Bush v. Gore

Bush v. Gore
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 11, 2000 Decided December 12, 2000
Full case name	George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr. and Joseph Lieberman, et al.
Docket no.	00-949
Citations	531 U.S. 98 (more) 121 S. Ct. 525; 148 L. Ed. 2d 388; 2000 U.S. LEXIS 8430; 69 U.S.L.W. 4029; 2000 Cal. Daily Op. Service 9879; 2000 Colo. J. C.A.R. 6606; 14 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 26
Argument	Oral argument
Decision	Opinion
Case history
Prior	Judgment for defendant, Fla. Cir. Ct.; matter certified to Florida Supreme Court, Fla. Ct. App.; aff'd in part, rev'd in part, sub nom. Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. v. Harris, 772 So. 2d 1273 (2000); cert. granted, stay granted, 531 U.S. 1036 (2000).
Holding
In the circumstances of this case, any manual recount of votes seeking to meet the December 12 "safe harbor" deadline would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Florida Supreme Court reversed and remanded.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy David Souter · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
Per curiam
Concurrence	Rehnquist, joined by Scalia, Thomas
Dissent	Stevens, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer
Dissent	Souter, joined by Breyer; Stevens, Ginsburg (all but Part III)
Dissent	Ginsburg, joined by Stevens; Souter, Breyer (Part I)
Dissent	Breyer, joined by Stevens, Ginsburg (except Part I–A–1); Souter (Part I)
Laws applied
U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2, amend. XIV; 3 U.S.C. § 5

This article is part of a series about George W. Bush
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This article is part of a series about Al Gore
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Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was 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, 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. Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.^[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm."^[1] Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.

In a 5–4 per curiam decision, the Court ruled, strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, it held that the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution; the case had also been argued on Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist. The Court then ruled as to a remedy, deciding against the remedy proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter to send the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida's electors in Tallahassee.^[1] Instead, 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 stated that 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 to allow the Florida court to finish counting disputed ballots under uniform guidelines requested in a remedy proposed by Breyer and Souter. 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 the vote certification made by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to stand, giving Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes. Florida's 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 candidate Al Gore, who won 267 electoral votes but received 266, as a "faithless elector" from the District of Columbia abstained from voting. Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the original, limited recount of undervotes of several large counties would have resulted in a Bush victory, though 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]