declared Gore the winner of Florida. However, by early next morning, the official tally changed to Bush and then later to undecided. At that time, Bush had 2,909,135 Florida votes to Gore’s 2,907,351. With both candidates receiving 48.8% of the states’ votes, Florida enacted an automatic recount of its electronic votes under its Election Code 102.141, which states that if the margin of victory is 0.5% or less, its accuracy must be verified. With the election’s results up in the air, intense legal debates proliferated. What became the central question was whether Florida’s votes could be legitimately verified. On November 9th, Al Gore requested the manual recount of votes in four Florida counties, yet two days later, the Bush campaign challenged under constitutional grounds. After a series of legal debates, the center of which revolved around whether the manual recount and the extension of the deadlines for counting the votes could be legally sustained, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the manual recounts should continue and be counted in the official tally, a ruling that the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a multi-faceted verdict on December 12th against the Florida Supreme Court’s prior ruling declaring that the manual recount of votes was unconstitutional because it could not validate any uniformity in how they were counted. The court’s most important finding was that the unsigned 7-2 per curiam stated that a recount regardless of how it was conducted would be unconstitutional as it could not be adequately finished to meet the deadline of December 12th under Title 3, U.S. Code, Section 5 of elector controversies while adhering to the equal protection and due process clause of the 14th amendment. The law states that any discrepancies as to who the electors of a state are must be solved at least six days in advance of when the electoral college meets to vote. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the final official tally of Florida’s popular vote became 2,912,790 for Bush and
Since the 12th amendment, there have not been any major changes to the way the electoral college functions constitutionally. However, there are two Supreme Court cases that should be noted. Together, the 12th amendment and Article II, section I, clause II, laid the constitutional and legal foundation of which the Supreme Court gave decrees relating to faithless elector laws. In the first case McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the Supreme Court ruled that the states have the power to dictate how they want their presidential electors to be chosen. In particular, the first phrase within Article II, section I, clause II again states that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct [emphasis mine], a Number of Electors” became the basis of the court’s decision. Although this case does not relate to faithless elector laws directly, after the ruling, states expanded the Court’s decision into allowing themselves to create requirements for their electors. One of these requirements became pledge laws. Six decades later, it took another Supreme Court case to determine if these pledge laws were constitutional. Decided in 1952 by a 5-2 vote, Ray v. Blair is the only Supreme Court case that pertains to faithless elector laws. The debate started when a member of the democratic party, Edmund Blair refused to take his party’s pledge to become an elector in Alabama. Specifically, Blair did not agree with a particular section in Alabama’s statues that stated “a pledge to aid and support [emphasis mine] the nominees of the National Convention of the Democratic Party for President and Vice-President of the United States.” Because Blair did not agree to the pledge, the party’s Chairman of Alabama’s Executive Committee of the Democratic Party Ben F. Ray denied his certification to be an elector. Before the Supreme Court took the case, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that it was illegal for Ray to mandate Blair take the pledge. The Court argued on