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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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 Bush/Gore election of 2000, the results in Florida were effectively tied. The state as a whole had a difference of fewer than 1,000 votes separating the two. In reality, several states were pretty close but most were pretty quickly resolved.
In such a close election and with Broward County using punches rather than pens to mark ballots, it became the hyperfocus of news for weeks.
If the Electoral College were settled it would have been less of a story, but neither Bush nor Gore had the 270 needed to win, meaning that we didn’t know who the President would be until Florida was resolved. It was kind of like the 2020 election, but (1) without the crazy, and (2) it was *all* Florida. No equivalent of Rudy Guilliani doing a press conference at a landscape company next to a dildo shop, or his hair dye running, no crazy talk of getting legislatures to invalidate election results, etc. It was just a question of a hand recount in Florida.
Problem is, a lot of people in Florida weren’t pulling the little “punching handle” hard enough, meaning that instead of a proper hole punch appearing on the ballot, you would only get a dimple or perhaps a half-punch with the little “piece” still hanging on. The question was whether those partial punches should count. Most of the time you could simply remove those partials without impacting the outcome of a local measure or a candidate for office…but with the state being separated by fewer than 1,000 votes on the question of President? All of a sudden those partial punches became critical.
And the problem was harder to resolve than you might think:
* Was the person punching the ballot simply not strong enough to fully punch the ballot, but they really wanted to indicate their choice?
* Or were they feeling doubtful and changed their mind mid-punch, pulling back and *not* wanting to mark the question? Or maybe they made a mistake and accidentally marked the wrong whole?
* If they punched a hole on a different response to the same question, that’s pretty easy, you reject the dimple and count the hole; but a couple thousand ballots had only a dimple or chad and had *no* clearly marked hole in the question for President.
The non-punches that resulted from someone pulling the handle a little bit were *dimples,* the partial punches were *hanging chads,* a ‘chad’ being a small piece of anything, in this case a small bit of paper. And “hanging chad” became part of the lexicon for months, if not years, it was the sort of thing late-night comedians were still mocking on a regular basis even ten years later and pop culture *still* reference it occasionally even now.
As to how the question resolved: by late December we still had no agreement on how to count those unclear ballots and who the winner should be, but the inauguration was only a month away and the EC had to certify a winner. The House of Representatives would have had the Constitutional authority to make the decision, but the campaigns took it to the Supreme Court instead. At that point Bush had a small lead of 537 votes of clearly marked ballots, and Gore decided to cede the election rather than drag us through a Constitutional crisis or force the Court or the House to make such a polarizing decision — it was the sort of decision that would have satisfied very few people no matter how legally sound it was. Wanting to avoid that level of toxic drama, Gore decided to drop the contest and Bush became president.
For what it’s worth, a lot of people didn’t like that Gore did that (and will still express their anger at it if you ask) but I suspect that if it had gone to the Court and/or House we would have had a less violent (but equally bitter) equivalent to what we just saw in 2020 to present. By ceding the election, Gore cut that type of response off at the pass. And I’ll leave it at that.
Note: yes, Bush literally won by 537 votes. Not thousands, hundreds. Five *hundred* votes.
A couple decades ago there were voting machines that punched holes in the ballot to clearly indicate which canidate was voted for as the counting machines physically counted the holes similar to how old punch card based computers worked. A hanging Chad referred to ballots that were not completely punched through by the machine or still had bit of paper where the hole would be. Few people know that the name was actually a reference to Chad Schreidenbacker, an activist during the Civil rights era that traveled across Florida helping people register to vote before tragically in 1998, the undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
Bush/Gore election. Hanging chads were pieces on the ballot card that didn’t get cut off but should have. Back before everything was electronic…
When Al Gore and George Bush both ran for President. It came down to which of them won in Florida. The problem was that in Florida, they used those punch card voting machines. The “chad” is the punched out paper piece. The election was close enough that they were asked to recount every single ballot. Some ballots has that chad just hanging on by the tiniest fiber of paper. So the hole was there, but the piece of punched out paper was also still there. Those were “hanging chads” and it mattered if you counted the ballot with hanging chads as voted or not voted for. Like maybe I pushed “Al Gore” on my ballot, (simplified, I know you have to vote for an elector) but the voting machine didn’t quite punch the “Al Gore” spot, or the punchout was still hanging there. Was it counted as a vote for Al Gore, or was it counted as “no vote for either candidate?”
That became a huge issue and it was all over the news durnig the 2000 US Presidential election.
So it’s an old reference, but it’s one that many people have heard, like you.
Hanging chads are the reason we ended up with Bush (An Oilman) instead of Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), and continued burning fossil fuels instead of having leadership and a sensible plan to avert the worst of climate change.
A chad is the little paper circle that is punched out by a hole puncher. It’s an individual confetto found in a hole puncher. A hanging chad is a paper circle that does complete detach from the rest of the sheet of paper that has been hole punched. The paper chad was a major topic during the 2000 election because ballots would require you to hole punch a circle next to the candidate’s name. The election was so close that courts need to rule on how partially hole punched ballots should be counted.
Florida. Bush v al glore. The election hung in the balance, there was a lawsuit about… hanging chads.
See, to fill out the multiple choice test, some places in florida thought it would be fun to punch little holes in the paper ballot. It was silly, fun. Then, they started throwing out votes because the holes were double punched or something odd happened to them.
Luckily, Bush’s brother, Jeb bush was governor of flordia. They found ballot boxes in the swamp.
The lawsuit basically could determine the next president (whether or not they could throw out ballots [they did anyway])
Bush wonnered. Trade towers went down. Presidential powers expanded to wage war on any terrorist group at-will, which, apparently, is whole ass countries. And, the world’s been a better place ever since.
Hang in there, chads.
Florida. Bush v al glore. The election hung in the balance, there was a lawsuit about… hanging chads.
See, to fill out the multiple choice test, some places in florida thought it would be fun to punch little holes in the paper ballot. It was silly, fun. Then, they started throwing out votes because the holes were double punched or something odd happened to them.
Luckily, Bush’s brother, Jeb bush was governor of flordia. They found ballot boxes in the swamp.
The lawsuit basically could determine the next president (whether or not they could throw out ballots [they did anyway])
Bush wonnered. Trade towers went down. Presidential powers expanded to wage war on any terrorist group at-will, which, apparently, is whole ass countries. And, the world’s been a better place ever since.
Hang in there, chads.
That’s an easy one to answer.
A *hanging chad* (noun) is the reason America spent several trillions dollars bombing the Middle East instead of helping its own citizens, climate change legislation got squashed, and a significant portion of appointed judges guiding the American legal system believe in literal angels and biblical “prophecy.”
Hope that clears things up.
That’s an easy one to answer.
A *hanging chad* (noun) is the reason America spent several trillions dollars bombing the Middle East instead of helping its own citizens, climate change legislation got squashed, and a significant portion of appointed judges guiding the American legal system believe in literal angels and biblical “prophecy.”
Hope that clears things up.
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