Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/bush-v-gore-virginia-lawsuit-precedent-supreme-court/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 14:14:41+00:00

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The case-that-must-not-be-named is becoming the standard precedent for election protection lawsuits.
All the votes from the November 5 election have been tabulated, and the Virginia attorney general race is as close as they come. Democrat Mark Herring holds a slim 164-vote lead over his Republican opponent, Mark Obenshain. The close count has teed up a likely recount for next month, and the Republican candidate has hinted at an unusual legal strategy: basing a lawsuit on Bush v. Gore, the controversial Supreme Court decision that ended the 2000 presidential election in George W. Bush’s favor.
The Supreme Court usually prides itself on respecting the past while keeping an eye toward future legal precedent. But the court trod lightly when it intervened in 2000. The five conservative justices may have handed the election to Bush, but they tried to ensure that their decision would lack wider ramifications. “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances,” read the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, “for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” The conservative majority wanted to put a stop to the Florida recount, but they hoped their ruling—which extended the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to argue that different standards cannot be used to count votes from different counties—wouldn’t set precedent in future cases.
For a time the justices got their wish. But the supposed one-time logic of the controversial decision has begun to gain acceptance in the legal community—particularly among campaign lawyers in contentious elections.
Obenshain issued a statement last week that left his options open and mentioned the need for “uniform rules,” which election law expert Rick Hasen interpreted as a sign that the Republican is gearing up for a lawsuit that would base its challenge on Bush v. Gore.
Bush v. Gore was largely ignored in litigation in the years immediately following the decision, discarded by legal scholars as a one-off line of reasoning. That began to change after Bush’s reelection, as Democrats searched for ways to combat Republican efforts to restrict access to the polls. In 2006, a three-judge panel from Ohio’s Sixth Circuit of Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs’ equal protection argument in Stewart v. Blackwell, but that ruling was later vacated by the full circuit. Bush v. Gore came into play again during the first major recount since 2000, when former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman’s legal team predicated their arguments on the decision (Minnesota courts rejected that argument, eventually allowing Al Franken to take the Senate seat in question).
But in 2012, the Obama campaign found success using Bush v. Gore to fight back against the GOP’s voter suppression laws. Once again, it was the Sixth Circuit that found itself amenable to discarding the Supreme Court’s warnings and treating Bush v. Gore like any other opinion that creates precedent. That court had begun to establish Bush v. Gore as meaningful precedent in two previous decisions—2008’s League of Women Voters v. Brunner and 2010’s Hunter v. Hamilton County Board of Elections—but it went a step further with a pair of 2012 decisions. In Obama for America v. Husted, the president’s reelection campaign convinced first a district judge and then the Sixth Circuit that Ohio’s decision to decrease the days for early voting while maintaining an exemption for military absentee ballots violated the equal protection concepts established in Bush v. Gore. In the other case, Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless v. Husted, a group of conservative judges relied on Bush v. Gore to side with the plaintiffs and overturn a state rule to invalidate votes cast in the wrong location due to poll worker mistakes. “It reads Bush v. Gore as a kind of free-floating license to do equity in election cases,” Hasen said in a law review article on the cases.
Even as campaigns turn to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court itself has stayed on the sidelines, reluctant to revisit the legal reasoning in the case. They declined to hear an appeal on the 2012 early voting case, the best opportunity the court has had revisit its 2000 decision and correct lower courts on whether it creates precedent. The justices do discuss Bush v. Gore outside the courtroom—Antonin Scalia likes to admonish people to “get over it,” while former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has expressed doubt on whether the court should have considered the case—but they won’t touch it in their decisions. The case had been verboten in written decisions, never once cited in a Supreme Court opinion until earlier this year, when Justice Clarence Thomas referenced Bush v. Gore in a July dissent for Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council.
Even as bitter memories fade, the voter protection implications of Bush v. Gore remain uncertain. The Sixth Circuit is the lone circuit court to treat the case as established constitutional fact. “No other circuits have given Bush v. Gore a wide reading (or much of a reading at all),” Hasen writes. “In the rest of the country, Bush v. Gore is still basically dead.” Perhaps Mark Obenshain and Virginia Republicans will change that.

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