Presidential Candidates 2000

George W Bush defeated Al Gore

Other in primaries: Bill Bradley, John McCain

Bush won based on Florida. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes out of 5,825,043 cast when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida

Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the Florida count was.[3] Bush led the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. The small margin produced an automatic recount under Florida state law, which began the day after the election. That first day's results reduced the margin to just over 900 votes.[4] Once it became clear that Florida would decide the presidential election, the nation's attention focused on the manual recount.

Because the margin of the original vote count was less than 0.5 percent, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount,[5] which began the day after the election. It was ostensibly completed on November 10 in the 66 Florida counties that used vote-counting machines and reduced Bush's lead to 327 votes.[4][6] According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that a total of 18 counties—accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida—did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed.

Following the machine recount, the Gore campaign requested that disputed ballots in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties be counted by hand. Volusia County started its recount on November 12. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5:00 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and it soon became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline. On November 13 the Gore campaign and Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have the deadlines extended.[13] Meanwhile, the Bush campaign worked to stop the recount. On November 11, it joined a group of Florida voters in suing in federal district court for a preemptive injunction to stop all manual recounting of votes in Florida... On November 13, the federal court ruled against an injunction.

On November 14, the original deadline for reporting results, with the Volusia County recount complete, Bush held a 300-vote lead. The same day, a state judge upheld that deadline but ruled that further recounts could be considered later... The next day, the Florida Supreme Court allowed manual recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties to continue but left it to a state judge to decide whether Harris must include those votes in the final tally. Miami-Dade County decided on November 17 to conduct a recount but suspended it on November 22. The Gore campaign sued to force Miami-Dade County to continue its recount, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to consider the request.

On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that manual counts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties must be included and set 5:00 p.m. on November 26 as the earliest time for certification. After that decision, the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state court effectively rewrote state election statutes after the vote.

The Palm Beach County recount and the Miami-Dade County recount (having been suspended) were still incomplete at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, when Harris certified the statewide vote count with Bush ahead by 537 votes. The next day, Gore sued under Florida's statutory construct of the "contest phase". On November 28, Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County Circuit Court rejected Gore's request to include the recount results from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Gore appealed that decision to the Florida Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court convened on December 1 to consider Bush's appeal of the Florida Supreme Court's November 21 decision extending the certification date... On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its ruling that had extended the certification date.

On December 8, the Florida justices, by a 4–3 vote, rejected the selective use of manual recounts in just four counties and ordered immediate manual recounts of all ballots in the state where no vote for president had been machine-recorded, also known as undervotes.

On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia. On December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered in Bush v. Gore that the recount must stop because it lacked a uniform statewide methodology and there was insufficient time to create one and complete the recount.