The Supreme Court got involved in the 2000 presidential election because there was a controversy over the counting of votes in Florida.
Explanation:
The presidential election in the United States of America in 2000 took place on November 7th. It opposed the Republican candidate George W. Bush and the outgoing Democratic vice president Al Gore. In terms of popular vote the latter prevailed, but the electoral votes, 271 against 266, were favorable to Bush and determined his election.
It was in Florida that the result of the national election was finally played out. Some Democrats, convinced of their victory in the state, accused the governor of the latter, Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican candidate, to have favored the election of his brother by rigging the electoral process. Jeb Bush denied the charges and then withdrew from all the judicial and administrative proceedings that followed. The Electoral Code aggravated the controversy over the name of the winner because it specified that the recount must necessarily take place by reading perforated cards or manually in four counties maximum. However, the machines used being often old, it happened that the hole had been badly pierced meaning for the machine that it was a blank vote.
At the end of the electronic recount, George Bush was still a winner with about 1,500 votes in advance. Al Gore's lawyers then obtained a new manual recount in three counties deemed to be favorable to the Democrats, those of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward, where in fact he was most likely to pick up voices perceived as null or blank by electronic machines and turn them into votes cast in his favor.
However, the manual recount of the polling stations did not change the result of November 7th. Several judges, seized by Al Gore's lawyers, allowed further recounts by ordering different methods according to the polling stations, while others refused to do so considering that the recount had been correctly carried out. Seized by Al Gore's lawyers, the Florida Supreme Court (of which six out of seven judges were Democrats) then ordered the recount to be held in all disputed counties, but before December 12th, when the results were due to be officially proclaimed.
On December 1, 2000, George W. Bush's lawyers appealed to the US Supreme Court, citing the breakdown of equality before the law because of the different methods used to count and override the Florida Court's jurisdiction. Â
After a first warning to the Florida Supreme Court of the overreaching of its prerogatives and its encroachment on the legislative domain, the US Supreme Court (of which seven judges out of nine had been appointed by Republican presidents) ruled by 7 votes against 2 in Bush v. Gore on December 12th that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was unconstitutional and, by 5 votes to 4, that it was impossible to carry out a constitutional recount within the time allowed by the US Constitution unless violating several legal principles related to equity and equality before the law. In doing so, it canceled the final manual countdown of votes in Florida, and named George W. Bush as the winner of the presidential election; with the votes of Florida voters, Bush won 271 electors against 266 for Al Gore.
