can you imagine if bush v. gore happened with a 4-4 court?

[unblock]

what a mess that would have been!

hopefully the supreme court would have realized they weren't going to settle anything and just stayed out of it. alternatively, they could have taken some of the election-related cases and just left the lower court ruling stand due to the 4-4 deadlock.

but then the effective decisions would have been all over the place. remember, some post-election analysis concluded that in nearly any other scenario regarding what to count or not count as a proper vote, gore would have won.

except the republicans wouldn't have stood for that.

florida, under republican control, would have invalidated their own electors or refused to certify any result giving it to gore. with neither candidate getting 270 electoral votes, the election would have been decided by the republican house of representative, who of course would have picked shrub anyway.

the democratic senate might have picked lieberman as vice president! how crazy would that have been! or they might have realized that's pretty unworkable and just picked cheney, accepting defeat.

we wouldn't have had gore as president, and we might have ended up in the exact same place anyway -- but the damage to the political system would have been worse. as it was, it was just one legendarily, stupidly partisan decision. but with a 4-4 split, it would have been a lot uglier.


anyway, the reason i mention this is how stupid is it for republicans to refuse to even consider a supreme court nominee when the court is divided 4-4?

deciding election certainly isn't the primary role of the supreme court, but they decide all kinds of issues, and a 4-4 court for basically an entire year defeat the entire point of having an odd number of seats on the court.


it'll be really, really ugly if we have comparable electoral uncertainty with a 4-4 court, thanks to the incredibly selfish, irresponsibly partisan republican senate.

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. The Florida Supreme Court, by a 4–3 vote, ordered a statewide manual recount.

Hat there been a 4-4 split, the recount would have continued, and it was likely that Gore would have won.

[unblock]

3. There were several cases

Involving exactly what to count as a legal vote. So, yes, recount, but there were still many questions.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

9. And those would have taken place in front of election judges and local courts. Where it belonged.

[still_one]

2. Would not have been a problem at all, the last court ruling would have applied, and there would have

been a manual recount

[unblock]

4. I disagree.

For the same reason the Supreme Court stepped in an did something highly partisan, Florida would not have certified the election. They would have done what they needed to do to throw it into the House of Representatives.

[still_one]

5. No, that is not how it works. If there is a 4-4 SC ruling, the lower court ruling stands.

That is exactly what has been happening on any 4-4 SC decisions.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/14/us/politics/how-scalias-death-could-affect-major-supreme-court-cases-in-the-2016-term.html?_r=0

[unblock]

6. But that's only one step in the process

You're right as to the the specific bull legal challenge that was bush v gore. Correct, whether they split 4-4 it declined to take it up at all, the lower court decision would stand.

But the lower court decision was about the recount, not about who actually wins becomes president. After the election, the Florida Secretary of State has to certify the election. She would have refused, on some grounds of fraud or confusion or all the controversy or just the fact that she could.

Without that certification, no electors from Florida would vote in the electoral college, throwing the election to the republican house.

This is similar to what happened in 1876 (Hayes-Tilden)

[still_one]

10. My emphasis was only on the SC 4-4, not the internal politics that would or could have occurred at

the state level. If Florida refused to certify as you suggest, and the required 270 electoral college votes were not attained, then you are correct that the election would have gone to the House where the republican congress would have made bush the president, however from my understanding if that happened, the VP would have been chosen by the Senate.

[TrishaJ]

12. and a manual recount may have

pointed to Gore; however, Jeb Bush and the GOP Florida Legislature would have sent a second set of delegates and the issue would have been taken up in the GOP House of Representatives. Bush would STILL be installed as President. It would have just taken longer.

[Jerry442]

7. Fla legislature might have...

...declared a slate of Gore electors void on the grounds of too much hanky-panky and appointed Bush ones. Knowing the likelihood of this happening is beyond my ken.

[stevenleser]

11. Yes. They had already voted early in the day the SCOTUS issued its ruling and they voted to give

Florida's electors to Bush. This ensured Bush's election no matter what the SCOTUS did. Let me walk you through it:

If SCOTUS sided with FL Supreme Court, the recount continues, Gore is found to have won, Florida Dept of State has no choice but to certify that result, but the FL State Legislature has the constitutional power to choose the electors. This conundrum would result in both Bush and Gore electors going to vote in the electoral college. Congress would attempt to address the dispute. Most likely the dispute would result in Florida's electors being thrown out in their entirety. Without Florida's Electoral votes, neither Bush nor Gore would have had 270 Electoral Votes throwing the Presidential election into the House of Representatives which the Republicans controlled as far as overall numbers and state delegations. To be succinct, in that scenario, Bush becomes President.

We all blame the SCOTUS for what happened, and what they did was scummy, but it was the Republican controlled state legislature that sealed the fate of the election earlier in the day. After the SCOTUS ruling, they tried to bury the fact that they had done this, but if you scour the internet with a few searches, you will eventually find mainstream Florida media reports that they were meeting that morning to do this.

[Jerry442]

13. Interesting. You could argue that the legislative path would have been better.

Well, less bad anyway. All the players would have been elected officials who would have had to face the voters at some point and the SCOTUS wouldn't have compromised its institutional integrity by appointing a president.

Still would have been pretty ugly.

Thanks for the history. I didn't remember the Florida legislature actually voting. I think I missed that somehow.

[raging moderate]

8. I wonder if the GOP have done this on purpose as part of some scheme?

This refusal to consider a sitting President's appointments, including a Supreme Court Justice, is so strange. And a 4-4 split in the Supreme Court, as you suggest, has so many possible ways to screw up an election. And there is the iron hold on the voting machines. And all of the other possible GOP antics you have suggested are so plausible. What if they really are planning to throw this election somehow, and all these odd things are somehow part of a plan with many possible outcomes?