text:
User:RickK

There is a fatal flaw in the system. Vandals, trolls and malactors are given respect, whereas those who are here to actually create an encyclopedia, and to do meaningful work, are slapped in the face and not given the support needed to do the work they need to do.

There is no reason to continue here. RickK 04:32, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

simple:User:RickK

The person calling himself rick_k at livejournal is NOT me. http://www.livejournal.com/users/rick_k/ I have filed a report with the livejournal people, but who knows if they'll do anything about it. RickK 21:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

title: User:RickK


text:
Talk:Trainspotting (film)

Fair use
That's an awfully big quote. Is this fair use? -- Wapcaplet 03:00, 22 June 2003 (UTC)

 * Not sure. It appears to have been copied verbatim from the imdb quote page. It even replicates the errors contained there. I have fixed the quote to conform to what's actually said on the Region 1 DVD. 209.149.235.241 22:17, 31 January 2004 (UTC)

Adminspotting
Should I make reference to Adminspotting? :) - I'll mention it's a spoof | Adminspotting

Project2501a 13:55, 26 November 2004 (UTC) (Respond in my talk page, plase :)

Stub class
i would class this as a stub, any objections? --AeneasMacNeill 14:49, 9 December 2004 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Trainspotting (film)


text:
User:M f korn

M. F. Korn has written eleven novels and had over 220 story appearances in magazines worldwide. Currently available are two collections, CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES and ALIENS, MINIBIKES AND OTHER STAPLES OF SUBURBIA and two novels, SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR and RACHMANINOFF'S GHOST. A collection of four science fiction novels, ALL THE MUTANT TRASH IN ALL THE GALAXIES is forthcoming, as well as the twin short-novel paperback THE WHITE TRASH WITCHES’ COVEN / PAVANE FOR A SCREAM QUEEN.

He resides in Louisiana as a programmer and has a daughter, Savannah, six years old. One of his degrees is in Piano Performance. Mike enjoys playing Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Chopin and ragtime, and listening to Requiems, Sacred Masses for the Dead. His web page is: www.geocities.com/rachmaninoff_70815/.

title: User:M f korn


text:
Roger Neilson

Roger Paul Neilson, (June 16, 1934 – June 21, 2003) was a Canadian professional ice hockey coach, most notably in the NHL, where he served with eight teams. Known as Captain Video because of his technological contributions to the game, he is a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame in the builder category. Alongside his decorated coaching abilities, Neilson is commonly remembered today for his many antics which resulted in the creation of several NHL rules.

Born in Toronto, Neilson attended a public high school, North Toronto Collegiate Institute. Neilson's coaching career began as a student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he continued to coach until graduation with a degree in physical education in both hockey and baseball.

Coaching career
Neilson's coaching career began in 1966 as head coach of the Ontario Hockey League's Peterborough Petes, then the junior farm team of the Montreal Canadiens, and he remained for 10 years in Peterborough, Ontario, where he maintained a home until his death. He also worked at the University of Windsor with a summer hockey camp program, which led to camps from Port Hope, Ontario to Israel.

Neilson moved into professional hockey coaching with the Dallas Black Hawks in the Central Hockey League in 1976–77.

Neilson's entry into the National Hockey League (NHL) came in 1977 with the Toronto Maple Leafs, when he was hired to replace Red Kelly as the head coach of the team. Neilson coached the Toronto Maple Leafs (1977–79), the Buffalo Sabres (1979–81, associate and head coach), Vancouver Canucks (1981–84, assistant and head coach), Los Angeles Kings (1983–84), Chicago Blackhawks (1984–87, assistant), New York Rangers (1989–93), Florida Panthers (1993–95), Philadelphia Flyers (1997–2000), and for two games with the Ottawa Senators in April 2002.

Neilson's tenure with Toronto lasted until 1979, when Neilson was fired as head coach of the Maple Leafs by owner Harold Ballard. There was outrage throughout the players, media, and general public. Ballard then relented, but wanted Neilson to enter the next game with a paper bag over his head as "the mystery coach", but Neilson refused and coached the next game as if nothing had happened.

Neilson was initially an assistant coach with Vancouver, but he took over as head coach after Harry Neale was suspended for taking part in an altercation with fans during a brawl against the Quebec Nordiques. When the team went unbeaten in the next seven games, he was given the job permanently. It was in his new capacity that Neilson led the team on its run to the 1982 Stanley Cup Finals.

After five seasons with the Rangers and Panthers, Neilson led the Flyers to first place in the Eastern Conference in the 1999–2000 season. With the Flyers leading in the conference standings at the midseason break, Neilson earned the honor to coach the Eastern Conference squad in the All-Star Game. Previously, based on his performance with the Canucks, he had coached the Campbell Conference All-Stars at the 1983 All-Star Game. But a Neilson-coached team fell short of expectations once again, as the Flyers were ousted by the New Jersey Devils in seven games in the Eastern Conference championship round.

Lemieux 'hit' controversy
The peak and valley of Neilson's stay with the Rangers came in the 1991–92 season, when they captured the Presidents' Trophy with the best record in the league. The Rangers entered the playoffs as prohibitive favorites to win their first Stanley Cup since 1940, only to be eliminated by the Pittsburgh Penguins in six games in the Patrick Division finals.

Neilson's reputation as a so-called old school coach was put on a microscope in Game 2 of the series, when Rangers player Adam Graves fractured the left metacarpal bone of Penguins superstar Mario Lemieux with a two-handed baseball swing of his stick. Graves stated that he was swinging on the glove to loosen his grip on the stick to deal with the puck, which reflected Neilson's belief for one to go for the hands. Neilson later said he did not see the incident, although it happened in front of his team's benches.

"Yes, no question about it. I kill penalties, too. I hit the gloves, also, once in a while. But to take a swing like he did ... that certainly came from the coach." Lemieux said after the injury. He added, "Certainly a contract was on me that game. I'm not saying Roger Neilson told Graves to go after me, but he told his players to go after me."

Graves was assessed only a two-minute minor penalty on the play. He was allowed play in Game 3, in which he scored the first goal of a 6–5 overtime victory. Two days after the incident, at the league's disciplinary hearing, it decided to suspend Graves four games. The Penguins rallied to win their next seven games, the series, and the Stanley Cup Finals.

Non-coaching career
Neilson worked for the Edmonton Oilers as a video analyst during the 1984 Stanley Cup Playoffs, culminating in the Oilers' first Stanley Cup championship, and the Chicago Blackhawks as an assistant to head coach Bob Pulford from 1984 to 1987. From 1995 to 1997, he was an assistant coach for the St. Louis Blues.

During the 1987–88 and 1988–89 seasons, Neilson did not coach but served as a color commentator for TSN with Jim Hughson and Gary Green.

Retirement from hockey
On February 20, 2000, Neilson went on medical leave for cancer treatment, and assistant coach Craig Ramsay took over in his absence. On April 10, Neilson told General Manager Bobby Clarke that he was ready to return to the team, but Clarke insisted on additional medical clearance before he returns. In an interview, Neilson said he had been "treated like a king" and referred to Clarke a friend. All the while, Ramsay repeatedly said that he would return to assistant coach as soon as Flyers' management approved Neilson to return as coach. Neilson was ultimately informed that he had been permanently replaced by Ramsay.

Neilson's dismissal by Clarke was widely lamented by fans and media as lacking class and respect. Neilson's doctors advised the Flyers that he lacked the strength to perform his duties as head coach. Neilson insisted on trying to return at the end of the first round of the playoffs, but Clarke refused. He even tried to defend his decision in the press, stating, "Roger got cancer – that wasn't our fault. We didn't tell him to go get cancer. It's too bad that he did. We feel sorry for him, but then he went goofy on us."

Neilson was then hired as an assistant coach for the Senators. For the last two games of the 2001–02 season, which were inconsequential to the standings, head coach Jacques Martin stepped away from the bench, allowing Neilson to take the reins and become the ninth man to coach 1,000 games along with the distinction of having served as a head coach for eight different teams. The following season, the Senators won the Presidents' Trophy as the regular season and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. It was public knowledge that Neilson's cancer was terminal when the Senators were ousted in a seven-game series.

Neilson's overall regular-season record was 460 wins, 378 losses, 159 ties, and 3 overtime losses.

Coaching legacy
Neilson dedicated his entire life to coaching and hockey. He had no family ties and would stay up late into the night watching video and analyzing games.

Among his most well-known innovations was the use of videotape to analyze other teams, leading to the nickname "Captain Video". He was also the first to use microphone headsets to communicate with his assistant coaches.

In situations where the face-off was in the opposition's end and there were three or less seconds to go in the first and/or second period, Neilson would pull his goaltender for an extra attacker for a potential shot on net off the ensuing face-off. His reasoning was that if the other team gained possession of the puck, it would be virtually impossible for the opposition to score from their end in the mere seconds that were left. No other coach would consider this radical move, and it was indicative of his innovative thinking.

Neilson was well known for closely reading the rule book with the intent of exploiting loopholes. During one particular game in his first season coaching the Petes, he was down two men in a 5-on-3 situation for the last minute of the game. Realizing that more penalties could not be served under the existing rules, Neilson intentionally put too many men on the ice every ten seconds. The referees stopped the play and a faceoff was held, relieving pressure on the defence. In addition, Neilson also took advantage of fans throwing objects onto the ice to deliberately cause stoppages of play late in a game. After these displays, the rules were changed so that a call for too many men on the ice in a 5-on-3 situation, or a delay-of-game penalty in a 5-on-3 situation, or any deliberate act to stop play (i.e., objects thrown on the ice, or the net being intentionally dislodged) in the last two minutes of regulation or in overtime now results in a penalty shot.

Neilson also discovered that if he put a defenceman in net instead of a goaltender during a penalty shot, the defenceman could rush the attacker and cut down the latter's angle of shot, greatly reducing the chances of a goal. In 1968, he used this information in an OHL game between Neilson's Peterborough Petes and the opposing Toronto Marlboros. Neilson replaced Petes goaltender Pete Kostek with defenseman Ron Stackhouse. Stackhouse successfully blocked Frank Hamill's penalty shot attempt by charging out as soon as Hamill crossed the blue line. The rules now state that a team must use a goaltender in net for a penalty shot and that the goaltender cannot leave the crease until the skater has touched the puck.

One game during a time-out, Neilson told his goaltender, "...when we pull you, just leave your goal stick lying in the crease." When the other team gained possession, they sent the puck the length of the ice toward the open net, only to deflect wide when it hit the goal stick lying in the crease. The rule was changed the next season so that a goal would be awarded in such a situation.

Neilson also broke the rules, in a sense, when he did not like what was happening on the ice. As the Canucks coach during Game 2 of the 1982 Campbell Conference Final playoff series against the Chicago Blackhawks, he felt his team was unfairly penalized on several occasions during the third period. He took a trainer's white towel and held it on a hockey stick, as if to wave a white flag. Three other Canucks players did the same thing, and all were ejected from the game. By doing this, Neilson inadvertently started an NHL tradition. Canucks fans waved white towels by the thousands at the next game, a playoff tradition that continues to this day and is widely copied by other hockey teams.

Life after hockey
Neilson was awarded a Doctor of Laws by McMaster University in 2001 (see below). He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder in November 2002. He was also appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada {CM} in 2002. The City of Peterborough renamed George Street South Roger Neilson Way opposite the Memorial Centre Arena in 2003; the address of the Arena was supposed to be changed to 1 Roger Neilson Way. The Ottawa Senators have named their coaches office at Scotiabank Place The Roger Neilson Room. The City of Ottawa renamed their Minor Peewee AAA Hockey Division after Neilson in 2005. Also in 2005, the Ontario Hockey League created an award for the top academic player attending college or university and named it the Roger Neilson Memorial Award.

In 1999, Neilson was diagnosed with bone cancer, which spread to become skin cancer in 2001. He died on June 21, 2003, only five days after his 69th birthday, and the funeral was held in Northview Pentecostal Church in Peterborough.

Shortly after his death, the Ottawa Senators Foundation announced plans to build "Roger's House" (French: "La maison de Roger"), later renamed Roger Neilson House, a paediatric palliative care facility built in his memory on the grounds of the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa. The building was opened on April 21, 2006, by the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.

In September 2004, Roger Neilson Public School, a new elementary school in Peterborough, opened. The name was chosen because of Neilson's commitment to teaching, which exemplified the qualities of the Character Education program of the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board.

On April 7, 2011, Rogers Arena in Vancouver commemorated Neilson's contribution to the NHL and Vancouver Canucks, in particular to the tradition he created during the 1982 playoff series with the Chicago Blackhawks, later named "Towel Power", by erecting a large statue of him in the courtyard of Rogers Arena.

The Florida Panthers dedicated the press box to Neilson, their first coach, in 2013.

title: Roger Neilson


text:
Finlandia Vodka

Finlandia is a brand of vodka produced in Finland. It is made from barley distilled into a neutral spirit in the village of Koskenkorva in Ilmajoki, operated by Finland's Altia Corporation. The distilled alcohol is then transported to a production facility in the village of Rajamäki in Nurmijärvi, about 45 kilometers (28 miles) north of Helsinki. In Rajamäki, the spirit is blended with glacial water, flavored (except for the classic non-flavored edition, 101 and Platinum), and bottled.

The Finlandia brand was established in 1970 by Alko, Finland's state-owned alcoholic beverage company. It is now owned by the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company.

Finlandia vodka is distributed in 135 countries and is widely associated with Finland on the international market. Flavors include cranberry (since 1994), lime (1999), mango (2004), red berry (2004), wild berries (2005), grapefruit (2006), tangerine (2009), and blackcurrant (2009).

History
The distillery that produces Finlandia vodka was founded in 1888 by Dr. Wilhelm Juslin next to the glacial spring in the small Finnish village of Rajamäki in the Nurmijärvi parish. Today, a facility at that same historic location still manufactures and packages Finlandia.

In 1920, after the passage of the alcohol Prohibition Act in Finland, the Rajamäki distillery was bought by the Finnish state to secure an alcohol supply for pharmacies and for other non-beverage purposes. When the Prohibition Act was lifted in 1932, the state took over exclusive control of vodka production.

In 1970, Alko, the state-owned alcoholic beverage company, established the Finlandia vodka brand name. A year later the Finlandia brand became the first Nordic vodka sold in the United States, as well as the first imported vodka brand there classified in a premium category.

In 1975, a new alcoholic beverage plant was constructed at the Rajamäki location in Finland, and the distilling operation was centralized at the Koskenkorva facility in 1987.

In 2000, the listed U.S.-based Brown-Forman Corporation acquired 45% of Finlandia Vodka Worldwide, with the state-owned Altia Group, a successor of Alko's production division, retaining 55% ownership. Two years later Brown-Forman acquired an additional 35% stake in Finlandia Vodka. In 2004, Brown-Forman acquired the remaining 20% of Finlandia Vodka and assumed 100% ownership in the brand.

In 2016, Bloomberg reported Brown-Forman was considering a sale of Finlandia Vodka which was not commented on by the company; however, the brand was not sold.

Production
Finlandia vodka is produced from Finnish-grown six-row barley and pure glacial spring water.

At the Koskenkorva facility in western Finland, initial distillation of the fermented six-row barley takes place in seven columns with an average height of 25 meters using Altia's multi-pressure distilling system. Any remaining impurities, including lethal methanol as well as fusel alcohols and oils, are removed as the grain spirit is moved in a continuous process through more than 200 distillation steps. The entire production process, from grain mashing until the final neutral spirit flows out of the column, takes approximately 50 hours.

The final product, a grain spirit 96.5% by volume, is then transported about 315 kilometers (196 miles) south to the historic alcoholic beverage plant in the village of Rajamäki near Helsinki. The barley distillate is diluted with glacial water from the Rajamäki spring. Because the water is naturally filtered through sand and moraine formed by retreating glaciers during the Ice Age, no deionization, osmosis treatment or other artificial purification is used – unlike with some other vodkas.

The cooling and heating water used throughout the process is recirculated in a closed system to efficiently control temperature and keep water use to a minimum.

Varieties
Finlandia is available in pure form (distilled alcohol + water) and in several flavored versions.

Finlandia promotion
During the past several decades, the marketing of Finlandia vodka has involved a number of global promotional campaigns.
 * 1976–1985 Several advertising campaigns in which taste is the primary focus: "There are vodkas for orange juice lovers and tomato juice lovers. Now a vodka for vodka lovers" (1976). "The vodka for vodka purists" (1977). "Vodka for vodka drinkers" (1982). "Finlandia Vodka for vodka lovers" (1983). "The world's finest vodka. Over ice" (1984–85).
 * 1990 The campaign "Finlandia. Vodka From the Top of the World" stresses the properties appreciated by vodka drinkers: coldness, clarity, and purity. The campaign was reintroduced in 2006.
 * 1998 The campaign "In a past life I was pure, glacial spring water" is launched under the umbrella theme "Past Lives" in which Finlandia vodka recalls its glacial origins. The ad series evokes a sense of the past through grainy photos and personalities speaking about their past lives.
 * 1999 The campaign "Refresh" captures Finlandia vodka as "purely refreshing".
 * 2002 Finlandia appears as "The Official Vodka of James Bond" for "007 Die Another Day", the James Bond film series.
 * 2005 The campaign "Vodka from a Purer Place" declares Finlandia to be "naked vodka" by playing up its Finnish heritage and the "pure glacial spring water" from which it is made. Transparent bottles are posed against snowy landscapes under headlines like "Here you see exactly what you're made of" and "When you have nothing to hide behind, you tend not to hide anything".
 * 2013 The campaign "To the life less ordinary" is designed to illustrate that, due to its blend of 6-row barley, glacial water, and the midnight sun process, Finlandia is a "less ordinary vodka" produced in a less ordinary fashion. The campaign is meant to inspire viewers to never settle for the routine but instead always embrace a less ordinary life.

Bottle design
Frozen Ice (1970) Tapio Wirkkala designed the original "Frozen Ice" bottle, which conveyed the impression of an ice-cold drink from Lapland in the Arctic North. The textured glass glittered like the surface of an icicle. The label featured two white reindeers sparring against the Midnight Sun low on the horizon.

Hammered Ice (1998) Hansen Design of Design Philadelphia introduced "Hammered Ice" bottle design. The paper label was dropped and replaced with lacquered text.

Glacial Ice (2003) Harri Koskinen, Finnish tabletop glass and industrial designer, along with New York's Wallace Church & Co. graphic designers and the Finlandia Global package design team, designed and launched the "Glacial Ice" bottle. The texture mimicked the sensation of melting ice, capturing the origins of the brand's glacial spring water.

Melting Ice (2011) Finlandia introduced a new bottle called "Melting Ice". The bottle was developed through the collective effort of designers including Harri Koskinen, the Finnish designer who was instrumental in the development of the prior Finlandia bottle, and Kenneth Hirst, an industrial designer based in New York, who sculpted the new form.

title: Finlandia Vodka


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User talk:Wikiborg

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Xiong Chiamiov t alk c ontact 23:52, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * Tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

Hi. I noticed you changed "U.S. Government–sponsored" to "U.S. Government-sponsored" in EELV. The ndash in this context was not arbitrary.. see Ndash, specifically "pre–World War II", etc.. —Fleminra 02:33, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

Acknowledged.

 * Hey... same comment.. Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. I would prefer that not all dashes be assimilated.. thanks..  —Fleminra 16:35, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

 * We will comply.

Question
Why do you go through articles modifying the interanguage links? It looks to me as if you are converting them from pure Unicode to ASCII. Either way, can you please provide an edit summary? I know your edits are minor, but even minor edits sometimes require explanation. Oleg Alexandrov 02:00, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

 * State which edits in which articles should have an edit summary.
 * UNICODE as HTML entities breaks less easily than UTF-8 during edits.

He-he, it seems you took it too seriously. :) I meant to say, no article in which you converted UNICODE to HTMLized unicode have edit summary. I had a hard time understanding why you do that conversiont, and an edit summary would have helped, but now you explained so I am happy.

I think you better first argue your point about UNICODE as HTML entities in some forum rather than converting the interlanguage links without discussion. This because you have an entire army of bots which will convert your changes back to true Unicode when they make interlanguage links. Oleg Alexandrov 01:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

 * We will adapt.

 * Dear hive-mind, access the my preferences -> Editing -> Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary subroutine and set the value to true. This will improve efficiency. It will also make resisting edit summaries more futile. End transmission. --Brad Beattie (talk) 02:38, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

 * We aim for perfection.

Wikiborg
Thank you for your correction. It is appreaciated. Feel Free to follow me around and correct my error prone ways. --Artoftransformation 16:41, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Commons e-mail
If you are the person who sent me an e-mail via Commons, the return-to address (wikiborg AT sics SE) doesn't work.--Eloquence* 15:15, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

 * Your analysis is correct. The ISP has made a mistake.
 * We have created a new Return-To: address to route around the problem.

Invitation
You have been detected modifying the entry for WP:∫, and must participate in this project. Resistance is optional. Cwolfsheep 19:02, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Project is relevant. We will allocate resources to its execution.
 * Your distinctiveness will be added to our own. Cwolfsheep 01:49, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Good catch
Good catch on general semantics vs general semantics in the Robert Anton Wilson article. Maybe I was led astray by a "caps" problem; I could have sworn I tried it and there was no active link to a "general semantics" page. Rosencomet 22:37, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

An RfC that you may be interested in...
As one of the previous contributors to Infobox film or as one of the commenters on it's talk page, I would like to inform you that there has been a RfC started on the talk page as to implementation of previously deprecated parameters. Your comments and thoughts on the matter would be welcomed. Happy editing!
 * This message was sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 18:27, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Wikiborg


text:
Tony Award for Best Play

The Tony Award for Best Play (formally, an Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre) is an annual award given to the best new (non-musical) play on Broadway, as determined by Tony Award voters. There was no award in the Tonys' first year. The award goes to the authors and the producers of the play. Plays that have appeared in previous Broadway productions are instead eligible for Best Revival of a Play.

Award winners
Legend: † marks winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

* marks finalists of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama {{legend|#B0C4DE|indicates the winner.}}

Multiple wins

 * 5 awards
 * Tom Stoppard

 * 2 awards
 * Edward Albee
 * Tony Kushner
 * Arthur Miller
 * Terrence McNally
 * Yasmina Reza
 * Peter Shaffer
 * Neil Simon

Multiple nominations

 * 10 nominations
 * Neil Simon

 * 9 nominations
 * August Wilson

 * 8 nominations
 * Tom Stoppard

 * 6 nominations
 * Edward Albee

 * 5 nominations
 * Martin McDonagh
 * Arthur Miller

 * 4 nominations
 * Michael Frayn
 * Athol Fugard
 * John Osborne
 * David Rabe
 * Peter Shaffer
 * Tennessee Williams

 * 3 nominations
 * Jean Anouilh
 * Brian Friel
 * John Guare
 * David Hare
 * Hugh Leonard
 * Terrence McNally
 * Harold Pinter
 * Lanford Wilson

 * 2 nominations
 * Ayad Akhtar
 * Robert Bolt
 * Jez Butterworth
 * Paddy Chayefsky
 * Harvey Fierstein
 * Horton Foote
 * Herb Gardner
 * Richard Greenberg
 * William Gibson
 * Simon Gray
 * Stephen Adly Guirgis
 * Christopher Hampton
 * David Henry Hwang
 * William Inge
 * Arthur Kopit
 * Tony Kushner
 * John Leguizamo

 * Tracy Letts
 * David Lindsay-Abaire
 * David Mamet
 * Conor McPherson
 * Sidney Michaels
 * Peter Nichols
 * William Nicholson
 * Lynn Nottage
 * Eugene O'Neill
 * Mike Poulton
 * Yasmina Reza
 * Dore Schary
 * Robert Schenkkan
 * John Patrick Shanley
 * Sam Shepard
 * Simon Stephens
 * David Storey
 * Paula Vogel
 * Wendy Wasserstein

Superlatives
British writer Tom Stoppard has won this award five times, more than any other playwright. Only seven other writers (Arthur Miller, Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Neil Simon, Yasmina Reza and Peter Shaffer) have won the award more than once, each winning twice.

With ten nominations, Neil Simon has been nominated for the award more than any other playwright. August Wilson, with nine nominations, comes in second, followed by Tom Stoppard (eight nominations), Edward Albee (six nominations), Arthur Miller (five nominations), and Martin McDonagh (five nominations).

In 1994, Tony Kushner became the first playwright to win consecutive Tony Awards for his two-part Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Terrence McNally repeated this feat the following two years with his plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class.

title: Tony Award for Best Play


text:
OHL

OHL or Ohl may refer to:

Initialisms

 * Latvian Hockey Higher League, known in Latvian as the Optibet hokeja līga
 * Oberste Heeresleitung, the Supreme Army Command of Germany in World War I
 * Obrascón Huarte Lain, a Spanish construction company
 * Old Hill railway station's National Rail station code
 * Ontario Hockey League, one of the three Major Junior ice hockey leagues which constitute the Canadian Hockey League
 * Open Hardware License (disambiguation)
 * Oral hairy leukoplakia, a type of oral pathology
 * Oud-Heverlee Leuven, a Belgian football club
 * Overhead line, such as an overhead electric line used for railway and tram electric power supply
 * Ozburn-Hessey Logistics
 * Overhung Load, in regard to an electric motor it is the allowable radial load on the shaft of a motor, at a certain distance from the base of the shaft.

People

 * Don Ohl (born 1936), American former NBA professional basketball player
 * Maude Andrews Ohl (1862–1943), American journalist, poet, novelist
 * Russell Ohl (1898–1987), American crystal engineer recognized for patenting the modern solar cell

Places

 * Ohl, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated community

title: OHL


text:
Ricki Lake

Ricki Pamela Lake (born September 21, 1968) is an American television host and actress. She is known for her lead role as Tracy Turnblad in the 1988 film Hairspray, for which she received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She is also known for her talk show, Ricki Lake, which was broadcast internationally from September 1993 until May 2004. When the show debuted, Lake was 24 and credited as being the youngest person to host a syndicated talk show at the time. In late 2012, Lake began hosting a second syndicated talk show, The Ricki Lake Show. The series was canceled in 2013 after a single season, but Lake won her first Daytime Emmy Award for the project.

Early life
Lake was born in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, to a secular Jewish family. Her parents are Jill (a homemaker) and Barry Lake (a pharmacist), though Lake was largely brought up by her paternal grandmother, Sylvia Lake, until Sylvia's death in 1978.

Lake attended Ithaca College for one year.

Acting
Lake made her film debut as Tracy Turnblad, the lead character in John Waters' 1988 cult classic Hairspray. Lake also starred in other Waters films including Cry-Baby (with Johnny Depp and Susan Tyrrell), Cecil B. Demented (with Melanie Griffith and Stephen Dorff), and Serial Mom (with Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston). She starred in Mrs. Winterbourne with Shirley MacLaine and Brendan Fraser, Cabin Boy, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Cookie, and Inside Monkey Zetterland.

She joined the cast of the Vietnam War drama series China Beach as a Red Cross volunteer, Holly "the Donut Dolly" Pelegrino, for the show's third season. She also had a recurring role on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens as Doug's sister Stephanie. She guest-starred on television series including Drop Dead Diva and a voice role on King of the Hill, and starred in the television movie Baby Cakes. She had a cameo appearance in the 2007 remake of the original cult-classic Hairspray as a William Morris talent agent, and teamed up with star Nikki Blonsky (who played Tracy Turnblad in the 2007 movie musical remake) and Marissa Jaret Winokur (who played Tracy Turnblad in the Broadway musical based on the original 1988 film) to record "Mama I'm a Big Girl Now" for the soundtrack. The song is played during the film's end credits. She later reunited with original Hairspray co-star Debbie Harry for the film Hotel Gramercy Park, which was released in 2008.

Talk shows
Ricki Lake was Lake's first daytime talk show and at 24, she was the youngest person at the time to host one. The show specialized in topics involving invited guests and incorporated questions and comments from a studio audience.

The show debuted in syndication on September 13, 1993, and ended first-run episodes on May 25, 2004. In 2000, Lake told Rosie O'Donnell in an interview that she had signed on for four additional years. Although Sony Pictures Television had many stations contracted through the 2004–2005 season, Lake decided to end the show in August 2004, citing (among other things) a desire to spend time with her family. She moved from Los Angeles to New York to tape the 11th season of the show, then returned to California when taping was complete. Lake returned to the talk show platform when she hosted a revived version of her original talk show which premiered in September 2012 and was cancelled after one season.

2006–2010: Other projects
After her talk show had wrapped production on its final season, Lake went on to host the 2006 CBS limited series Gameshow Marathon, which re-created classic game shows with celebrity contestants. She also signed a development deal with Gameshow Marathon production company FremantleMedia for other ventures, including creating and producing future programs and projects. In October 2007, Lake appeared in the Lifetime TV movie Matters of Life and Dating. Lake also had a cameo in the 2007 film Hairspray as a talent agent and also sang "Mama I'm A Big Girl Now" with Nikki Blonsky and Marissa Jaret Winokur for the film's end credits. The Business of Being Born, Lake's documentary about home birth and midwifery, was released in limited markets on January 18, 2008. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and Red Envelope released the film in New York, L.A. and San Francisco in October; it also screened in Australia.

The Business of Being Born included footage and details of Lake's own "life-changing" home-birthing experience and followed a midwife going about her work. Tribeca called it "The Inconvenient Truth of Childbirth". Lake described it as her life's work for the last three years and expressed hopes that the film educated and empowered people to really know their choices in childbirth. She performed in the CBS television special Loving Leah in January of that year. Lake also jointly wrote a book on the world of natural childbirth and birthing options, along with Abby Epstein and Jacques Moritz, Your Best Birth, which was published by Wellness Central on May 1, 2009. Lake and Epstein also launched MyBestBirth.com, an online social network, powered by Ning, intended to allow parents and medical professionals to dialogue about varying birthing options and resources. Lake returned to television on May 11, 2009, succeeding Sharon Osbourne as host for the third season of VH1's Charm School. On November 10, 2010, Lake joined fellow talkers Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, and Montel Williams as guests of Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show, marking the first time those hosts appeared together on one show since their respective programs left the air.

2011–present
In March 2011, reports said that three television studios, Twentieth Television, Universal Media Studios and CBS Television Distribution, were interested in bringing Lake back to the talk-show realm in 2012. This was after Lake began appearing on various programs in which she expressed a desire to return to the genre. Lake competed on the 13th season of Dancing with the Stars. She was partnered with three-time champion Derek Hough and cited Kirstie Alley's appearance as an inspiration to do the show. Lake achieved tremendous success, consistently achieving high scores. After making the finals, Lake was announced as the contestant in third place, losing to television personality Rob Kardashian and actor and Army veteran J. R. Martinez, despite having higher scores than either.

On April 20, 2011, Lake signed with Twentieth Television to develop The Ricki Lake Show, which premiered in September 2012. The new program had a more Oprah-like format as compared to her earlier talk show. It was cancelled after one season. Lake won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host in 2013.

On December 7, 2016, Lake made a cameo in the television musical Hairspray Live! On February 11, 2017, Lake appeared as a guest judge on the British talent show Let It Shine with Gary Barlow, Dannii Minogue, and Martin Kemp on the BBC. On February 17, 2018, Lake appeared on the British television show Through the Keyhole hosted by Keith Lemon.

In March 2018, at SXSW, Lake and Epstein premiered their documentary film Weed the People, examining the use of cannabis as medicine and its status as a Schedule I prohibited drug in the United States. The film focused in particular on the use of cannabis in the treatment of pediatric cancer.

On February 6, 2019, she was revealed to be "Raven" in the Fox series The Masked Singer during its first season. She performed "Rainbow" by Kesha, "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga and "Brave" by Sara Bareilles. In October 2019, she began competing in The X Factor: Celebrity.

On October 28, Ricki made a guest appearance on the ITV Daytime program Loose Women. Ricki was said to be a last minute addition to the panel with one of the original panellists off sick at short notice.

In 2022, Lake launched a podcast, Raised by Ricki, in collaboration with Lemonada Media. Lake and co-host Kalen Allen discuss previous episodes of Ricki Lake and interview celebrity guests.

Personal life
Lake has discussed drastic weight changes in interviews, including swings of up to 100 pounds and extreme diets that left her "fainting on, like, the spot. I'd be standing up and then, black out, and not remember anything."

Lake met illustrator Rob Sussman in October 1993, on Halloween. The couple married in Las Vegas on March 26, 1994. They have two sons: Milo Sebastian Sussman (born 1997), and Owen Tyler Sussman, whose water birth, in 2001, was shown in The Business of Being Born, which Lake also produced. The couple filed for divorce in August 2003; it was finalized on February 25, 2004.

In November 1994, Lake was arrested for staging an anti-fur demonstration against Karl Lagerfeld.

Lake began dating jewelry designer Christian Evans in mid-2009. They became engaged in August 2011, and married on April 8, 2012. On October 29, 2014, Lake filed for divorce from Evans, citing "irreconcilable differences". In December 2014, however, they announced they had put their divorce on hold; it was finalized in 2015.

On September 18, 2010, Lake's rented Malibu home was destroyed by a fire. She and her sons escaped without injury.

On January 15, 2011, Lake finished in sixth place in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Luxury Ladies Poker Event, collecting $5,587 of the prize pool.

On January 1, 2020, Lake posted a picture on her social media accounts, in which she revealed that she had been dealing with hair loss that had resulted from years of depression, weight loss, pregnancy, and the use of chemicals in her hair dating back to her work in Hairspray (Lake confirmed that it was her actual hair that was used during the filming: "I went from Hairspray to 'Hairless'"), which caused her to finally cut her receding hair and then reveal her new buzz-cut (she also noted that her first talk show, in which they did outrageous hairstyle episodes, was another factor in her decision). Lake said the struggle had been "debilitating, embarrassing, painful, scary, depressing, lonely," noting that "there have been a few times where I have even felt suicidal over it. Almost no one in my life knew the level of deep pain and trauma I was experiencing". Lake assured everyone that she had not been diagnosed with other medical conditions related to the hair loss, and wanted to embrace her new look, saying that "I am liberated. I am free. I am releasing and letting go. I am brave. I am beautiful. I am love".

In February 2021 she announced that she was engaged to Ross Burningham. They married in January 2022.

title: Ricki Lake


text:
Media circus

Media circus is a colloquial metaphor, or idiom, describing a news event for which the level of media coverage—measured by such factors as the number of reporters at the scene and the amount of material broadcast or published—is perceived to be excessive or out of proportion to the event being covered. Coverage that is sensationalistic can add to the perception the event is the subject of a media circus. The term is meant to critique the coverage of the event by comparing it to the spectacle and pageantry of a circus. Usage of the term in this sense became common in the 1970s. It can also be called a media feeding frenzy or just media frenzy, especially when the media coverage itself is covered.

History

Although the idea is older, the term media circus began to appear around the mid-1970s. An early example is from the 1976 book by author Lynn Haney, in which she writes about a romance in which the athlete Chris Evert was involved: "Their courtship, after all, had been a 'media circus.'" A few years later The Washington Post had a similar courtship example in which it reported, "Princess Grace herself is still traumatized by the memory of her own media-circus wedding to Prince Rainier in 1956."

Media circuses make up the central plot device in the 1951 movie Ace in the Hole about a self-interested reporter who, covering a mine disaster, allows a man to die trapped underground. It cynically examines the relationship between the media and the news they report. The movie was subsequently re-issued as The Big Carnival, with "carnival" referring to what we now call a "circus". In the film, the disaster attracts campers including a real circus. The movie was based on real-life Floyd Collins who in 1925 was trapped in a Kentucky cave drawing so much media attention that it became the third largest media event between the two World Wars (the other two being Lindbergh's solo flight and the Lindbergh kidnapping).

Examples
Events described as a media circus include:

Aruba

 * The disappearance, and assumed killing, of Natalee Holloway committed by Joran van der Sloot (2005–)

Australia

 * The Azaria Chamberlain disappearance of 2-month-old baby in outback Australia (1980)
 * The Beaconsfield Mine collapse (2006)
 * 2009 Violence against Indians in Australia controversy
 * Schapelle Corby Drug smuggler (2014)

Brazil

 * The murder of Isabella Nardoni (2008)

Canada

 * Albert Johnson aka Mad Trapper of Rat River, a trapper fleeing RCMP concerning a dispute with local indigenous over trapping rights evades a manhunt for a month over 240 km, ending in a shootout at a cabin (1932)
 * Conrad Black, business magnate of newspapers, convicted of fraud, embezzlement and corporate destruction, imprisoned in Florida (2007)
 * Toronto mayor Rob Ford's life, including his usage of drugs, alcohol and involvement with organized crime (2013)
 * Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka (serial killers) convicted for the murders of Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy, and Kristen French (1987–1992)
 * Omar Khadr (detained as a minor at Guantanamo Bay in 2001, transferred to Canada in 2012, released in May 2015)
 * Luka Magnotta Rocco, who murdered his Chinese-national roommate and mailed his remains to schools and public offices in 2012 before fleeing to Germany where he was arrested.
 * Fatal traffic accident of the Neville-Lake children and their grandfather (2015)

Chile

 * 2010 Copiapó mining accident (2010)

Colombia

 * The Death of Luis Andres Colmenares (2010)

India

 * Sheena Bora murder case
 * Death of Sushant Singh Rajput

Indonesia

 * Miss Universe Indonesia 2023 sexual abuse scandal (2023)

Italy

 * Murder of Maurizio Gucci, by hitmen ordered by ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani (1995)
 * Amanda Knox (convicted of the murder of Meredith Kercher; her conviction was subsequently overturned) (2015)

Japan

 * Murder of Shiori Ino

Malaysia

 * Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (2014)

Peru

 * Joran van der Sloot and the murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez (2010)

Philippines

 * Assassination of a Spanish landowner by a Filipino laborer in Negros in 1890, which was covered by Spanish-owned newspapers in Manila in the year's first half.
 * Cabading killings (1961), a case wherein a father killed his family and his son-in-law before killing himself.
 * Murder of Lucila Lalu (1967)
 * In the 1990s, there were reports on an alleged notorious killer in Negros Oriental targeting women, although these accounts were never confirmed.
 * Vizconde massacre (1991)
 * Pepsi Number Fever 349 incident (1992)
 * Murders of Eileen Sarmenta and Allan Gomez (1993)
 * Manila Film Festival scandal (1994)
 * Execution of Flor Contemplacion (1995)
 * Chiong murder case (1997)
 * Murder of Nida Blanca (2001)
 * Vhong Navarro assault incident (2014)

Romania

 * Disappearance and alleged murder of Elodia Ghinescu, especially on OTV, which aired a couple hundred episodes on the matter (2007)

South Africa

 * Oscar Pistorius on trial for death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp (2013–2014)

South Korea

 * Suicide and funeral of K-pop star and Shinee member Kim Jong-hyun (2017)

Spain

 * The Alcàsser case (1992)
 * The Wanninkhof-Carabantes case (1999–2006)
 * The disappearance of Marta del Castillo (2009–2013)
 * The murder of Asunta Basterra (2013)
 * The disappearance and murder of Diana Quer (2016–2018)
 * The murder of Gabriel Cruz (2018)

Thailand

 * Tham Luang cave rescue (2018)

Ukraine

 * Mykola Melnychenko's involvement in the Cassette Scandal (1999–2000)

United Kingdom

 * The McLibel case (1997)
 * The disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2008)
 * The life, career, death and funeral of Jade Goody (2009)
 * The News International phone hacking scandal
 * The Charlie Gard case (2017)
 * "Megxit" feud between Meghan Markle/Prince Harry and the royal family (2020–2023)
 * The public absence and cancer diagnosis of Kate Middleton (2023-2024)

United States

 * The 1924 murder trials of Beulah Annan, Belva Gærtner, and several other female suspects in Chicago, adapted into the Chicago franchise by a newspaper reporter
 * The 1932 kidnapping of toddler Charles Lindbergh Jr. Journalist H. L. Mencken described the incident as "the biggest story since the Resurrection".
 * The early 1930s string of public enemies, ranging from mafia leaders such as Al Capone to smaller-time gangsters, most enduringly famously Bonnie and Clyde
 * The 1954 trial of Sam Sheppard. The U.S. Supreme Court held "massive, pervasive, and prejudicial publicity" prevented him from receiving a fair trial
 * The 1965 littering trial against singer Arlo Guthrie and Richard Robbins, deliberately turned into a local media circus by arresting officer William Obanhein to deter others from repeating their actions
 * Coverage of the investigation and trial of the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and four others by the Manson family
 * The murder of John Lennon in December 1980.
 * David Gelman, Peter Greenberg, et al. in Newsweek on January 31, 1977: "Brooklyn born photographer and film producer Lawrence Schiller managed to make himself the sole journalist to witness the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah....In the Gilmore affair, he was like a ringmaster in what became a media circus, with sophisticated newsmen scrambling for what he had to offer"
 * The rescue of baby Jessica McClure (1987)
 * The Central Park jogger case (1989)
 * The O. J. Simpson murder case (1994–1995)
 * The Blizzard of '96 (1996), "...this storm ...so hyped by the media in the same way that the O. J. Simpson murder case became hyped as the "Trial of the century"
 * The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal (1998)
 * The Elián González custody conflict (2000)
 * The Summer of the Shark (2001)
 * The trial of Scott Peterson for the murder of his wife Laci Peterson (2004), "The circus became even more raucous when Peterson went on trial for murder in 2004"
 * The trial of Martha Stewart (2004), "The stone-faced Stewart never broke stride as she cut a path through the media circus"
 * The Runaway bride case (2005)
 * The disappearance of Stacy Peterson (2007)
 * The alleged teenage "pregnancy pact" at Gloucester High School (2008)
 * The Casey Anthony murder trial (2011), "Once again, it was relentless media coverage that in large part fed the fascination with the case", Ford observed
 * The killing of Trayvon Martin (2012), "Here is where the media circus takes a decidedly ugly turn", Eric Deggans wrote
 * The murder of Travis Alexander (2013), where Jodi Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder
 * The Killing of Cecil the lion (2015)
 * Opposition to and protests against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and the proceedings of his Confirmation Hearings (2018)
 * The murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed (2020)
 * The Killing of Gabby Petito (2021)
 * The Casey White prison escape (2022)
 * Will Smith slapping Chris Rock (2022)
 * The Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial (2022)
 * The 2022 University of Idaho killings (2022)
 * The various scandals surrounding George Santos (2022–2023)
 * The trial of Alex Murdaugh (2023)
 * Indictment of Donald Trump in New York (2023)
 * Coverage of the 2024 United States presidential election, the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, and incidents surrounding incumbent president Joe Biden (2024)

title: Media circus


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2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida

The 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Bush's win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.

Background
The controversy began on election night, November 7, 2000, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling, first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the peninsula (in the Eastern time zone) but about ten minutes before they closed in the heavily Republican counties of the panhandle (in the Central time zone). Later in the evening, the networks reversed their call, moving to "too close to call", then later giving it to Bush; then they retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call". Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the Florida count was.

Bush led the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. The small margin produced an automatic recount under Florida state law, which began the day after the election. That first day's results reduced the margin to just over 900 votes. Once it became clear that Florida would decide the presidential election, the nation's attention focused on the manual recount.

Recount
The Florida election was closely scrutinized after Election Day. Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount, which began the day after the election. It was ostensibly completed on November 10 in the 66 Florida counties that used vote-counting machines and reduced Bush's lead to 327 votes. According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that a total of 18 counties—accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida—did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed.

Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. On November 9, the Bush campaign announced they had hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker and Republican political consultant Roger Stone to oversee their legal team, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

Following the machine recount, the Gore campaign requested a manual recount in four counties. Florida state law at the time allowed a candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts. The county canvassing board was then to decide whether to do a recount, as well as the method of the recount, in those three precincts. If the board discovered an error that in its judgment could affect the outcome of the election, they were then authorized to do a full recount of the ballots. This statutory process primarily accommodated recounts for local elections. The Gore campaign requested that disputed ballots in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties be counted by hand. Volusia County started its recount on November 12. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5:00 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and it soon became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline. On November 13 the Gore campaign and Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have the deadlines extended.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign worked to stop the recount. On November 11, it joined a group of Florida voters in suing in federal district court for a preemptive injunction to stop all manual recounting of votes in Florida. Bush's lawyers argued that recounting votes in just four counties violated the 14th Amendment and also that similarly punched ballots could be tabulated differently since Florida had no detailed statutory standards for hand-counting votes. On November 13, the federal court ruled against an injunction.

On November 14, the original deadline for reporting results, with the Volusia County recount complete, Bush held a 300-vote lead. The same day, a state judge upheld that deadline but ruled that further recounts could be considered later. Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican, then gave counties until 2:00 p.m. on November 15 to provide reasons for recounting their ballots. The next day, the Florida Supreme Court allowed manual recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties to continue but left it to a state judge to decide whether Harris must include those votes in the final tally. Miami-Dade County decided on November 17 to conduct a recount but suspended it on November 22. The Gore campaign sued to force Miami-Dade County to continue its recount, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to consider the request.

As the manual recounts continued, the battle to certify the results intensified. On November 17, Judge Terry Lewis of Leon County Circuit Court permitted Harris to certify the election results without the manual recounts, but on the same day the Florida Supreme Court stayed that decision until it could consider an appeal by Gore. On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that manual counts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties must be included and set 5:00 p.m. on November 26 as the earliest time for certification. After that decision, the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state court effectively rewrote state election statutes after the vote.

As the manual recounts progressed, most of Florida's counties were considering overseas absentee ballots. That part of the vote count was completed on November 18, increasing Bush's lead to 930 votes. The Palm Beach County recount and the Miami-Dade County recount (having been suspended) were still incomplete at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, when Harris certified the statewide vote count with Bush ahead by 537 votes. The next day, Gore sued under Florida's statutory construct of the "contest phase". On November 28, Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County Circuit Court rejected Gore's request to include the recount results from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Gore appealed that decision to the Florida Supreme Court. On December 8, the Florida justices, by a 4–3 vote, rejected the selective use of manual recounts in just four counties and ordered immediate manual recounts of all ballots in the state where no vote for president had been machine-recorded, also known as undervotes.

The U.S. Supreme Court convened on December 1 to consider Bush's appeal.

On December 4, Sauls rejected Gore's contest of the election result; Gore appealed. Also on December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its ruling that had extended the certification date.

On December 6, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature convened a special session to appoint a slate of electors pledged to Bush, as the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to determine how its state's electors are appointed.

On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.

On December 12, the same day as the U.S. Supreme Court Bush v. Gore ruling, the Florida House approved awarding the state's electoral votes to Bush, but the matter was moot after the Court's ruling. Some have argued (using the independent state legislature theory) that awarding the electors in this manner would be illegal.

On December 13, Gore conceded the election to Bush in a nationally televised address.

During the recount, controversy ensued with the discovery of various irregularities that had occurred in the voting process in several counties. Among these was the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot", which resulted in an unusually high number of votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. Conservatives claimed that the same ballot had been successfully used in the 1996 election; in fact, it had never been used in a Palm Beach County election among rival candidates for office, but only for referenda. Also, before the election, the Secretary of State's office ordered county election officials to expunge tens of thousands of citizens identified as felons from the Florida voting rolls, using a list that later demonstrated error levels of 15% or greater. Blacks were identified on some counties' lists at up to five times their share of the population. A December 4 article exposing flaws in the process correctly claimed that many of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law. The demographics of the list strongly suggested that, of those who were wrongly on the list and thus should have been able to vote, an overwhelming number of Blacks would have chosen the Democratic nominee.

Additionally, this Florida election produced many more "overvotes" than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval County (Jacksonville), where some 21,000 ballots had multiple markings, such as two or more choices for president. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, the Duval County ballot spread choices for president over two non-facing pages. At the same time that the Bush campaign was contesting hand recounts in Democratic counties, it accepted hand recounts in Republican counties that gained it 185 votes, including where Republican Party workers had been permitted to correct errors on thousands of applications for Republicans' absentee ballots.

Political commentator and author Jeff Greenfield observed that the Republican operatives in Florida talked and acted like combat platoon sergeants in what one called "switchblade time", the biggest political fight of the century. On the other hand, he said, Democrats talked like referees with a fear of pushing too hard, not wanting to be seen as sore losers. "While Democrats did make their way down to Florida, there was nothing like the certainty or the passion that ignited Republicans. The only exception: African-Americans. For all the furor over Palm Beach, it was black precincts where voters had been turned away, denied a ballot because some had been mislabeled as felons, blocked from voting because of bureaucratic bungles, or because the huge increase in black turnout had overwhelmed local officials. For those with memories going back four decades, all this was no accident. It was instead a painful reminder of the days when the battle for the ballot was, literally, a life-and-death matter. At an NAACP-sponsored hearing in Miami four days after the election, prospective voters told of police cars blocking the way to the polls, of voters harassed by election workers. It was anecdotal evidence at best, and local authorities argued persuasively that the police presence near a polling place was pure coincidence. Such explanations did little to lessen the sense of anger among black Democrats."

Controversial issues
Various flaws and improprieties in Florida's electoral processes were immediately apparent, while others were reported after later investigation. Controversies included:
 * All five major U.S. TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) assumed that they could confidently call a winner in any state "where the vast majority of polls had closed", based on history. No call in a state with two different poll-closing times had ever turned out wrong. While most of Florida is in the Eastern time zone, polls in the westernmost counties in Florida were open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they are in the Central time zone. The network calls were made about ten minutes before the polls in the Central time zone closed, based on the Voter News Service calling the state of Florida for Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who might not have voted due to the networks' call as high as 15,000, which could have reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes; a study by conservative researcher John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes. This survey assumed that the turnout in the Panhandle counties, which was 65%, would have equaled the statewide average of 68% if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. But the relatively smaller turnout percentage in the Panhandle has been attributed to the surge in the black vote elsewhere in Florida to 16% of the total, from 10% of the total in 1996. Research conducted by Henry Brady and David Collier strongly disputed Lott and McLaughlin's findings. Brady and Collier were sharply critical of Lott's methodology and claimed when all relevant factors are accounted for, Bush was likely cost only between 28 and 56 votes. In a 2010 television special by the TV Guide Network, the "2000 Election Flip Flop Coverage" ranked #3 on a list of the 25 biggest TV blunders, having caused news outlets to change the way they report on election night.
 * Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up roadblocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election. The Voting Section of the U. S. Department of Justice later investigated reports from the Tallahassee and Tampa areas and concluded that there was no evidence that roadblocks were related to the election or had occurred in close proximity to voting places.
 * On November 8, Florida Division of Elections staff prepared a press release for Secretary of State Katherine Harris that said overseas ballots must be "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day. It was never released. Harris did send out a letter saying that absentee ballots without postmarks must be discarded, but Florida's attorney general subsequently said they should not be. On November 13, Harris issued her first statement on overseas ballots, saying that they had to be "executed" on or before Election Day, not "postmarked on or prior to" Election Day.  Over Thanksgiving, 14 county boards decided to include 288 overseas ballots that had been rejected days earlier, an act dubbed the "Thanksgiving stuffing".
 * On November 14, Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo on how to challenge flawed ballots, including overseas ballots cast by members of the military. It gave postmark and "point of origin" criteria that Herron maintained could be used to challenge overseas ballots. It was in line with a letter Harris sent stating that if an overseas ballot had no postmark, it had to be thrown out. Meanwhile, Republicans relied on their own 52-page manual for the same purpose. But on November 19, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore supporter, later told the counties to reconsider ballots without a postmark. Before that, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce postmark requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots from overseas, which were predominantly for Bush. In contrast, Republicans pursued a strategy of disqualifying overseas ballots in counties that favored Gore and pressuring elections officials to include flawed overseas ballots in Bush counties.
 * A suit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. A settlement agreement was reached in this suit with ChoicePoint, the owner of DBT Online, a contractor involved in preparing Florida's voter roll purge list.
 * Four counties distributed sample ballots to voters that differed from the actual ballot used on election day, including Duval County, which used a caterpillar ballot, so called because the list of presidential candidates stretched over two pages. The instructions on the sample ballots said "Vote every page". More than 20% of ballots in black precincts of Duval County were rejected because of votes for president on each page. Further, counties and precincts with large black populations disproportionately had technologies where ballots would predictably go uncounted. In punch-card counties, 1 in 25 ballots had uncountable presidential votes, while counties that used paper ballots scanned by computers at voting places (to give voters a chance to correct their ballot if it had an error) had just 1 in 200 uncountable ballots. A systematic investigation by the United States Commission on Civil Rights concluded that although blacks made up 11% of Florida's voting population, they cast 54% of the uncounted ballots.
 * Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state, Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, contracted with DBT Online Inc., at a cost of $4.294 million, to have the "scrub lists" reworked. In a May 2000 list, over 57,000 voters were identified as felons, and counties were ordered to remove all listed names from their voting rolls. Democrats claimed that many simply had names similar to actual felons, some listed "felonies" were dated years in the future, and some were random. Some counties refused to use the list, finding it error-ridden. In other counties, supervisors of elections notified those at risk of being scrubbed, giving them a chance to prove they were not felons, which a small number did. In most cases, those on the scrub list were not told that they were not allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls. An estimated 15% of the names on the county lists were in error. Florida was the only state in the nation to contract the first stage of removal of voting rights to a private company and did so with directions not to use cross-checks or the company's sophisticated verification plan.
 * Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was ultimately responsible for oversight of the state's elections and certification of the results, even though she had served as a co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida. Furthermore, George W. Bush's brother Jeb Bush was serving his first of two terms as the governor of Florida at the time. Although Jeb Bush recused himself from involvement in the recount, Democrats alleged there was still an appearance of possible impropriety.
 * Some observers, such as Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen, have argued that Florida violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and who had their rights restored by said states) to request clemency and a restoration of their rights from the governor, a process that could take two years and ultimately was left to the governor's discretion. In 1998, Schlenther v. Florida Department of State held that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his right to vote.
 * The Brooks Brothers riot: A raucous demonstration by several dozen paid activists, mostly Republican House aides from Washington, flown in at Republican Party expense to protest Miami-Dade County's manual recount. The recount was shut down a couple hours after the screaming protesters arrived at the county offices, where they began pounding on the doors, chanting and threatening to bring in a thousand Republicans from the Cuban-American community. Some Republicans contend that their demonstration was peaceful and was in response to the Miami-Dade election board's decision to move the ballot counting to a smaller room closer to the ballot-scanning machines to speed up the process. The election board consisted of three appointees, Myriam Lehr and David Leahy, who were Independents, and Lawrence King, a Democrat. After the demonstration, which took place in view of multiple national network television cameras, the election board reversed its decision to recount ballots, determining that it could not do so by the court-issued deadline. The Republican representatives involved in the recount effort credit this demonstration, dubbed the "Brooks Brothers Riot" because of the suits and Hermès ties the Republican operatives wore, as a key factor in "preventing the stealing of the 2000 presidential election".
 * The suppression of vote pairing. Several websites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas. For example, Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore, and Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This was intended to allow Nader to get his fair share of the vote, perhaps meeting the threshold to allow the Green Party to participate in the presidential debates in the 2004 election, while helping Gore carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the websites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them to shut down. The ACLU became involved in a legal effort to protect the sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Jones seven years later. The vote-pairing sites allegedly tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who voted for Gore.
 * The actions of the Florida Supreme Court. At the time, six of the Court's seven justices were Democratic appointees. It was argued, particularly by Republicans, that the court was exceeding its authority and issuing partisan rulings biased in Gore's favor. On November 17, the court acted "on its own motion" to stay official certification of the election until it could hear Gore's appeal of Harris's decision to reject late-filed hand recounts, while specifically allowing counting of absentee and other ballots to continue, an action the Gore legal team did not request. Similarly, in 4–3 decision on December 8, the court ordered a statewide counting of undervotes, which Gore's team had also not requested. Among other Republicans, James Baker called this ruling "inconsistent with Florida law", on which basis Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats argued that the Florida Supreme Court was simply trying to ensure a fair and accurate count.
 * While the Bush campaign opposed the Gore campaign's requests for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties, it quietly accepted manual recounts in four Republican-leaning counties. Polk, Hamilton, Seminole, and Taylor, which used the more reliable optical scanners and manually examined unreadable ballots (both undervotes and overvotes) during the electronic recounts in accordance with those counties' existing policies (see County-by-county standards below). These manual counts gained Bush 185 votes.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot

Many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots because they found the ballot's layout confusing. The ballot displayed the list of presidential running-mate pairs alternately across two adjacent pages, with a column of punch spaces down the middle. Bush's name appeared at the top of the ballot, sparing most Bush voters from error. About 19,000 ballots were spoiled because of overvotes (two votes in the same race), compared to 3,000 in 1996. According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida."

On November 9, 2000, Buchanan said on The Today Show, "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore."

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9 that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there". Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, called that "nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded: "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated that Palm Beach County's Buchanan supporters numbered between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said: "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."

The ballot had been redesigned earlier that year by Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, a member of the Democratic Party. She said that she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger, so that the county's elderly residents could see the names more easily.

Florida Supreme Court appeals

The case of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris (also known as Harris I) was a lawsuit about whether county canvassing boards had authority to extend manual recounts in order to inspect ballots for which the machine counter did not register a vote. The court ruled that counties had that authority, and to allow time for these efforts, extended the statutory deadline for the manual recounts. It also stayed the state certification to November 26.

There were two main issues:
 * Whether the county canvassing boards' authority to conduct manual recounts to correct "errors in the vote tabulation" extended to efforts to remedy situations where machines, though perhaps correctly functioning to detect properly marked ballots, did not count votes on certain ballots on which votes might be found under a manual inspection with an "intent of the voter" standard (Harris had ruled that it did not); and
 * How such recounts in the case at hand could be made to fit into the statutory scheme, which, as Harris interpreted it, contemplated a quick certification followed, if necessary, by an election contest during which a court (rather than the canvassing boards) would be empowered to correct errors.

Regarding the first issue, the court ruled that, while Harris was generally entitled to deference in her interpretation of state laws, in this case the interpretation "contravene[d] the plain meaning" of the phrase "error in the vote tabulation" and so must be overturned.

Regarding the second issue, the court ruled that the statutory scheme must be interpreted in light of the Florida state constitution's declaration that "all political power is inherent in the people," with any ambiguities therefore construed "liberally." Preventing the canvassing boards from continuing to conduct recounts beyond the seven-day timeframe (specified in the law, but with ambiguity as to how firm it was intended to be), would "summarily disenfranchise innocent electors [voters]" and could not be allowed unless the recounts continued for so long as to "compromise the integrity of the electoral process." The court ordered counties to submit returns by November 26, until which time the stay of certification would stand.

Aside from this case, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily Democratic counties would be unfair.

Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered the recount to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore.

At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, rejected Gore's original four-county approach and ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of all undervoted ballots in all Florida counties (except Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia) and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live worldwide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 26 tally.

U.S. Supreme Court proceedings
The recount was in progress on December 9 when the United States Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting), granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount. About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. By a 5–4 vote the justices reversed and remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court "for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion", prior to the optional "safe harbor" deadline which the Florida court had said the state intended to meet. With only two hours remaining until the December 12 deadline, the Supreme Court's order effectively ended the recount.

The decision was extremely controversial due to its partisan split and the majority's unusual instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore said he disagreed with the Court's decision, but conceded the election.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's certification of the election results was thus upheld, allowing Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him president-elect.

Florida counties' recount decisions
Florida Attorney General Robert Butterworth in his advisory opinion to county canvassing boards wrote:

"The longstanding case law in Florida [ ] has held that the intent of the voters as shown by their ballots should be given effect. Where a ballot is so marked as to plainly indicate the voter's choice and intent, it should be counted as marked unless some positive provision of law would be violated. As the state has moved toward electronic voting, nothing in this evolution has diminished the standards first articulated in such [judicial] decisions ... that the intent of the voter is of paramount concern and should be given effect if the voter has complied with the statutory requirement and that intent may be determined. ... The Florida Statutes contemplate that where electronic or electromechanical voting systems are used, no vote is to be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the county canvassing board." Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan in a contemporaneous article:

"There is a real issue here about what voting actually means. To some, voting is a right that should be guaranteed regardless of any incompetence, error, failure, or irresponsibility on the part of the voter. ... Others have a different view. They argue that American democracy is ... a far stricter, Lockean, Anglo-American system based on the letter of the law and a successful vote cast by a rational, responsible voter. In this constitutional system, the 'will of the people' is an irrelevant abstraction. ... From affirmative action and hate-crime laws it's a small step to ensuring that all voters, however negligent, have their intent, however vague, reflected in the final result of an election."

Florida Code Section 101.5614[5] states that no vote "shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." A physical mark on a ballot, at or near a designated target, is such an indication.

Post-election studies
According to factcheck.org, "Nobody can say for sure who might have won. A full, official recount of all votes statewide could have gone either way, but one was never conducted." CNN and PBS reported that, had the recount continued with its existing standards, Bush would likely have still tallied more votes, but variations of those standards (and/or of which precincts were recounted) could have swung the election either way. They also concluded that had a full recount of all undervotes and overvotes taken place, Gore would have won, though his legal team never pursued such an option.

NORC-sponsored Florida Ballot Project recount
The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of ballots collected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted. NORC investigators were able to examine 175,010 ballots, 99.2% of Florida's total, but county officials were unable to deliver "as many as 2,200 problem ballots" to NORC. Some counties produced their rejected ballots by rerunning all ballots through tabulation machines but were unable to deliver all problem ballots because machines accepted more ballots than previously certified and rejected fewer. The project ended up using a sample that was 1,333 votes fewer than the expected total of votes, with most of the variation in Votomatic overvotes, the ballots least likely to yield votes in a recount. The 175,010 ballots examined contained undervotes (votes with no choice made for president) and overvotes (votes made with more than one choice marked). The organization analyzed 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes. Of the overvotes, 68,476 chose Gore and a minor candidate; 23,591 chose Bush and a minor candidate. Because there was no clear indication of what the voters intended, those numbers were not included in the consortium's final tabulations.

The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The review's findings were reported in the media during the week after November 12, 2001, by the organizations that funded the recount: Associated Press, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and Tribune Publishing, which included the Los Angeles Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune.

Based on the NORC review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes (with, for each punch ballot, at least two of the three ballot reviewers' codes being in agreement). The standards that were chosen for the NORC study ranged from a "most restrictive" standard (accepts only so-called perfect ballots that machines somehow missed and did not count, or ballots with unambiguous expressions of voter intent) to a "most inclusive" standard (applies a uniform standard of "dimple or better" on punch marks and "all affirmative marks" on optical scan ballots).

An analysis of the NORC data by University of Pennsylvania researcher Steven F. Freeman and journalist Joel Bleifuss concluded that, no matter what standard is used, after a recount of all uncounted votes, Gore would have been the victor. Such a statewide review including all uncounted votes was a tangible possibility, as Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, whom the Florida Supreme Court had assigned to oversee the statewide recount, had scheduled a hearing for December 13 (mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court's final ruling on December 12) to consider including overvotes. Subsequent statements by Lewis and internal court documents support the likelihood that overvotes would have been included in the recount. Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit". Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supported these interpretations and criticized the coverage of the study by media outlets such as The New York Times and the other media consortium members for focusing on how events might have played out rather than on the statewide vote count.

The NORC was expecting 176,446 uncounted ballots to be available from Florida's counties, based on county precinct reports that produced the final, state-certified vote totals.

Orange County presented fewer rejected ballots to the NORC than expected. When the county segregated all ballots by machine for the NORC review, 512 previously rejected ballots were determined to be completely valid. Orange County then performed a hand segregation and determined that these votes numbered 184 for Bush, 249 for Gore and 79 for other candidates.

The NORC adjusted its analysis for the Orange County results and a few minor differences by increasing the starting baseline vote total by 535 votes. In addition, some counties had provided an extra 432 total ballots, while others produced 1,333 fewer ballots than expected. As adjusted, 176,343 ballots were expected, compared to 175,010 ballots actually provided to the NORC for review. The county-level variance from the total number of ballots was 0.76%. Thus the project included a sample within less than 1% of the expected total of votes.

Only a fourth of the variance consisted of optical ballots. Most of the variation occurred in Votomatic overvotes, the least likely ballots to yield votes in a recount. Among the nearly 85,000 Votomatic overvotes in the sample, only 721 reclaimable votes were confirmed in the NORC study.

Media recounts
From the beginning of the controversy, politicians, litigants and the press focused exclusively on the undervotes, in particular incompletely punched chads. Undervotes (ballots that did not register any vote when counted by machine) were the subject of much media coverage, most of the lawsuits and the Florida Supreme Court ruling. After the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations continued to focus on undervotes. Based on the review of these ballots, their results indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision), but that Gore might have won under other standards and scenarios. The post-controversy recounts revealed that, "if a manual recount had been limited to undervotes, it would have produced an inaccurate picture of the electorate's position."

USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today, show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore's margin was three votes. Under the other standards used in the study, Bush's margin of victory increased as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:
 * Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush margin: 1,665 votes.
 * Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush margin: 884 votes.
 * Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush margin: 363 votes.
 * Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore margin: 3 votes.

The study notes that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore would have won under the strict standard or that a high degree of certainty obtained in the study's results. It also remarks that there were variations between examiners and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots that registered more than one vote when counted by machine.

The study also found that undervotes originating in optical-scan counties differ from those from punch card counties in a particular characteristic. Undervotes from punch card counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes, and in particular to counties that scanned ballots at a central location rather than at precinct locations. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.

Some media reports focused on undervotes (chad blocked hole, wrong ink or pencil used, partial oval mark not detected, humidity affected scanner, ballot feeder misalignment), while others also included overvotes (hole punched or oval filled plus a write-in name, other multi-marked ballots). A larger consortium of news organizations, including USA Today, The Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, The Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all machine-rejected ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. The organization analyzed 171,908 ballots (60,647 undervotes and 111,261 overvotes), 3102 less than the later NORC study. According to their results, Bush won under stricter standards and Gore won under looser standards. A Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request; however, faxes between Judge Terry Lewis and the canvassing boards throughout the state indicated that Lewis, who oversaw the recount effort, intended to have overvotes counted.

According to the study, 3146 (3%) of the 111,261 examined overvotes "contained clear and therefore legally valid votes not counted in any of the manual recounts during the dispute." According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential ballot was split across two pages and voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this alone cost Gore the election.

Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:
 * Lenient standard. Gore margin: 332 votes.
 * Palm Beach standard. Gore margin: 242 votes.
 * Two-corner standard. Bush margin: 407 votes.
 * Strict standard. Bush margin: 152 votes.

The overvotes with write-in names were also noted by Florida State University public policy professor and elections observer, Lance deHaven-Smith, in his interview with Research in Review at Florida State University:

 * ...Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called "spoiled ballots." About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate's name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there's not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they're unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida's eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore's name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, [sic] while Bush's name was marked on only 17,000... –Lance deHaven-Smith

Furthermore, the Florida Administrative Code: 1S-2.0031, "Write-in Procedures Governing Electronic Voting Systems", (7) at the time specified, "An overvote shall occur when an elector casts a vote on the ballot card and also casts a write-in vote for a qualified write-in candidate for that same office. Upon such an overvote, the entire vote for that office shall be void and shall not be counted. However, an overvote shall not occur when the elector casts a vote on the ballot card but then enters a sham or unqualified name in the write-in space for that same office. In such case, only the write-in vote is void." There were two write-in candidates for president who had been qualified by the state of Florida. Under the FAC, a ballot with any other name written in (including Bush and Gore, who were not qualified as write-in candidates) was not an overvote, but rather a valid vote for the candidate whose name was marked by the voter.

Opinion polling on recount
A nationwide December 14–21, 2000 Harris poll asked, "If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for—with no misleading ballots and infallible voting machines—who do you think would have won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?". The results were 49% for Gore and 40% for Bush, with 11% uncertain or not wishing to respond.

Television film
The Florida recount was the subject of the 2008 television film Recount, which aired on HBO. Directed by Jay Roach, it starred Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, Bob Balaban as Benjamin Ginsberg, Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies, Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, John Hurt as Warren Christopher, Denis Leary as Michael Whouley, Bruce McGill as Mac Stipanovich, and Tom Wilkinson as James Baker. It won Outstanding Television Movie at the Primetime Emmy Awards, with Roach winning Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special, and Dern a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

Archives

 * Jonathan Rosenblum Papers. 1993-2006. 1 cubic foot (1 box). At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. Contains records of Rosenblum's assistance in ballot recount efforts in November 2000.