Would the Majority Have Stopped the Hand Count if Gore Had Been Ahead?

Abstract

Abstract Aims to demonstrate that, during the (Bush vs Gore) US presidential election of 2000, by any reasonable standard of evaluation, the majority justices of the US Supreme Court failed to test the US constitutional system in ways that it had never been tested before, and did so not because of incompetence, but because of malice aforethought. The author states that he is convinced that if it had been Bush rather than Gore who needed the Florida recount in order to have any chance of winning the election, that at least some of the five justices who voted to stop the recount would instead have voted to allow it to proceed. The main sections of the chapter are: Judicial Impropriety; Hypothetical Cases Involving a Supreme Court Decision Regarding a Presidential Election; The Difficulty of Proving an Improper Motive; Academic Defenders of the Majority Justices; Ad Hominem Arguments and Analysis of Motive; and Analysing the Justices’ Motives in Bush vs Gore: A Prelude.