Bush v. Gore

The Bush V. Gore case was one of the closest elections in presidential candidacy history, as it ultimately decided the 2000 presidential nomination between Texas governor George W. Bush and vice-president Al Gore (time.com) The case was conclusively decided on former Texas Governor, George Walker Bush, in a precise presidential vote, effectively naming Bush the 43rd president of the United States (time.com). The court’s decision was correct with the siding of Bush because the Majority Opinion argued that the Florida’s vote recount was unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. For the Dissenting Opinion, the case could be argued that if the ballots were not polluted on Florida’s side of the vote, there would have been a accurate outcome of the votes. The case could be argued that the deadline for the recounts was placed in an unrealistic timeframe to fully complete the manual recounts in the select four Florida counties.

The majority opinion in this case was on the side of Bush. It was a unimaginably close election, as the final vote went down to the last and final state, Florida. The outcome of Florida's vote recount resulted in a dramatic squeeze on the results. Out of 6 million total votes that resulted from the Florida recount, only 327 votes separated the two presidential candidates (pbs.org). By the time of the final decision, over a month had passed since the original votes were cast (phschools.com).

One of the main arguments in the Bush V. Gore case was that the Florida vote recount was unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause (Oyez.org). The Equal Protection Clause states that “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal p...

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In the end, Florida’s 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the republican, 271 total electoral votes. Al Gore, a democrat, ended up with a total of 266 electoral votes. A majority of electoral votes is required to achieve victory in either the President or Vice-President position. (princeton.edu)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush in a vote of 5-4. The Court’s decision defeated the suspense of who would end up being the 43rd president. The court said there was no way to hold an acceptable recount by the final election deadline, and that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution when it ordered recounts in only certain districts. In the end, this case was a very highly controversial moment in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history, naming George Bush the president of the United States of America. (phschools.com)