Majority opinion

At oral arguments on December 11, Bush’s legal team asserted that the Florida Supreme Court had exceeded its authority by ordering the manual recount of undervotes, while Gore’s team contended that the case, having already been decided at the state level, was not a matter for consideration at the federal level. In a per curiam ruling issued the following day, the Court found (7–2) that, owing to inconsistencies in manual recounting methods and standards between Florida counties, the Florida court’s order of a manual recount amounted to a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a smaller majority (5–4), the Court also ruled that no new recount could take place, because none could be finished by the “safe harbor” deadline—the date, set by federal law (3 U.S.C. §5), by which states were required to resolve any disputes regarding the selection of presidential electors in order to guarantee that their final determination “shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution.” Although failure to meet the deadline, which fell on December 12 (six days before the meeting of the Electoral College on December 18), would not have prevented Florida’s electoral votes from being counted, the majority argued that any court order for a new, “constitutionally proper” recount would violate a provision of Florida election law that empowered state courts to grant “appropriate” relief in response to legitimate challenges to certified election results. And that provision would be violated, according to the majority, because in drafting it the Florida state legislature presumably intended that any such relief be completed by the safe-harbor deadline. (The majority also argued that the Florida Supreme Court itself had recognized this intention when, in earlier related cases, it had referred to voters’ “participating fully in the federal electoral process” and to election statutes’ being “cognizant of the federal grant of authority derived from the United States Constitution and derived from 3 U.S.C. §5.”)

Concurring opinion

In a concurring opinion joined by associate justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice William Rehnquist agreed with the majority regarding the intentions of the Florida state legislature (“Surely when the Florida Legislature empowered the courts of the State to grant ‘appropriate’ relief, it must have meant relief that would have become final by the cutoff date of 3 U.S.C. §5.”) but also suggested that the safe-harbor provision itself imposed a strict deadline beyond which no recounts could proceed (“In Presidential elections, the contest period necessarily terminates on the date set by 3 U.S.C. §5 for concluding the State’s ‘final determination’ of election controversies.”). Rehnquist argued in addition that the recount order was invalid because it effectively created new election law in violation of Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which reserves that power to the state legislatures.

Dissenting opinions

The decision of the majority was heavily criticized by the minority, each one of whom wrote a dissenting opinion. All of the dissenting justices contended that the majority was wrong to prevent any remedial manual recount from taking place. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the manual recount order had not violated the equal protection clause and that the majority’s reversal of the order contradicted principles of federalism and the Court’s tradition of deferring to state courts regarding the interpretation of their own states’ laws. He also disputed the stricter interpretation of the safe-harbor provision as prohibiting vote counting beyond the deadline: “those provisions [of Title 3 of the U.S. Code] merely provide rules of decision for Congress to follow when selecting among conflicting slates of electors.…They do not prohibit States from counting…legal votes until a bona fide winner is determined.” Justice David Souter asserted that the Court’s initial stay of the Florida Supreme Court’s recount order was unnecessary (“If this Court had allowed the State to follow the course indicated by the opinions of its own Supreme Court, it is entirely possible that there would ultimately have been no issue requiring our review”) and defended the Florida court’s interpretation of appropriate relief under state election law. Justice Stephen Breyer contended that the Florida Supreme Court would have been in a far better position than the majority to judge whether a remedial recount could have been completed before the meeting of the Electoral College on December 18, and he pointedly observed,

By halting the manual recount, and thus ensuring that the uncounted legal votes will not be counted under any standard, this Court crafts a remedy out of proportion to the asserted harm. And that remedy harms the very fairness interests the Court is attempting to protect.

Finally, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered a detailed refutation of Rehnquist’s contention that the Florida Supreme Court had created its own election law; agreed with Stevens that the recount order had not deprived Florida voters of equal protection (“I cannot agree that the recount adopted by the Florida court, flawed as it may be, would yield a result any less fair or precise than the certification that preceded that recount”) and that the majority had discarded the Court’s former commitment to federalism and deference to state courts; and agreed with Breyer that, in Ginsburg’s words, “the December 12 ‘deadline’ for bringing Florida’s electoral votes into 3 U.S.C. §5’s safe harbor lacks the significance the Court assigns it” (“were that date to pass,” she continued, “Florida would still be entitled to deliver electoral votes [that] Congress must count”). Her decision to conclude her opinion with “I dissent,” rather than the traditional “I respectfully dissent,” was widely noted.

With the termination of the recount process, Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to Bush. Gore officially conceded on December 13 and stated in a televised address, “While I strongly disagree with the Court’s decision, I accept it.”