Craig Waters

Public Information Officer

Court PIOs, Technology, and Transparency during Bush v. Gore

Craig Waters on a late night phone call with a reporter.

From the perspective 20 years later, one of the most striking aspects of the Bush v. Gore cases is that they marked a major historical shift in how courts in the United States and around the world deal with the public. This shift was rooted in the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with Bush v. Gore serving as the main catalyst that brought the changes to the fore in a sudden, dramatic manner. In particular, there were four major changes that were dramatically on display during Florida’s 36-day election dispute in the fall of 2000.

After Bush v. Gore, these four things would become standard operating procedures for most courts. They would have major implications for the way courts around the world would operate as the Twenty-First Century progressed. But before Bush v. Gore, they were viewed either as frills or as a wish list for a more distant future. Together, they constitute one of the great shifts in daily court operations in the last half century. And they were created by the confluence of two factors – an historic legal dispute over the American presidency and technological changes that had begun less than a decade earlier, most especially the advent of the World-Wide Web.

Public Information Officer Craig Waters at the podium addressing the media with Clerk of Court Tom Hall. December 5, 2000.

These four are: (1) courts establishing professional Public Information Offices to oversee communications with the public on a daily basis, (2) courts routinely using websites and the Internet as direct communications tools with the public, (3) courts accepting case filings electronically using web-based connections, and (4) courts broadcasting their own proceedings live, in real time, on a global basis using the Internet as well as more traditional media.

1. Court PIOs. Prior to 2000, court public information officers (PIOs) were relatively rare. The Florida Supreme Court named its first PIO in 1996 under then-Chief Justice Gerald Kogan. Even then, the job position’s usefulness was questioned. Elimination of the position was often discussed up until Bush v. Gore, on grounds that the cost of the position was not justified by enough media and public demand. At the time in 1996, PIOs existed only at the United States Supreme Court, in the Supreme Courts of the larger and more urban states, and among a few large trial courts that tended to produce frequent high-profile cases, like Los Angeles.

Bush v. Gore changed all of that. It marked the first time that court PIOs became a primary focus of news coverage caused by intense worldwide demand for information about court proceedings. This happened in part because the 24/7 news cycle that, at the time, was evolving from its origins in television news toward a much broader and more pervasive phenomenon. It was moving gradually toward a distribution model in which both written and multimedia news products were delivered via the World-Wide Web. In the fall of 2000, the Florida Supreme Court literally had the choice of either managing this press scrutiny or letting it descend into chaos visible to a worldwide audience. It chose to manage it. And that effort was widely viewed as a success.

As a result, Florida’s approach to public communications in Bush v. Gore changed the way courts viewed the proper role of a court PIO. Before 2000, the consensus among courts employing PIOs was that they should be used as seldom-seen facilitators who fielded routine press questions behind the scenes but obscured their own identities. Under this model, if anyone appeared on television or was quoted in a newspaper, it was one of the judges at the court, not the PIO. The PIO simply laid the groundwork and nothing more.

This model had been followed even when it produced disastrous results. The most prominent example was in the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles. There, the presiding judge personally appeared in a five-part pre-trial television news interview, fanning speculation that he was seeking personal publicity and fame.  It was one of several elements that led courts around the nation to view the Simpson trial as a bad example. Some even contended that, yet again, it showed that courts should avoid television and similar publicity rather than risk undermining public trust and confidence.

But there was another way of looking at the Simpson trial’s failure. Bush v. Gore helped highlight a critical distinction in the way Florida approached its judicial duties and the way Los Angeles courts did. Because the presidency of the United States was at stake in Bush v. Gore, worldwide press scrutiny was so intense that it was impossible for both practical and ethical reasons for judges themselves to have direct involvement in press relations. And this especially was true in light of the pitfalls made vivid by the O.J. Simpson case.

Moreover, the intense press scrutiny in Bush v. Gore occurred while the Florida Supreme Court Justices and their staffs were confronting some of the most time-sensitive and difficult cases in the Court's 155-year history. Responding to the press became more than a full-time job by itself. It would have been an impossible burden to expect judges and their judicial staff to manage press relations themselves without help from a professional PIO.

It is not surprising in retrospect – although some judges thought differently at the time – that having a full-time PIO fully attentive to the informational needs of the press and the public paid dividends. Despite controversy over its rulings, the Florida Supreme Court was widely praised for its commitment to openness and transparency in a matter of urgent importance to millions of people around the globe.  This was especially true with the public announcements of court decisions on live television from the front steps of the Florida Supreme Court Building. These live announcements created an appearance of order at the Court and of sincere responsiveness to public demand for timely information about history-changing decisions.

By contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court adhered more closely to the traditional model in its own handling of press relations. It eschewed public announcements like those made by its Florida counterpart. As a result, the nation’s highest Court was widely criticized for its lack of openness and transparency at a critical point in world history.

The comparison was not lost on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist openly criticized his Florida counterparts for being too open, claiming this level of transparency was undignified,  his Court nonetheless bowed to public opinion and released tape-delayed audio of its own appellate proceedings in Bush v. Gore for the first time in its history.  This was widely seen as a partial bow to public pressure arising from Florida’s successful and historic use of Internet livestreaming for its own oral arguments.

The issue of court communications with the public only intensified in the years ahead. After seeing what happened in Bush v. Gore, many courts realized they were totally unprepared if a major legal dispute brought by the kind of worldwide scrutiny the Florida Supreme Court had successfully faced. At that point in time, few people had anticipated the full scope of changes brought by the invention of the Internet. So, judges and court managers around the world scrambled to prepare for the future, taking lessons from Florida’s use of technology and transparency.

After Bush v. Gore was finalized, many courts worldwide began establishing their own Public Information Offices for the first time. The Florida Supreme Court’s handling of press relations in the fall of 2000 still is studied in professional development programs for courts and other governmental organizations. It is viewed as a successful use of transparency to address public concerns about the integrity of proceedings in a highly charged and politicized environment.

The lesson of Bush v. Gore was that real transparency achieved through technological means controlled by the courts themselves was emerging as the new norm in the Twenty-First Century. Other more traditional views of court decorum could create a harmful image of secrecy, mistrust, and disorder. Judges certainly should not be involved in press and public relations. But it still was wise for them to employ professional PIOs who could so do.

The model of a professional PIO, rather than judges, serving as the public face of a court in moments of high controversy has become the predominant one in the Twenty-First Century. Courts now recognize the inherent appearance of a conflict of interest if judges attempt to handle public communications themselves under such intense public scrutiny. The failures of public relations in the O.J. Simpson case could be avoided by courts employing their own PIOs as intermediaries with the public, helping to distance judges from any appearance of ethical impropriety.

The demand for information about the Florida Supreme Court’s successful public information program skyrocketed in 2001. It put the Florida Supreme Court’s PIO on the professional speaking circuit for the next four years. State judicial conferences, state Bar associations, and governmental communications offices saw the Florida Supreme Court as a model for their own efforts to meet new demands for information created by the emergence of the World-Wide Web. Many courts around the nation and around the world hired their own PIOs for the first time.

Even in Florida, the lessons of Bush v. Gore, combined with the impact of the 2001 terrorist attacks, prompted a 2002 recommendation by a Florida Supreme Court commission that every division of the State Courts System should have its own PIO.  This in turn led to the creation in 2005 of the first state-specific court PIO professional association in the United States, the Florida Court Public Information Officers, Inc. Today, FCPIO is one of the key components of a statewide Court Communications Plan that is helping the judiciary successfully meet the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic.

2. Court Websites. It is hard to remember today that, in 2000, court websites still were a new phenomenon. Many courts lacked websites at this time, including the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the Florida Supreme Court had one of the oldest court websites in the world, dating back six year to its first collection of just 16 webpages put online in 1994. All the initial material in those pages was taken from a simple docent manual for courthouse tours aimed mainly at students and tourists visiting the Florida Supreme Court, with no content about official business, filings, or dockets. However, the content on these pages would soon expand dramatically. Staff and court customers began to realize the Internet was an entirely new communications medium with an amazing array of uses not yet fully imagined in 1994. Online information met a need that could be addressed in no other way.

The Florida Supreme Court began posting opinions and filings in high-profile cases on its website two years later in 1996 as one of the first projects of the newly created Public Information Office. This use of a website to distribute free copies of official documents was an unheard-of novelty at the time.  Although other courts were exploring the idea, most others planned to charge a fee to access their documents. At first, Florida was unusual in providing documents at no cost and without need of registration. This “public domain” approach to online court documents was a minority view at the time.

This particular use of a court website was so novel that it was featured in 1997 in Detroit at the annual Court Technology Conference sponsored every few years by the National Center for State courts. Much of the audience in 1997 remained skeptical of the idea that courts even needed websites. And if they did, most courts still favored plans to develop websites that would pay for themselves and for other court budget items through access fees. They gave little thought to First Amendment concerns and to issues of the public’s ability to access official documents.

That view would soon change as the Internet itself altered public expectations about access to government. There were obvious harbingers in the months ahead of this trend, especially as the World-Wide Web placed courts under a new and more pervasive form of public scrutiny.

In Florida, the first big example came in 1999. It happened when the Florida Supreme Court confronted a case that received worldwide press attention in a pending legal issue. The case involved Florida’s death-penalty law and specifically its continued practice of conducting executions in an electric chair that already had malfunctioned twice. Ironically, it marked the first time a court’s website itself generated global headlines, an obvious indicator of how novel court websites were at the time.

In the summer of 1999, a third botched execution occurred in the electric chair. It involved inmate Allen Lee Davis. He was executed on July 8, 1999, a gory event that spawned headlines for weeks. It also provided a first glimpse at the kind of worldwide scrutiny that would come a year later in Bush v. Gore, when Florida’s problematic presidential election – caused by a badly drafted state election code and faulty election technology and ballot design – thrust the state into the international limelight in a way never imagined before. 

The electric chair case came to the Florida Supreme Court as a challenge to the method of execution under various constitutional provisions, including the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. After reviewing the case, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed a statute authorizing the electric chair’s use despite its proclivity to malfunction. But Justice Leander J. Shaw, Jr., issued a blistering dissent.

Then Justice Shaw did something unusual. He attached color photos taken by a Department of Corrections’ inspector general. They showed the gruesome and bloody scene of the Davis execution inside Florida’s death chamber.

Like all other opinions since 1996, this decision along with Justice Shaw’s dissent were uploaded to the Florida Supreme Court website. But it was the first time photographs were formally appended to an opinion placed on the court website. Today’s world has trouble remembering that, in 1999, digital photographs were still something of a novelty. People still were not widely accustomed to the technology. And the alteration of photographs by programs like Photoshop still lay in the distant future, meaning that gruesome photographs of an execution gone awry still had a shock value in 1999 that they would not have today.

The inclusion of the photographs was duly noted by the press, but not in a way that brought little attention to their presence on the World-Wide Web.  No newspaper reprinted the photos, and they were never shown on in any detail on television news broadcasts. Moreover, the press still relied on paper copies retrieved by sending reporters to the Florida Supreme Court building in Tallahassee. The press was still following traditional reporting techniques, as yet unaware how the Internet would change journalism in the years ahead. Most reporters did not even realize that the photographs also were available online on the Court’s website.

A week passed before people around the world realized the photos could be viewed on the Internet. This knowledge only became widespread because the Miami Herald published a news story belatedly providing the actual web address of the specific webpage where the photographs were located.  Once this realization took hold, these photographs created a noticeable worldwide response. They were the only known official photographs of a modern state execution placed on the World-Wide Web up until that point in time. And like all Florida Supreme Court decisions, they were available for instantaneous viewing, free of charge.

What these photographs depicted sparked outrage. It led to protests at American embassies abroad and generated an avalanche of new legal challenges to Florida’s electric chair. The rising controversy soon prompted the United States Supreme Court to accept review in a case challenging the electric chair,  which in turn caused the legislature to render the issue moot by abolishing use of the chair in favor of lethal injection.

The power of a court website was unmistakable. In the end, Justice Shaw’s views prevailed. Web access gave wider berth to his dissenting viewpoint, moved public opinion in Florida and elsewhere, and led to the effective abolition of the electric chair. And it did so very rapidly. Less than four months had passed between the Davis execution and the United States Supreme Court action that ended use of the electric chair in Florida.  Rather than risk losing in the nation’s highest Court, the legislature retired the electric chair.

The stage was set for 2000. Just as occurred in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court website would be used to distribute court filings and opinions just a year later in Bush v. Gore. The particular webpage for election filings, still located on the Florida Supreme Court website today, was modeled after a similar page created for the extraordinary spate of filings in the 1999 cases challenging Florida’s electric chair. The 2000 presidential election website was online and available to the public by the Friday after election, November 10, 2000, in time for filings coming to the Florida Supreme Court in the cases later known to history as Bush v. Gore.

But the presence of this webpage alone did not get the attention people would expect today, 20 years later. People still were not accustomed to using the Internet to monitor official events. So, this particular use of the World-Wide Web was still very new and largely unfamiliar to most people. Reporters were no exception. Accustomed to their own longstanding routines, journalists seemed not to understand the value of having court documents online within minutes of filing. They still wanted paper copies retrieved at the source.

The Court’s Public Information Office repeatedly emphasized that the filings were available on this website. Articles were even written about the subject. But reporters were so habituated to obtaining official documents only in paper copies that they show up at the Florida Supreme Court building. As a result, several hundred reporters descended on the Florida Supreme Court each time major opinions were released. And each reporter expected to receive paper copies at the front doors of the courthouse. It justified their expensive travel to Florida’s capital city, after all.

This same process of reporters standing in line repeated itself for the first few weeks of the election controversy. It did so until, one day, the Florida Supreme Court’s only high-speed photocopier broke down. And this meant that paper copies were not available in a timely manner at the door. It was only then, after much prompting by Court staff, that reporters turned to the unfamiliar idea of printing PDF copies directly from the Florida Supreme Court website. News organizations seemed surprised to realize that they could do so even in their home offices in New York, Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow. Suddenly, having so many reporters’ feet on the ground in Tallahassee looked like a needless expense for media and an actual impediment to quick coverage of breaking news.

Today, printing documents off a court’s website is so routine we think of it as part of the landscape. But the single historical event that marked the transition into this era of web-based self-service was Bush v. Gore.  Staff at the Florida Supreme Court even noted a drop in the number of reporters gathering outside the courthouse as the election controversy approached its conclusion. Once the election controversy was finished, the Court itself soon stopped issuing any paper copies, relying entirely on web distribution instead. Today, of course, it is entirely possible for a reporter to cover a major lawsuit or appeal from start to finish without ever stepping inside the courthouse doors.

But in 2000, the very idea of such a thing seemed like magic. In fact, it is easy today to forget that Bush v. Gore occurred before the development of social media, which now dominate much of the communications landscape in 2020. The availability of social media has changed many of the assumptions underlying the Florida Supreme Court’s approach to crisis communications.

Twitter alone, for example, serves the same need and thus replaces the live television appearances required in 2000 to get information out to the press and the public quickly, fairly, and in an orderly manner. In the area of social media, too, the Florida Supreme Court would become a pioneer in the years ahead when it posted its first Twitter page in 2009. This was followed up in succeeding years with accounts on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media, along with podcasts. With the adoption of the Communications Plan in 2016, the use of social media also spread to Florida’s lower courts. Through social media, court PIOs could distribute official news and documents instantaneously on a global basis. Today, we tend to forget that no such things existed during the Bush v. Gore controversy in 2000.

3. Court eFiling. At the time of Bush v. Gore, electronic filing still was a far-away dream. The idea had been discussed since the first successful placement of court documents online, which began at the Florida Supreme Court with “high profile” cases starting in the 1990s. But there were many problems. Issues that continued to stall development of eFiling for many more years included authentication of filings, enforcement of procedural rules within a digital environment, and problems of public access to official documents that often contained private information made confidential by law. These problems would delay the launch of Florida’s eFiling efforts another decade.

But Bush v. Gore brought an unexpected foretaste. As the controversy progressed, the timing of attorney filings became a growing problem in November and December of 2000. Justices of the Florida Supreme Court needed as much advance time as they could get in addressing issues attorneys intended to raise, due to tight deadlines imposed by federal law on presidential election returns. The old system of paper filings became a hindrance.

Increasingly, the Clerk’s Office asked attorneys to send their documents in PDF as soon as possible to an email account set up for the purpose, with courtesy copies to all attorneys and parties involved. This let the Justices begin to review arguments before paper copies could be officially stamped and placed into the Clerk’s filing system. PDF documents created by the attorneys themselves also made it much easier to place the documents quickly online for access by the public worldwide.

This temporary system during Bush v. Gore was simple. It made no effort to address the many remaining problems involved in the final move toward a full eFiling system. But it worked in this specific context. In the rarefied environment of a dispute over a presidential election, the many remaining problems associated with eFiling, such as privacy in confidential data, were nonexistent or readily avoidable.

4. Court Broacasts. The one area in which the Florida Supreme Court especially stood out in 2000 was its ability to make a broadcast-quality feed of all its arguments in Bush v. Gore available on a global basis. In this sense, the happenstance of the election dispute occurring in Florida was fortuitous. By 2000, the Florida Supreme Court already had three years’ experience broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage of its oral arguments by three methods: (a) a feed distributed on Florida’s state-operated cable news network, The Florida Channel; (b) a direct link to a state-owned satellite transponder available for downlink anywhere in North America; and (c) a web-based livestream from a video web portal called Florida Gavel to Gavel.  Redundancy was built into the system to ensure broadcasts could be delivered under almost any circumstances, including during a crisis.

This cutting-edge system of broadcasting oral arguments had been put in place in 1997. This came about through a cooperative agreement between the Florida Supreme Court and Florida State University, led by then-Chief Justice Gerald Kogan and then-President of FSU Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte. Managed by the Court’s Public Information Office, it was a program many years ahead of its time and far more advanced than anything that existed in other courts and most other governmental bodies.

Livestreaming of any video and audio feed at the time was considered exotic, but even more so for court arguments. The practice even produced some controversy. Most people still had Internet connections that lacked enough bandwidth to make livestreaming workable on their own personal or office computers. Livestreaming, in other words, still had an elitist quality because it was not yet widely available to people of more modest means – although that situation would change in just a few years.

In 2000, the bandwidth issue clearly diminished public understanding of the true significance of the Florida Supreme Court’s livestream. Many viewers were unaware it existed. Most continued to rely on television networks and cable systems to deliver government access broadcasts to their homes and offices. The corporate network television “filter” still existed. It would be several more years before consumers of news would come to expect government organizations to make livestreams of their proceedings directly available on the Internet without need of relying on a corporate network.

Even with this limitation, the Florida Supreme Court’s redundant approach to its broadcasts still worked in a way that surprised even the big corporate television news networks in New York. Florida’s satellite feed was more than adequate to fill their needs along with the needs of foreign television networks with the ability to downlink a satellite transponder feed in any North American city. And that included every major and minor international network, because all of them had access to downlink facilities in places like New York, Atlanta, and Miami.

When many news networks representatives first arrived in Tallahassee at the start of the presidential election dispute in November 2000, their first act was to file demand letters with the Florida Supreme Court for placement of their own cameras inside the courtrooms. This would have been a cumbersome arrangement fraught with security problems. It would have meant cables running down court stairwells and out doorways to the large fleet of satellite trucks that soon arrived in Tallahassee and surrounded the capitol complex.

These networks were stunned to learn that the Court already had four robotic broadcast-quality cameras installed in the courtroom that could feed video and audio wirelessly to their home offices in other cities by satellite. No other court had anything like it. Some of these representatives were so shocked they refused to believe such a system could work. They insisted upon meetings with FSU technicians and test runs to assuage their worries. But at broadcast time, the satellite relay directly from the Florida Supreme Court worked without any problems.

Two separate oral arguments were heard in the Bush v. Gore cases in the fall of 2000, on November 20 and December 7. Both were broadcast to a worldwide audience live, unedited, and from start to finish. No changes of any kind were needed to make these broadcasts possible because everything needed already was in place.

To this day, these two Florida Supreme Court oral arguments remain the only appellate proceedings in history that were broadcast to a global audience in their entirety. Some estimates placed the live audience in the United States alone at 50 million, not counting viewership in other nations. Nothing similar happened at the United States Supreme Court, which adhered to its policy – still in effect today – of not permitting television cameras into its courtroom.

One commentator called the international broadcasts "unprecedented" and added:

Rather than hear the usual day-after-day political spinning from both camps, the public would see extended colloquies between judges and lawyers, in a surrounding where respectful and temperate arguments replaced the more familiar cacophony of overheated accusations.

Another noted that "it was impossible not to be impressed by [the] dialogue in the court."  By any estimate, the technological transparency of live broadcasts combined with ready access to court filings on the Internet created a positive and lasting impression. It showed that the Florida Supreme Court was not engaging in a political act, but a studiously fair judicial process.

5. Conclusions. This impression of a fair process helped counter an opposing narrative put forward by some of the political operatives involved in Bush v. Gore. They clearly hoped to create a public-relations impression that the Florida Supreme Court was a rogue tribunal aiming to resolve the presidential election according to its own preferences. The apparent objective of this public-relations effort was to lay part of the groundwork for a claim in the United States Supreme Court that it must step in and reverse its Florida counterpart in order to set things “straight.”

But what many people saw on their television sets helped undermine these accusations. In the oral argument broadcasts, people saw judges trying their best to apply principles of voting fairness to an incredibly chaotic series of problems created by bad statutory draftsmanship, inadequate voting devices, and poor ballot design. The most difficult cases frequently involver the messiest facts.

In that sense, much of the Bush v. Gore controversy in the fall of 2000 was a public relations clash occurring simultaneously with a series of lawsuits to determine the outcome of a botched presidential election in Florida. There was obvious interplay between the public relations battle and the lawsuits. The core point of disagreement in this public relations war was how to remedy the legal elections mess Florida had created through its badly drafted election code and its use of astoundingly deficient voting technology and ballot design – errors that had occurred months or years before election day without being detected.

On one side, there was the view that the way to remedy the problem was by hand-counting ballots to discern voter intent after the voting technology had failed. This was a view that most clearly corresponded with a longstanding series of Florida election cases going back more than a century making the “intent of the voter” the preeminent legal concern for a Florida court. In that sense, it was not surprising that the Florida Supreme Court adhered to its own precedent. At the very least, transparency in oral arguments and court filings helped show the public that this was so, as the Court’s Justices repeatedly called attention to Florida precedent that predate Bush v. Gore by many decades.

On the other side, there was the view that Florida should only get one bite at the apple. Election day was November 7, 2000, and any serious errors that occurred on that day were regrettable but not subject to further remedy, under this view. It was an argument for finality. And it elevated finality to a position more important than voter intent. Florida had chosen faulty election procedures, in other words, and its voters would pay the price. There was precedent supporting this view, too, along with the constitutional equal protection arguments the United States Supreme Court ultimately marshalled when it adhered forcefully to the principle of finality and reversed the Florida Supreme Court.

To a significant extent, both Republicans and Democrats in this public relations war were engaging in spin and exaggeration with the hope of influencing outcomes. The law occasionally confronts cases where both the law and the facts are so ambiguous that strong cases can be made for either side’s arguments. Bush v. Gore was quintessentially one of these cases. And from a point in time 20 years later, it is obvious that the public relations battle was marked by partisan hyperbole. Unfortunately, it was in the interests of the prevailing side to discredit the Florida Supreme Court in hopes that a public backlash would help sway the United States Supreme Court.

This strident approach to public relations has become more prevalent in the years that have followed. To that extent, the partisan hyperbole surrounding Bush v. Gore was a precursor of what today is called “disinformation.” Of course, social media did not exist in 2000, and much of today’s disinformation is spread on the variety of social media platforms that have become prevalent in the last 20 years. But the first stirring of disinformation as a public relations tactic were evident in the fall of 2000, even if in a somewhat more restrained manner than today.

There are clear lessons here for courts in the future. Transparency helped the Florida Supreme Court establish its own good faith for the history books. And transparency was achieved through the technology the Court employed. Without this technology, the public relations campaign launched to attack the Florida Supreme Court’s rulings might have gone unanswered. It is no coincidence that these same technological innovations now have become standard operating procedures for courts throughout the nation. This use of technology is good for public understanding and thus tends to promote public trust and confidence in the courts.

But the other important lesson here is that courts cannot let disinformation about their own operations go unanswered. Due to ethical restrictions, it is often not possible for judges or courts to directly refute attacks on their rulings. But courts can at least show the public the evidence of their own good faith in approaching judicial duties. Professional court PIOs are an important part of that response. So is the use of technology to promote transparency and provide the public real-time access to the work of courts. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words even when it is livestreamed. There is little doubt 20 years later that the Florida Supreme Court’s transparent approach to Bush v. Gore served it well and established a more accurate historical record.