Bush v. Gore: How the 2000 Election Recount Ended on December 12

The 2000 presidential election was decided on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore stopped a statewide manual recount in Florida. The decision left Texas Governor George W. Bush ahead in Florida by 537 votes out of nearly six million, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency. Vice President Al Gore conceded the next evening.

What the Supreme Court Decided

The Court issued an unsigned per curiam opinion. It held that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated the Equal Protection Clause because counties had no uniform standard for deciding which marks on a ballot counted as a vote. Seven justices agreed that the recount procedures raised equal protection problems.

The deeper split was over the remedy. Five justices concluded that no recount meeting constitutional standards could be finished by December 12, the date Florida law treated as the deadline for choosing electors without challenge. They reversed the Florida court’s order, which ended the recount. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a concurrence.

The majority tried to narrow the ruling’s reach, writing that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.” The decision came late in the evening, with about two hours left before the December 12 deadline.

Election Night: Too Close to Call

Florida turned the night of November 7, 2000, into a reversal-filled broadcast. Relying on data from the Voter News Service, television networks first called the state for Gore shortly after most Florida polls closed, then pulled the call back as “too close to call.” Later they called Florida, and the presidency, for Bush, before retracting that call as well.

Gore phoned Bush to concede, then called back to withdraw the concession after learning how narrow the gap had become. By the end of the night Bush led in Florida by 1,784 votes. Because the margin was under half a percentage point, state law required an automatic machine recount, which cut Bush’s lead to 327 votes by November 10.

Timeline of the Florida Recount

• November 7: Election Day. Florida is too close to call.
• November 8-10: The automatic machine recount reduces Bush’s lead to 327.
• November 21: The Florida Supreme Court unanimously rules that manual recounts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties must be included and sets November 26 as the earliest certification time.
• November 26: Secretary of State Katherine Harris certifies Bush as the winner by 537 votes.
• December 8: The Florida Supreme Court, 4-3, orders a statewide manual recount of undervotes, ballots that machines read as having no vote for president.
• December 9: The US Supreme Court votes 5-4 to stay the recount, which had been underway for only a few hours.
• December 11: Lawyers for both campaigns argue the case in Washington.
• December 12: The Court decides Bush v. Gore.
• December 13: Gore concedes in a televised address.

The 2000 calendar shows how the dispute stretched from Election Day through the middle of December, 36 days by the count of the days between dates calculator.

Butterfly Ballots and Hanging Chads

Much of the fight concerned how Florida’s ballots were designed and read. In Palm Beach County, a “butterfly ballot” listed candidates on facing pages with punch holes down the middle. Post-election analysis found that it misdirected more than 2,000 votes intended for Gore to Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.

Punch-card ballots created another problem. When voters did not push the stylus all the way through, the small paper rectangles, called chads, could stay partly attached or merely dimpled. Counting boards had to decide whether such a ballot showed a vote, and different counties applied different standards. That inconsistency was the core of the equal protection argument the Supreme Court accepted.

The Final Count and the Electoral College

Florida’s certified totals gave Bush 2,912,790 votes and Gore 2,912,253. Nationwide, Gore won the popular vote, 50,999,897 to 50,456,002, a margin of 543,895 votes. In the Electoral College, Bush received 271 votes, one more than the 270 needed, and Gore received 266 after one elector from the District of Columbia cast a blank ballot.

The election produced close results beyond the White House. The Senate ended up split 50-50, with Democrats gaining four seats, and Hillary Clinton won an open Senate seat in New York with 55.3 percent of the vote.

What Later Reviews Found

In 2001, a consortium of news organizations paid the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to examine Florida’s disputed ballots. The review found that the outcome depended on which ballots were included and which standard was used. Under the consortium’s standards for a full statewide review of disputed ballots, Gore came out ahead by margins ranging from 60 to 171 votes.

Those findings came nearly a year after Bush took office and did not change the result. For anyone researching the dates, the key distinction is that Florida certified Bush’s win on November 26, while the Supreme Court’s December 12 ruling ended the legal fight over whether that count would stand.