What this election really showed was that our voting methods (more or less across the country) are currently not accurate enough to determine a majority of the vote in elections which are very close.
Al Gore definitely won the majority of the national popular vote by a slim margin. But, as I stated in a previous thread, United States presidential elections are not determined directly from the popular vote. They are determined through the representative electoral process set up by the founding fathers (and yet to be discarded by the american people).
This result of this, in the recent election, was that one state, Florida, ending up in the position of casting the deciding electoral votes for the election. Florida's electoral votes would go to whichever candidate garnered the majority of the popular vote in Florida. However, the popular race in Florida turned out to be so close that it was ultimately impossible to determine a winner (by vote) there. The margin of error (due to the inaccuracy in the vote) in Florida was consistently greater than any difference in the votes for Gore and Bush found thoughout all the analyses of the voting conducted after the voting in Florida was completed.
Given this situation, it soon became evident to both parties (if not the american public) that the winner of the Florida popular vote, and thus, the U.S. electoral vote, and thus, the presidency, would be determined by how the vote was counted.. At this point, whatever their public declarations, each party's sole objective was to establish a method of counting the vote which would result in their candidate being elected.
The point here is that, due to the fact that our voting methods are not designed to be able to determine a majority of the vote when a vote is as close as it was in Florida, any criteria for performing a more accurate count would have to be determined after the election. This is, essentially, what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on. It ruled that you could not change the counting criteria used in an election after the election. Bush won because he was ahead (by an incredibly miniscule margin) after the vote tallying was completed according the vote counting criteria established before the election, and because the United States Supreme Court refused to allow that criteria to be changed, even refined, if you will, after the election.
JustAThought
