George W. Bush, et al. v. Albert Gore, commonly known as Bush v. Gore, was a controversial U.S. Supreme Court case heard on December 11, 2000. The case decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. In a 7-2 opinion, the court ordered that a ballot recount then being conducted in certain counties in Florida was to be stopped due to lacking a consistent standard. The court further declared, in a 5-4 vote, that there was insufficient time to establish standards for a new recount that would meet Florida’s deadline for certifying electors. The ruling in effect awarded Bush the presidency.
The election in question took place on November 7, 2000. Under the Electoral College system, each state votes for the president separately: a victor is then declared in each state, and the victor in the state wins a number of “electoral votes” equal to the state’s number of representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate. At the end of the nationwide ballot count, Gore led Bush 266 – 246 in the electoral vote. 270 votes were required for victory: Florida, with 25 electoral votes, did not have an official victor because the result was within the margin of error for machine counting; Bush had the lead following the machine count, by a very small margin.
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. The margin of victory was less than 0.5% of the votes cast, so a statutorily-mandated, automatic machine recount occurred. On November 10, with the machine recount finished in all but one county, Bush’s margin of victory had decreased to 327. According to author Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that a total of 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 the notion that the machine recount had been completed. Florida’s election laws 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, which are counties that traditionally vote Democratic and would be expected to garner more votes for Gore.
Bush, represented by Theodore Olson, charged that the recounts in Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because the votes were being counted unevenly, with standards varying from county to county and recounts in counties where he could have been likely to have gained votes not even being conducted, Bush argued, the decision went against the language in the Constitution.
Gore, represented by David Boise, responded that the Florida Supreme Court had done everything it could do to ensure equal treatment of both parties, and that requiring all ballots to be treated in the same fashion would require a uniform federal standard for counting votes, something that had never been established. Gore also claimed that ending the recounts was not an equitable way to settle the dispute: instead, the Court needed to establish a standard by which the votes should be counted, and then let the ballots are counted by that standard.