An infamous decision

Bush v. Gore

They decided against allowing the statewide manual recount because, allegedly, there was no statewide uniform standard for the manual counting of votes and this violated the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment.

Seven judges agreed to this point.

But that is a gross misapplication of the amendment.

And it has been pointed out that three of the five Republican judges who bought this argument and joined to make up the majority decision stopping the recount process for good were previously famous for understandings of the equal protection clause that made this decision senseless, including notably that hero of textualism and devotee of judicial principle unbiased by partisanship or personal preference, Antonin Scalia.

Democratic critics, however, have not disputed that point but the “remedy” of stopping the recount altogether, allegedly in deference to the presumed intent of the Florida Legislature to in any event meet a deadline beyond which the Florida count would not be safe from dispute in the US Congress.

The preferred remedy would have been to send the case back to Florida to do a better and more uniform recount of the whole state, by hand, even though this could not be completed by the deadline.

But in the aftermath it appeared that Gore didn't want that, anyway.