Pushkin. Good morning. Hope everybody got sleep last night. Thank you for coming. This morning brings news from Florida. The morning after the two thousand election, millions of Americans woke up to find out that the two thousand election was still going on. We still do not know the outcome of yesterday's vote. The presidential race was stuck in limbo. After hurtling towards a conclusion for more than a year,
it had come to an uneasy and bewildering stop. And for the thirty six days that followed, no one in America knew whether the next president would be Al Gore or George W. Bush, or how the winner would even be determined. The vote count is not going to decide this.
We're going to go way beyond into the courtroom. Watched the ensuing battle between the two candidates as if it were a sword fight taking place on a tightrope, except instead of swords, Gore and Bush were wielding obscure legal theories and allegations of partisan bias, and instead of a tightrope, they were navigating the idiosyncrasies of Florida politics. This was bureaucracy weaponized. This is hand to hand political combat. Of a sort that probably we've never seen before, not a
TV series. This is about the constitution, not about a campaign. Where is this going to go? I'm Leon Napok, the host of the new podcast in Fiasco. Nineteen thousand people tried to participate in a democratic election and warrant allowed to This like quiet municipal building turned into a loud, violent protest. With the death threats and with the media surge,
we felt like we were in the trenches. The first season of Fiasco will take you across Florida, from Palm Beach County to the Everglades, to Miami, to Sarasota to Tallahassee. Over the course of six episodes, we will lift up the hood on a strange, dysfunctional machine that was assembled on the fly in the fall of two thousand and was used just this once to resolve a singular and unprecedented stalemate. It's basically impossible to look back at this
story without turning into a Monday morning quarterback. It is amazing the consequences of what seems at first like a fairly small study. There was a sense that we were faced with an attempted soft coupe. What was Fiasco esque was the way the media handled it. Fiasco Bush v. Gore