly Democrat-leaning constituencies.
The 2000 US Presidential election was very close. It all came down to a few hundred votes in Florida. If the paper was incompletely punched, would the machine count it as a vote? Should the machine count it as a vote? Should humans recount the votes? If there *is* a recount, should the humans count incompletely punched paper as a vote?
This issue was [widely covered in the media](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida). It was a super important question in November 2000, it could literally decide who would be President of the United States.
The situation seemed a bit absurd at the time.
The voting machine experts’ technical terminology of “chads” goes back to at least the 1930’s or 1940’s, but was happily ignored by the general public — until it suddenly thrust into the media spotlight due to its importance in deciding the outcome.
The voting machine experts’ ridiculous names only added to the absurdity; [Wikipedia lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_%28paper%29) “hanging chad,” “swinging chad”, “tri-chad”, “dimpled chad” and “pregnant chad”. The most ridiculous-sounding terms quickly became the most famous (or infamous), thus “hanging chad” or “pregnant chad”.
Why can you not Google that?
hanging chad’s referred to votes that the GOP got thrown out in Florida during the bush v gore race. Basically they threw out a bunch of ballots because they weren’t punched all the way through on their vote for gore
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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