Did the Supreme Court steal the 2000 election from Al Gore

[OSR stands with Israel]

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html

Reading the article I would say the answer is no it wouldnt because different recount methods resulted in different winners so I highly doubt that even if Bush v Gore was decided another way Gore wins that election cause if they didnt make that election , one of two things happen after the recount process is still unable to produce a clear winner.

1. The Florida Legislature would have to appoint the electors and since both houses were controlled by the GOP , Bush/Cheney still would win


2. The election gets thrown to congress where the House would elect Bush as President and the Senate would elect Lieberman as Vice President.


You could argue the Bush v Gore decision was better than either of these two scenarios

[dw93]

I do in a sense that them stopping the recount handed Bush the election. Now, I do agree that there needed to be a unified method of counting the votes, but none the less they needed to allow the recount to go to its conclusion. Hell, there's still a chance Bush would've won the recount.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I do in a sense that them stopping the recount handed Bush the election. Now, I do agree that there needed to be a unified method of counting the votes, but none the less they needed to allow the recount to go to its conclusion. Hell, there's still a chance Bush would've won the recount.

The problem is that if a recount still didnt produce a winner, you would have had the election decided by either the Florida state legislature or Congress which you could argue would be worse than it being decided than the Supreme Court

[dw93]

I do in a sense that them stopping the recount handed Bush the election. Now, I do agree that there needed to be a unified method of counting the votes, but none the less they needed to allow the recount to go to its conclusion. Hell, there's still a chance Bush would've won the recount.

The problem is that if a recount still didnt produce a winner, you would have had the election decided by either the Florida state legislature or Congress which you could argue would be worse than it being decided than the Supreme Court

They'd be equally as bad but not worse. The Supreme Court deciding that election the way it did only hurt the Supreme Court as an institution and allowed the Republicans to weaponize the Supreme Court 20 years later. Why do you think until yesterday, when the Court refused to hear their case, the Republicans kept saying "we'll win in the Supreme Court"? Why do you think at the time the Justices who ruled in Bush's favor said the case was not to be used as past precedent?

Even Sandra Day O'Connor years later questioned whether the court should've heard the case and acknowledges that it hurt the image of the court:

https://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/04/29/sandra-day-oconnor-doubts-wisdom-of-bush-v-gore

[brucejoel99]

Well, for one thing, there's no concrete evidence that Gore would've won the election with the recounts he requested anyway. An extensive review of the disputed ballots that were ruled on in Bush v. Gore was conducted after the fact & it was found that their being counted wouldn't have been able to hand the election to Gore. However, the review was also unable to conclusively claim that W. definitely won the total statewide vote without a shadow of a doubt because, in addition to the 43,000+ votes which had been at stake in Bush v. Gore, there was an even broader group of 175,010 ballots which had been rejected in counties that Gore hadn't bothered to request recounts in.

The way I see it, the 2000 election in Florida was - for all intents & purposes - a statistical tie. The votes that were counted under Florida law resulted in W. winning by 537 votes. Had a recount managed to be properly conducted, then either candidate could've probably ended up being able to claim victory in the end given this close of a race, but the systematic failures ended up favoring W. So, in my mind, it wasn't a stolen election so much as an uber-close election in which the chips happened to fall in W.'s favor.

[Frodo]

It is a pity Al Gore didn't request a statewide recount, and just stuck to a select few counties in south Florida -he would have won the state by about the same margin George W. Bush did IRL, and therefore the presidency:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots was conducted by two groups—first by The Miami Herald and USA Today, in conjunction with the accounting firm BDO Seidman; and later by a multi-outlet consortium of news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, in conjunction with NORC at the University of Chicago. The Herald investigation concluded that Bush would still have won, and would likely have widened his lead slightly, even if the Supreme Court had permitted the recount that Gore had sought. The review also determined that, had a full statewide recount of all disputed Florida ballots taken place, with each ballot reviewed from scratch and ballot counters using an inclusive standard, Gore might possibly have won by a few hundred votes. Gore had never requested such a statewide recount. The consortium came to similar conclusions.

 
source

[Chips]

Possibly.

[Richard Slapper]

No. Bush would have still won had the recount gone on.

[pbrower2a]

Here's the problem:

Gore, the incumbent VP, inherits the President from a popular President in 2000 -- NOT!

Dole, Dubya twice -- blue
Clinton and Dubya twice-- green (Florida disputed for a month... thus the light shade)
Clinton, Gore, and Kerry -- red
Clinton, Gore, and Dubya -- tan
Clinton, Dubya, and Kerry -- yellow  

No state went from Dole to Gore.

Gore lost fully eleven states that Clinton had won four years earlier... and any one of them could have ensured that the Great Disaster would have not been President.

(from "Here We Can Contrast Elections)


... any one of the eleven states that went from Clinton to Dubya would have, had it gone for Gore, won the election for Gore. In 2000 that would have included New Hampshire with its four electoral votes. OK, the states in an arc from Louisiana to West Virginia have since gone increasingly R and have not been in reach for a Democratic nominee for President since then. Texas was fairly close for Clinton twice, but the Favorite Son effect came into play... huge.

If you ask what states were closest to going from Dole to Gore, then they were Virginia (8.04% in favor of Dubya) and Colorado (8.36% in favor of Dubya). Obama would win those two states in 2008... but eight years later.

In any event, Democrats cannot now expect to win Presidential elections when Oregon is extremely close, Minnesota is close, and Washington is within the range of reasonable contest.

Due to a realignment of the electoral vote between 2000 and 2004, Gore '00 + NH would not have been enough for Kerry. Kerry did win New Hampshire, but he also lost two states that Gore won by razor-thin margins in 2000 (Iowa and New Mexico). He might have gotten away with those losses had he instead won Ohio... but he didn't.

Depending upon Florida was a bad idea for Gore. His opponent had his brother as Governor. He picked a Jewish US Senator to try to win the Jewish vote in Florida that he thought would be the margin... he would have been wiser to pick Carl Levin (D-MI), a more ebullient character and more likely to exude confidence to offset Gore's "undertaker" style. Levin would have been a better choice for New Hampshire... but also Missouri, Nevada, and Ohio.