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With assistance from my brother, governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing the election by possibly 500,000 votes.
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Don't you just love the sheer ignorance of the US political system that causes people to say such things? The total, national popular vote is NOT a factor in the election of the President of the US. It never has been. This is completely irrelevant to Bush having won the election.
What causes a person to win the Presidential election is winning a majority of votes in the electoral college, which is NOT based on population directly. It is based on 2 votes per state + X votes based on population. Thus, 100 of the votes have nothing to do with population, but with geography. Many of them come from relatively very low population states. Further befuddling the issue is the fact that many states give their _entire_ electoral vote count to the candidate that wins the election in that state.
These things are what allows discrepencies between total popular vote and winner of the election to occur. Usually, the two go to the same person. But a few times (I think Bush Jr. was the 3rd), it has happened that the national popular vote and the electoral vote do not end up going to the same person. There is nothing illegal or fishy about this, at all. It is how the Presidential election system in the US works. Now, you be of the opinion that it is silly, and the election should be based entirely on the popular vote. You may or may not be right. But, saying that Bush did something wrong in 2000 just because he did not win the popular vote is wrong.
Now, whether Bush did something shady to win the vote in Florida is an entirely separate issue. It should NOT be confused with overall popular vote, which is, again, not related to who wins the US Presidential election. The whole issue was a big mess. Who knows what really happened. Gore did voluntarily cede the election to Bush at the end, so regardless of whether he legitimately won the Florida election, he did win the overall election, due to Gore ceding it to him. There is no contesting that fact.