re: #61 Honorary Yooper

No, they don’t, but the contentions regarding the recount of the Florida ballots were started by Gore’s team. They filed a lawsuit to keep counting the ballots after the proscribed number of counts had been done. Bush’s team then countersued. Then it went to the SCOTUS which ended this Gore-started nonsense.

People seem to forget that the popular vote means squat for the presidential election. It is only the electoral college vote that counts as the Framers designed it. This was so that the smaller states could be protected from the larger states in our federal union. Hence, a candidate could win the popular vote in states like California by a landslide, lose Texas by a close call, and lose the electoral college vote due to losing other needed states by close margins. Yet, he could win the popular vote.

Of course Gore was the one who took the recount to court, he felt he had legitimately won the election. (A fact that was later confirmed by a full recount of all Florida ballots, but lets not get into that right now.) The point is, the 2000 election was so contentious because the President of the United States was ultimately chosen by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court. You can certainly understand how this would be a contentious issue, seeing as the Supreme Court is a non-elected body.

As far as the popular vote, I understand it is technically irrelevant. But the fact that Bush was the first President to not have also won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college certainly didn’t help.