Bush v. Gore (2000)

The 2000 presidential election turned on Florida's 25 electoral votes, where George W. Bush led Al Gore by a few hundred votes out of nearly six million after an automatic machine recount. Disputes followed over punch-card ballots with partially detached chads, the confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, and manual recounts in several counties. On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount of undervotes, ballots on which machines had detected no presidential choice. The next day the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the recount.

On December 12, 2000, in an unsigned per curiam opinion, the Court held that the recount violated the Equal Protection Clause because counties used differing standards to judge voter intent, a conclusion seven justices accepted in some form. By a vote of 5 to 4, the Court ended the recount rather than allowing new standards, reasoning that Florida intended to meet the December 12 safe harbor deadline under federal law. The opinion said its consideration was limited to the present circumstances. Gore conceded the next day, and Bush's certified margin stood at 537 votes.

Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting, wrote that the identity of the winner might never be known with certainty, but the identity of the loser was perfectly clear: the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. Supporters of the decision said it ended a chaotic process that lacked consistent rules, while critics said the majority intervened in a state matter to reach a partisan result. The dispute led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which funded replacing punch-card voting systems, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist's concurrence later framed debates over the independent state legislature theory.