March 9, 2003 Note: This was first posted December 29, 2000. I have made a few corrections and a few comments as well.

I hope that not all of these "what-if" are banal.

What-if: No Monica Lewinsky scandal. This only requires that she either wasn't a White House intern or that she doesn't meet Linda Tripp (and thus tells all to her). The result would be no Impeachment, Al Gore doesn't keep his distance from the Clinton Legacy, Clinton compaigns vigrously for him, and Gore wins. OTOH, was the big African-American turnout a side effect of the Impeachment? If so, Gore might not win.

What-if: Gore Gets Several Thousand More Votes in Florida. Ten Presidential candidates were qualified in Florida; but, this caused problems in the counties that were using a punch card ballots system. They could either use small type and cram all ten on one page, use bigger type and use facing pages ("butterfly ballot"), or use bigger type and use two pages (Is it possible for the names to be "tiled" on one page?). While the "butterfly ballot" in West Palm Beach county got most of the publicity, Duval county's decision to use two pages had a more obvious effect. While Duval county as a whole leans Republican, there are several largely African-American precincts. Those precincts had a big turn out in the 2000 elections with thousands of first time voters. It appears that many of these voters, voting party-line Democrat (which meant voting for the 2nd candidate in each electorial race), voted for Gore, turned the page, and punched the 2nd name there, not noticing that it was the continuation of the Presidential ballot. Hundreds if not thousands of votes for Gore went down the drain. There are several possible ways to change this. If the qualification requirements were strict enough to reduce the number of candidates to 6 (or perhaps 7), then all the counties with punch card ballots would have used one page for the Presidential race, and Gore wins. A change specific to Duval county should also be sufficient (e.g., going to an optical-scanning system).

March 9, 2003 Note: It turns out that if Gore had did his recount in counties that had optical scanning systems, he would have picked up quite a few votes where the voters had both voted for him and had written in his name as well and more than Bush would of. Perhaps enough to carry Florida.

What-if: NAACP's vote turn out compaign was not done (or was not very successful). I haven't seen an estimate on how many additional votes nationwide (almost all for the Democrat party candidates) that this compaign was responsible for. But from those numbers that I have seen, I would estimate that there were over 1 million (maybe 2 million) additional votes for Gore and the Democrat candidates for the House and Senate. Incidentally, since the majority of these votes were probably in states that Gore would have won anyway, this is one of the reasons why Gore had a plurality much larger than JFK in 1960, but still needed hundreds more votes in Florida to get a Electorial College win. Thus, without the NAACP's efforts, not only does Bush wins (with a nationwide plurality and a larger Electorial College majority), but two or three additional Republican senators are re-elected (giving the Republicans a clear majority in the Senate). However, I don't have a suggestion on how to do this.

What-if: No Libertarian candidate for US Senate in the state Washington. The state of Washington has a fairly strict qualification requirement for the November election. Every candidate (except for Presidential ticket which has different rules) had to have received at least 1% of the total vote in the Primary (in September). The Libertarian party managed to qualify candidates for all the state-wide elections this year, all 8 House of Representatives seats, and for many of the state House and Senate positions as well (BTW, many of the candidates recieved over 1% of the vote in the November General Election as well). Slade Gorton-R went down in defeat by just over 2000 votes, while Jeff Jered-Libertarian had over 50000 votes. If Jered wasn't on the ballot, then, IMHO, some of his voters would have still voted and (JAWEG) at least 2500 more of those votes would have gone to Gorton then to Cantwell. Thus, "Landslide" Gorton wins another squeaker, and, again, the US Senate is not split 50-50. Jered qualified with about 1 and quarter percent of the Primary vote. To exclude him would probably mean a 2% limit (or perhaps no anti-trust case against Microsoft - I heard that the Libertarians had a rather successful fundraiser with Microsoft employees).

What-if: Different Electorial College: One possibility is that every state (and DC) splits up its electorial votes the same way that Maine and Nebraska do (that is 1 vote for each House district "won" and 2 votes for the overall state wide leader). I am not certain what the effect on the compaign strategy would be, but I will assume that the differences wash out and Gore and Bush would carry the same House districts as in OTL. I have not seen a vote breakdown by House district, but I suspect that Bush would have carried more than 211 of them (considering the over concentration of Gore votes in urban counties, Bush might have carried more than 217 districts in OTL). If Bush carries more than 211, he wins (and if he carrys more than 213, who has the most votes in Florida is utterly unimportant). March 9, 2003 Note: And I still haven't see a breakdown of the 2000 Presidental vote by Congressional district (though I haven't searched for one that hard either).

Another possibility is that each state (and DC) splits up its votes between the candidates in proportion to their vote totals in that state. For example; a state which has 10 electorial votes has 2.5 million votes cast in the election. Candidate A gets 1 million votes - he gets 4 Electors. candidate B gets 1.5 million votes - he gets 6 Electors. Of course, in practice, the numbers don't divide evenly, which means that candidates fractional electors would have to be rounded up or down by some algorithm. I have thought of two. One I call, "biggest fraction." In this one, the candidate with the biggest fractional elector will be rounded up; the rest are rounded down (unless there is still an unallocated elector, then the next biggest fraction gets it). The second one I call, "smallest increase." In this one, the candidate where rounding up will cause the smallest increase (as a ratio) will be rounded up. Assuming the same basic vote percentages per state as in OTL; Nader will get 2 Electors from California. He would also get several additional electors (one per state) if "biggest fraction" rounding is used (but none if "smallest increase" is used). I have not done the calculations to see what the nationwide result is; but those 2 Electors might be enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives. If one additional elector from Florida is the difference between 270 or 269 Electoral votes for Gore, then we would still be seeing weeks of legal action.