Gore v. Harris · 772 So. 2d 1243 (Fla. 2000) · No. SC2000-2431 · Decided December 8, 2000
The Florida Supreme Court ordered every disputed ballot in the state counted by hand. The recount lasted a day and a half before Washington stopped it.
The Facts
On November 7, 2000, Americans went to bed without knowing who had won the presidency. Florida’s own count would decide it, and Florida’s own count kept changing. The state’s initial canvass showed George W. Bush ahead by 1,784 votes out of nearly six million cast — close enough to trigger an automatic machine recount, which narrowed the margin further. Manual recounts began in a handful of counties, driven by voters using aging punch-card machines that often left a chad still attached to the ballot — hanging, dimpled, or merely dented — invisible to a machine, legible only to a human eye. In Palm Beach County, a confusingly designed “butterfly ballot” led thousands of voters, by their own sworn accounts, to punch the hole for Pat Buchanan when they meant Al Gore.
By November 26, Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Bush the winner by 537 votes, over objections that Miami-Dade County’s manual recount had been abandoned partway through and Palm Beach County’s had not finished in time to be counted. Al Gore filed a formal contest of that certification under Florida’s election code, asking a court to order the uncounted legal votes counted.
What Each Side Argued
For Gore
Gore’s lawyers argued that thousands of ballots showing a clear indication of voter intent — a dimpled or hanging chad the machine had never registered — sat uncounted, and that Florida law required a manual recount wherever the machine tally failed to reflect what voters had actually done. They asked the courts to order every undervote in the state counted by hand, not just the ballots in counties that had already started.
For Bush
Bush’s lawyers argued the certified result should stand. Florida’s canvassing boards had already exercised their judgment, no statewide legal standard existed for what counted as a valid mark on a punch-card ballot, and ordering a new, uneven count this late — under an already compressed deadline — risked creating more error than it resolved.
What the Court Held
On December 8, 2000, a divided Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, 4–3. It reversed the trial judge who had denied the contest, held that the uncounted “legal votes” — ballots showing a clear indication of the voter’s intent that the machines had missed — had to be counted, and ordered an immediate, statewide manual recount of every undervote in Florida, including Miami-Dade’s abandoned count and Palm Beach’s late one. The majority read Florida’s election-contest statute as demanding that every legal vote be counted, even at the cost of speed and a uniform counting procedure.
The Aftermath
The recount lasted about a day and a half. On December 9, the United States Supreme Court stayed it. On December 12 — the night the recount would have had to finish to meet the federal “safe harbor” deadline — the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), holding that recounting without one uniform, statewide standard for a valid vote violated the Equal Protection Clause, and that no time remained to conduct a recount that would satisfy it. The recount stopped for good. Bush was awarded Florida’s electoral votes, and with them, the presidency.
The Florida Supreme Court’s own decision was never actually carried out — reversed within four days of being issued. It remains one of the most consequential rulings any state court has made in American history anyway: not because its recount happened, but because the fight over whether it should have, decided by a single vote in Washington, settled a presidential election. The case reshaped how nearly every state runs elections afterward, from the end of the punch-card ballot to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.
| Court | Supreme Court of Florida |
| Citation | 772 So. 2d 1243 (Fla. 2000) |
| Case No. | SC2000-2431 |
| Lower Court | 1st DCA — 1D00-4745 |
| Decided | December 8, 2000 |
| Vote | 4–3 |
Primary sources: Opinion available. Initial Brief, Answer Brief, and Record on Appeal — access pending. This archive does not publish secondhand summaries.