Was Bush v. Gore (2000) actually as bad as its critics say it was?

[NoTrump]

Do you personally think that Bush v. Gore (2000) was actually as bad as its critics say it was?

After all, the say that I see it, the ruling in Bush v. Gore appears to be pretty defensible:

-First of all, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a lack of a uniform standard, confining the recount to undervotes (as opposed to recounting all of the ballots), including incompleted county totals in the vote count, and using untrained and inexperienced observers to conduct the recount is a violation of equal protection. All of this appears to be defensible. After all, the lack of standard would mean that identical ballots would get treated differently depending on which part of Florida and which counting table they were being counted on. Likewise, the exclusion of overvotes and the ballots which were classified by the machines as legal votes from the recount would mean that some legal votes would not be counted while some illegal votes would be counted--something which appears to be a violation of due process. Similarly, the inclusion of incomplete county totals into the vote count appears to likewise violate equal protection and due process since it would treat ballots in areas which weren't recounted differently from ballots in areas which were recounted.

As for having different voting machines in different counties and areas, Justice David Souter distinguished this from the standardless counting of ballots by pointing out that keeping costs down and promoting innovation would be state interests which would justify allowing different counties and areas to have different voting machines. In contrast, there was no state interest in treating identical ballots differently in different counties and areas.

-While the U.S. Supreme Court's remedy in Bush v. Gore has been extremely strongly and extremely widely criticized, it also appears to be defensible. Basically, the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have said that all six million ballots in Florida would need to be manually recounted in order for Florida's recount to be constitutional (along with having a uniform standard for counting ballots, of course). This would have meant that Florida would have needed to recount 1 million ballots per day so that it could complete its recounting by the December 18 federal deadline for having electors cast their votes. I suspect that this would have been extremely hard to do. Plus, there would have also probably needed to be judicial review of the results of this recount--something which there certainly wouldn't have been any time for.

Also, while one can say that the U.S. Supreme Court should have let Florida's Supreme Court make the final decision in regards to whether or not to continue counting, I would like to point out that the U.S. Supreme Court didn't quite forbid the Florida Supreme Court from reinterpreting or clarifying its interpretation of Florida state law (the U.S. Supreme Court claimed to defer to the Florida Supreme Court in regards to the importance of the December 12 safe harbor deadline). Plus, the case was remanded to the Florida Supreme Court and not dismissed. Thus, the Florida Supreme Court could have tried ordering a new manual recount in Florida. However, it is an open question as to what exactly the U.S. Supreme Court would have done in such a scenario. Indeed, it might or might not have overturned such a new ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Of course, as I explained above, it wouldn't have made a difference either way since there appears to have been insufficient time (six days) to conduct a new manual recount in Florida in a way which would have been consistent with the principles of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

-Finally, while one can claim that the U.S. Supreme Court said that its ruling in Bush v. Gore should not be used as precedent, I would like to point out that this appears to be an inaccurate representation of what exactly the U.S. Supreme Court said in Bush v. Gore. Specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court limited its holding to the present circumstances while not ruling out the possibility that the principles of Bush v. Gore could apply in future cases. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court simply appears to have wanted to avoided forcing its hand on future cases by making an overly broad ruling in Bush v. Gore.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on what I wrote here? Indeed, what exactly--if anything--am I missing here?

[wxtransit]

I think that while a few of your points are valid, you've just been banned for being a sock.