Q: How do you save a supreme court judge from drowning?
A: Take your foot off his head!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2000
United States presidential election, 2000 Florida results
At approximately 7:50 pm EST on election day, 10 minutes before the polls closed in the largely Republican Florida panhandle, some television news
networks declared that Gore had carried Florida's 25 electoral votes. They based this prediction on exit polls. However, in the actual vote tally Bush took a wide early lead in Florida, and
by 10 pm the networks had retracted their prediction of a Gore victory and placed Florida back into the "undecided" column. At approximately 2:30 am, with some 85% of the votes counted in Florida and Bush leading Gore by more than 100,000 votes, the
networks declared that Bush had carried Florida, and had been elected President. However, most of the remaining votes to be counted in Florida were located in three heavily Democratic counties - Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach - and as their votes were reported Gore began to gain on Bush. By 4:30 am Gore had narrowed Bush's margin to less than 2,000 votes, and the
networks retracted their predictions that Bush had won Florida and the Presidency. Gore, who had privately conceded the election to Bush, now withdrew his concession and announced that he would wait for a recount in Florida before any further action. By the morning of Wednesday, November 8
Bush's margin in Florida had dwindled to about 500 votes, narrow enough to trigger a mandatory recount in that state. In addition, Gore asked for hand recounts in four counties (Broward, Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia), as provided under Florida state law. This set into motion a series of recounts (portions by machine, and portions by hand), questions about portions of the Florida vote, and finally lawsuits.
These ultimately resulted in a December 12
7-2 United States Supreme Court decision that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional, as well as a 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision that ended the Florida recounts and allowed Florida to certify its vote. The vote was certified by Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State who had been the Florida co-chair of Bush's own campaign. Because Bush's younger brother, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida, there were allegations that Harris and Bush had somehow manipulated the election to favor the governor's brother. Bush's margin of victory in Florida was officially placed at 537 votes (out of more than 5.8 million cast), making it the closest presidential election in the history of the state. The nine members of the Supreme Court voted along ideological lines in the split decision with the two usually conservative swing voters (Justices O'Connor and Kennedy) siding with the three conservatives (Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia, and Thomas) outvoting the Court's four liberals (Justices Ginsburg, Souter, Stevens, and Breyer). Due to all of these factors, the 2000 presidential campaign has become one of the most controversial, and disputed, elections in American history.
Post recount
After Florida was decided, Texas Governor George W. Bush became President-elect and began forming his transition committee. In a speech on December 13, Bush said he was reaching across party lines to bridge a divided America, stating that "the President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race, and every background."
On January 6, 2001, a joint-session of Congress met to certify the electoral vote. Twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one-by-one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida. However, according to an 1877 law,
any such objection had to be sponsored by both a representative and a senator, and no senator would co-sponsor these objections. Therefore, Gore, who was presiding in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruled each of these objections out of order.
Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001.
In the aftermath of the election, independent recounts were conducted by The Miami Herald and USA Today,
concluding that Bush would have won in all legally requested recount scenarios, and in all other scenarios except for "a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards,” which would have gone to Gore.
Additionally, The Media Consortium hired the National Opinion Research Center to examine 175,010 ballots that were never counted in Florida. The investigation took 8 months and cost $900,000. Their results showed that the winning candidate varied based on the method used to include or interpret ballots.
For cases where all of their examiners agreed, the nine different recount scenarios resulted in Bush prevailing four times, and Gore prevailing in the other five. Ironically enough, under the recount rules initially requested by Gore, Bush would have won, and under the rules requested by Bush, Gore would have won.
National results
Though Gore came in second in the electoral vote, he received 543,816 more individual votes than Bush. Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state, Tennessee, which both he and his father had represented in the Senate. Had he won Tennessee, he could have won the election without Florida. Gore was the first major-party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972.
Electronic voting
Since the Presidential Election was so close in Florida, the United States Government and state governments pushed for election reform to be prepared by the 2004 United States Presidential Election. Many of Florida's year 2000 election night problems stemmed from voting machine issues like rejected ballots, "hanging chad", and the possibly confusing "butterfly ballot". A proposed solution to these problems was the installation of modern electronic voting machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_ballot
The United States Supreme Court voted 7–2 to end the recount on the grounds that differing standards in different counties constituted an equal protection violation, and
5–4 that no new recount with uniform standards could be conducted within the time available. The 7–2 ruling was more important as the votes had already been counted several times with uniform standards. However,
the 5–4 decision became extremely controversial due to the partisan split in the court's 5–4 decision and the majority's irregular instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore publicly disagreed with the court's decision, but conceded the election.