All US elections are governed by State Constitutions; even Presidential Elections.
The Florida Constitution states that recounts must be state-wide. Nobody gets to pick and choose which Counties/Precincts are recounted and which are not. They must ALL be recounted, or none at all.
The Dems didn't want to recount the entire state, because there were places that might have flipped to Bush.
So the SCOTUS simply applied the law, and told the Dems, "Go ahead and recount - ALL the precincts". The Dems said, "We don't have time", which is nonsense. All the precincts are counted locally, at the same time.
It would have taken the same time to recount the entire state as it would take to recount one precinct. So the Dems spun the narrative that SCOTUS "Designated" Bush the winner.
A newspaper survey done afterwards shows that Florida in 2000, completely recounted, would have had a several thousand vote margin in favor of GWB.
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
Thank you.
This statement is not entirely true.
In Bush v. Gore the Florida Supreme Court erroneously ruled that an ambiguity in the wording the recount provisions of the Florida Constitution permitted selective recounts.
Whether that finding was in good faith or not (it certainly wasn't) it is now mooted by the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision in Bush v. Gore. In that decision, the Court held that a selective recount of precincts or counties for a statewide office was an Equal Protection Violation of The Fourteenth Amendment.
Liberals like to pretend the court ruled narrowly. No, it did not. In an additional stipulation, the Court ruled 5-4 that there was not sufficient time to conduct a state recount in keeping with the "safe haven" provision of both Federal Law and the Florida Constitution That was the 5-4 part of the ruling.
State's still govern their own elections, but they their rules can not violate parts of the Federal Constitution incorporated against them by Amendment XIV. It thus no longer matters what Florida (or any other state) has to say about a recount: Since 2000 a recount for a statewide result must now include the whole state, without regard to what a state's provisions may be.