Bush v. Gore

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2000 U.S. Supreme Court case

This article is about the Supreme Court case. For the presidential race with which the case was concerned, see 2000 United States presidential election .

2000 United States Supreme Court case

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida's 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore . On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes , over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari and, in a 5–4 per curiam decision on December 12, 2000, ruled, strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, it held that Florida's counties' varying standards for discerning voter intent violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution .[1] The case had also been argued on Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor only with justices Antonin Scalia , Clarence Thomas , and William Rehnquist .[1]

The majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 "safe harbor " deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5 , which the Florida Supreme Court had said the Florida Legislature intended to meet.[2] The Court, holding that not meeting the "safe harbor" deadline would violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline proposed by justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter to allow the Florida court to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard.[1] That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court's decision.

The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was among the most controversial in U.S. history, as it allowed Florida secretary of state (and co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign ) Katherine Harris 's vote certification to stand, giving Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes . Those votes gave Bush, the Republican nominee, 271 electoral votes, one more than the 270 required to win the Electoral College. This meant the defeat of Democratic nominee Al Gore, who received 266 electoral votes.[a] Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the original limited recount of undervotes in several large counties would have resulted in a Bush victory, but according to the Florida Ballot Project , a statewide recount would have shown that Gore received the most votes. Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case.[3] [4] [5]

Background

[(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bush_v._Gore&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Background")
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See also: 2000 United States presidential election , United States Electoral College , and United States presidential election

In the United States, each state conducts its own popular vote election for president and vice president. The voters are actually voting for a slate of electors, each of whom pledges to vote for a particular candidate for each office in the Electoral College. Article II, § 1, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution provides that each state legislature decides how electors are chosen. Referring to an earlier Supreme Court case, _McPherson v. Blacker _, the Court noted that early in U.S. history, most state legislatures directly appointed their slates of electors.[6]

In the 21st century, state legislatures have enacted laws to provide for the selection of electors by popular vote within each state. While these laws vary, most states, including Florida, award all electoral votes to the candidate for either office who receives a plurality of the state's popular vote. Any candidate who receives an absolute majority of all electoral votes nationally (270 since 1963) wins the presidential or vice-presidential election.[7]

On November 8, 2000, the Florida Division of Elections reported that Bush won with 48.8% of the vote in Florida, a margin of victory of 1,784 votes.[8] The margin of victory was less than 0.5% of the votes cast, so a statutorily mandated[9] automatic machine recount occurred. On November 10, with the machine recount apparently finished in all but one county, Bush's margin of victory had decreased to 327 votes.[10]

According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin , later analysis showed that 18 counties—accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida—did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed.[11] Florida's election laws[12] allow a candidate to request a county to conduct a manual recount, and Gore requested manual recounts in four Florida counties—Volusia , Palm Beach , Broward , and Miami-Dade —that generally vote Democratic and would be expected to find more votes for Gore. Gore did not request any recounts in counties that generally vote Republican. The four counties granted the request and began manual recounts. Florida law also required all counties to certify their election returns to the Florida secretary of state within seven days of the election,[13] and several of the counties conducting manual recounts did not believe they could meet this deadline.[_citation needed
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On November 14, the statutory deadline, the Florida Circuit Court ruled that the seven-day deadline was mandatory but that the counties could amend their returns at a later date. The court also ruled that the secretary of state, after "considering all attendant facts and circumstances", had discretion to include any late amended returns in the statewide certification.[14] Before the 5 p.m. deadline on November 14, Volusia County completed its manual recount and certified its results. At 5 p.m. on November 14, Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris announced that she had received the certified returns from all 67 counties, while Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties were still conducting manual recounts.[15]

Harris issued a set of criteria[8] by which she would determine whether to allow late filings, and she required any county seeking to make a late filing to submit to her, by 2 p.m. the following day, a written statement of the facts and circumstances justifying the late filing. Four counties, including the three that missed the deadline, submitted statements, and after reviewing the submi

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