Bush v. Gore

The presidential election of 2000 came down to Florida, where George W. Bush led Al Gore by a few hundred votes out of nearly six million cast. An automatic machine recount narrowed the margin. Gore sought hand recounts in four Democratic counties, and for five weeks the country argued about hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and deadlines. Florida's secretary of state certified Bush the winner by 537 votes on November 26.

On December 8 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount of all undervotes statewide, ballots on which machines had detected no vote for president. The next day the U.S. Supreme Court halted the recount pending argument. On the night of December 12 it issued an unsigned opinion. Seven justices agreed that the recount as ordered violated equal protection, because counties were using different standards to judge the same kind of ballot.

Five justices then held that no recount meeting constitutional standards could be completed by December 12, the date Florida law was read to set for choosing electors, and so the recount was over. The majority described its holding as limited to the present circumstances. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented that although the identity of the winner might never be known with complete certainty, the identity of the loser was perfectly clear — the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. Gore conceded the next day.

Supporters of the decision argued that it prevented a chaotic, standardless recount and a constitutional crisis in Congress. Critics saw five Republican appointees choosing a president. A review by a consortium of news organizations in 2001 found that the limited recounts Gore had sought would not have changed the result, while some full statewide counts under certain standards would have. The case has rarely been cited by the Court since, but it remains among the most debated it has ever decided.