Nobody today associates Florida election laws with rationality, due process and deliberate speed, but actually, in the third week of November 2000, things were going as well as could be expected at the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board.

On election night, Nov. 7, multiple news outlets had called Florida and its crucial 25 electoral votes for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. A few hours later, the networks retracted their call, moving the state into the too close to call column. Then they awarded it to Republican George W. Bush, only to retract that too. Gore phoned Bush to concede; he later retracted that concession as well. At nights end, Bush led Gore by a meager 1,784 votes, instigating an automatic recount and setting the nation on a knifes edge.

By Nov. 10, a statewide machine recount had narrowed Bushs lead to just 327 votes, and the Gore campaign requested manual recounts in four counties, as allowed under state election law. For the next two weeks, canvassers endeavored to perform that task, peering through thousands of butterfly ballots, hanging chads, dimpled chads, fat chads so many chads under the gaze of national TV cameras. (Chads are the paper fragments created by holes in punch cards.) Lawsuits flew; injunctions were considered and rejected; deadlines were missed; and new, more arbitrary deadlines were set.

By Nov. 17, the outcome of the recount in Miami-Dade County, Floridas most populous, loomed large in determining who would be the next president. Canvassers there had begun a manual recount of more than 650,000 ballots, but up against a court-ordered Nov. 26 deadline, they decided to focus on just the 10,750 ballots that had been unreadable to computer scanners.

And thats when chaos struck. On Nov. 22, under the pretense of an organic uprising of concerned citizens, dozens of paid Republican operatives descended on the recount center, where they shouted and banged on windows, kicking and punching several officials in a violent stampede. The proximate target of their ire was Joe Geller, the chairman of the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party, whom they falsely accused of trying to steal ballots who had, in fact, merely requested a single sample ballot to test the theory that a machine error was responsible for an undercount of Gore votes.

Feel familiar yet?