Eric Alterman

While the Supreme Court’s ruling is unlikely to have much impact on the ultimate deciding of the race, it will be a spin-nightmare for the losing side. If the justices do eventually rule for Bush, the pressure on Gore will start building again immediately. If Gore wins the Supreme Court case, he will still require an astonishing string of victories coming after his two setbacks late Friday in the Florida Supreme Court. Now that the Florida court has refused to order an expedited ballot count and accepted the legality of the disputed “butterfly ballot,”

Gore will need :

• An affirmation by the local courts, and eventually, the Florida Supreme Court, to allow a hand recount of the 10,750 or so disputed ballots in Miami-Dade County, plus an order to include the 157 votes Gore picked up there before Republican-ordered rioters helped to shut it down;

• An allowance of the 215 votes he picked up in the Palm Beach recount before Katherine Harris refused to accept them owing to a two-hour miss on the deadline;

• An overturning of Harris’ (quite obviously partisan) decision to certify Nassau County’s first machine tally, which gave Bush 51 more votes than the mandated second count;

• A decision ordering the Martin County canvassing board to throw out the county’s 9,773 absentee ballots because Republicans were allowed to add voter identification numbers to ballot applications;

• A victory for the Democratic voters suing in Seminole County who (unaided by the Gore forces) are asking that nearly 5,000 Bush votes be disqualified, because they were illegally filled out by Republican operatives, rather than by the voters or their family members, as is specified by law.

• But here is the problem. In the unlikely event that Gore wins on enough of the above to overtake Bush, even by thousands of votes, the next step of Jeb Bush and the Republican-dominated Florida legislature will be to simply choose an alternate slate of pro-Bush electors.

  What happens then?

• One likely scenario would be that the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives would vote to seat the Florida legislature’s electors while the U.S. Senate, now fifty-fifty, votes for the original pro-Gore slate, with Vice President Gore casting the deciding vote. Another deadlock.

  And then what?

• Why of course, it’s back to the Supreme Court, this time, for real.

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