"The Florida Division of Elections announced the next day that Bush had won the state by 1,784 votes. However, this margin was so small that Florida law required a machine recount of the state, which reduced Bush’s lead to 327. The presidential choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine. Of these, 60,000 were “undervotes” — for instance, the voter had not fully punched through the ballot’s relevant perforated box. The remaining 110,000 were “overvotes,” in which the voter may have voted normally for Bush or Gore but also wrote in their name. The Gore campaign requested a recount by hand in four heavily Democratic counties. The Bush campaign sued to stop this. The Gore campaign’s efforts then disappeared for the next month into a mind-numbingly complex legal process, overflowing with ballot-design and deadline minutiae that no normal American could follow. Meanwhile, the Republican Party conducted a nationwide PR campaign with a message Americans could follow: that Gore was a pathetic sore loser who simply would not accept that he’d been defeated. Much of the national media eagerly adopted this frame."