How do you count ballots? Do they count if the machine doesn’t fully remove the hole? Do they count if a voter originally marked the wrong spot and then marked another, leaving two bullets filled? Which count of the votes is the final one? Do concessions have legal weight? Questions like these are widely believed to be those that determined the presidential election in 2000, and have as such gotten plentiful heartfelt discussion.

However, there is one other key factor that impacted the result of the election in the pivotal state of Florida which gets far too little discussion: ‘countless’ people turned away at the polls and wrongfully removed from the voter registration rolls. There is also reason to believe that those impacted were disproportionately voters of color, making this a civil rights problem of multiple levels, with both the right of people to vote and the right of people to be free from discrimination on the basis of race being infringed upon. Testimonies from poll workers and anecdotal stories from voters confirm both of these occurrences, as well as telling a story of polling places that were not even open for the whole legally established period for voting. Numbers also reflect voter disenfranchisement that disproportionately impacted Black voters, with them being more than ten times as likely to have their ballots rejected, even when controlling for the differences in county voter systems. The difference between rejection rates for Black voters compared to others means there were nearly ninety thousand excess rejected ballots from Black voters, beyond what should be expected, indicating a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act. In an election decided by 537 votes in the state, a state whose result determined the president, if the rejections of even one in every hundred of these ballots were illegal or misplaced that could have changed the result of the election, and as such the course of American history.

Throughout this country’s history, suppression of the voices of minority groups has been an enduring sin. In 2000, this was still the case. Even in the modern day, we as a society must make every effort possible to ensure we do not repeat these same moral failings, we must work to ensure that everyone has an equal right to vote regardless of race. 2000 acts as a reminder that this is not a given and that during the lifetimes of every single member of our nation’s Congress, these rights have been impaired.