Both Al Gore and George W. Bush were within 25 electoral votes of the necessary count to win the presidency, so the entire race boiled down to the contest in Florida.
As Dana Milbank of The Washington Post put it: Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County.
At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000.
But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters.
[2][dead link] [citation needed] The significance of the call is highlighted by Philip Meyer in his piece for the USA Today which stated: From then on, nothing Democrats could do would overcome the appearance that they were trying to steal the election on technicalities.