Bush v. Gore: Dimpled Chads, the Safe Harbor Deadline and the NORC Recount

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On November 8, 2000, George W. Bush led Al Gore in Florida by 1,784 votes out of nearly 6 million, and an automatic machine recount cut the margin to 327 by November 10. Gore sought manual recounts in Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, but Secretary of State Katherine Harris enforced the seven-day certification deadline until the Florida Supreme Court extended it to November 26. The fight turned on Votomatic punch cards, where chads clogging the rubber strips left hanging and dimpled chads that machines read as undervotes. Theodore Olson argued for Bush that county-by-county standards violated the Equal Protection Clause, while David Boies argued for Gore that Florida already had a standard: the intent of the voter.

On December 8 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of undervotes, and on December 9 the U.S. Supreme Court halted it 5 to 4, with Justice Antonin Scalia citing irreparable harm to Bush and Justice John Paul Stevens dissenting. On December 12, the safe harbor deadline, the Court ruled 7 to 2 that the varying standards violated equal protection and 5 to 4 that no valid recount could finish in time, giving Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes and a 271 to 266 win. A later review of more than 175,000 rejected ballots by NORC at the University of Chicago found Gore's four-county request would still have left Bush ahead, while a full statewide recount likely would have given Gore a margin of 60 to 171 votes.

• The safe harbor provision in Title 3, Section 5 shielded a state's electors from challenge if disputes were settled six days before the December 18 Electoral College vote.
• Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot ran its punch holes down the center between two pages of names.
• Black-majority precincts had three times as many rejected ballots as white-majority precincts.
• The majority wrote that its consideration was limited to the present circumstances, a line critics read as walling off the precedent.
• Justice David Souter was reported to have been deeply shaken by the ruling, which polls showed many Americans viewed as partisan.