
Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election
Florida's 2000 recount decided the presidency by 537 votes, and directors Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler go back through the mechanics of how that margin got built. The film follows a private company's purge of Florida's voter rolls, which removed thousands of eligible voters, disproportionately Black, under a felon-matching list riddled with errors. It documents police checkpoints set up near polling places in Black neighborhoods on election day, ballot designs that produced thousands of spoiled or miscounted votes, and the legal fight that ended at the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Interviews with voters turned away at the polls, election officials, and lawyers involved in the recount fill out the record, treating each irregularity as a data point rather than an isolated anecdote. Made for Brave New Films, the documentary builds its case methodically rather than rhetorically, letting the sequence of purges, checkpoints, and court rulings make the argument that the election's outcome was manufactured well before any ballot was recounted.