The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election

by Howard Gillman

Book Overview

The dramatic struggle over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election presented judges with an extraordinary political challenge, as well as a historic political temptation. In The Votes That Counted Howard Gillman offers a comprehensive yet critical assessment of how well courts coped with the competing expectations for impartial justice and favorable partisan results.

Lively and authoritative, the book documents how the participants,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226294080
• ISBN13: 9780226294087
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 325 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Fine academic look at...

the outcome of 2000 election and how America got there. The book chronologically relives the legal battles in courts by pro-Bush and pro-Gore forcs culminating with a 5-4 Supreme Court rulings overturning Florida's Supreme Court. Well written and well researched. If after reading the book you are still sincerely convinced that Bush v. Gore (I) and (II) were legally sound decisions, I would recommend another book: "The Attitudial Model (Revised)" by Segal and Spaeth.

Very good reporting, but poor editing

In this book, The Votes that Counted, Howard Gillman does a masterful job of reporting the facts that led up to the dispute, and the chronology of events during the aftermath of the Presidential Election in November, 2000.Naturally, Gillman focuses on Florida, which was the state of most interest in the election, since its electoral votes would ultimately determine who would reside in the White House.Gillman is, in my opinion, biased, with an evident fondness of the Democratic Party. There is, of course, nothing wrong with being opiniated, and Gillman does not let this interfere with his reporting of the evident facts.Gillman's analysis of the election and the subsequent judicial participation is a good one, and certainly does correlate well with the title of the book; he explains well why he feels that the justices of the Supreme Court (all five of them that sided with Bush) determined who the next President of the United States would be.As I was reading this book, I frequently found that I had to stop and re-read some sentences multiple times in order to understand the meaning; verbs were conjugated improperly, and improper tenses were used. I do not fault the author for these grammatical errors - I fault the editor for failing to catch and correct them.I found this to be a valuable book, and one worthy of studying carefully as study of the Presidental election of 2000 and judicial intervention in that contest. I gave it four stars rather than five because of what I see as a lack of strong editing.

Time to read it again

I first ran into this book at my college library and renewed it twice so I could take my time enjoying it. A year later I bought it. I play on reading it again on Spring Break. Placing the reader inside the legal system so soon after the decision, the author was able to capture the feelings of the justices and judges while the emotions were still in the air.The only major downfall of this book is the lack of logic expressed by the author several times to support his views. However, in any book in which the author admits a bias, I am inclined to assume there will be a slant to support his view when I read it. I feel this book is so good, I still give it 5 stars.

Judging the judges

A definitive, even handed analysis of the judges and the court decisions arising out of the Florida disputed election. While Gillman devotes specific chapters to each of the two Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, he does not ignore the lower court decisions in these case or the litigation on other challenges to the election outcome. Gillman is ultimately critical of the US Supreme Court decision, but he provides equal time to the Court's defenders and his criticism is both scholarly and dispassionate. Unlike other critics of the Court, including this reviewer, who think the Court did irreparable damage to itself and its reputations, Gillman concludes, and provides evidence to support his conclusion, that the decision has not and will not undercut the public's reverence for the Court's as the Nation's most trusted and respected institution.

Best book on the topic

This book is careful, thoughtful, wonderfully written and, as compared with some other works on the topic, is non-polemical. A must-read for anyone interested in the 2000 election controversy or anyone with an interest in the role of the courts in our system of government.