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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Good morning. Hope everybody got sleep last night. Thank

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Speaker 1: you for coming. This morning brings news from Florida. The

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Speaker 1: morning after the two thousand election, millions of Americans woke

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Speaker 1: up to find out that the two thousand election was

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Speaker 1: still going on. We still do not know the outcome

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Speaker 1: of yesterday's vote. The presidential race was stuck in limbo.

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Speaker 1: After hurtling towards a conclusion for more than a year,

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Speaker 1: it had come to an uneasy and bewildering stop. And

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Speaker 1: for the thirty six days that followed, no one in

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Speaker 1: America knew whether the next president would be Al Gore

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Speaker 1: or George W. Bush, or how the winner would even

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Speaker 1: be determined. The vote count is not going to decide this.

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Speaker 1: We're going to go way beyond into the courtroom. Watched

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Speaker 1: the ensuing battle between the two candidates as if it

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Speaker 1: were a sword fight taking place on a tightrope, except

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Speaker 1: instead of swords, Gore and Bush were wielding obscure legal

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Speaker 1: theories and allegations of partisan bias, and instead of a tightrope,

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Speaker 1: they were navigating the idiosyncrasies of Florida politics. This was

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Speaker 1: bureaucracy weaponized. This is hand to hand political combat. Of

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Speaker 1: a sort that probably we've never seen before, not a

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Speaker 1: TV series. This is about the constitution, not about a campaign.

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Speaker 1: Where is this going to go? I'm Leon Napok, the

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Speaker 1: host of the new podcast in Fiasco. Nineteen thousand people

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Speaker 1: tried to participate in a democratic election and warrant allowed

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Speaker 1: to This like quiet municipal building turned into a loud,

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Speaker 1: violent protest. With the death threats and with the media surge,

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Speaker 1: we felt like we were in the trenches. The first

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Speaker 1: season of Fiasco will take you across Florida, from Palm

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Speaker 1: Beach County to the Everglades, to Miami, to Sarasota to Tallahassee.

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Speaker 1: Over the course of six episodes, we will lift up

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Speaker 1: the hood on a strange, dysfunctional machine that was assembled

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Speaker 1: on the fly in the fall of two thousand and

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Speaker 1: was used just this once to resolve a singular and

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Speaker 1: unprecedented stalemate. It's basically impossible to look back at this

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Speaker 1: story without turning into a Monday morning quarterback. It is

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Speaker 1: amazing the consequences of what seems at first like a

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Speaker 1: fairly small study. There was a sense that we were

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Speaker 1: faced with an attempted soft coupe. What was Fiasco esque

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Speaker 1: was the way the media handled it. Fiasco Bush v.

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Speaker 1: Gore