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A Place At The Table: Bush V. Gore Through The Lens Of Race, Spencer A. Overton
A Place At The Table: Bush V. Gore Through The Lens Of Race, Spencer A. Overton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Although African Americans cast a majority of ballots rejected by counting machines following the 2000 presidential election in Florida, legal academic commentators have not grappled with the significance of race in their discussions of Bush v. Gore. This Essay uses race to expose structural shortcomings of merit-based assumptions about democracy embedded in the U.S. Supreme Court's majority per curiam. The Court prohibited a manual count of imperfectly marked ballots, effectively conditioning membership in political community on individual capacity to produce a machine-readable ballot. Despite the Court's individualized focus, however, merit-based assumptions about democracy interfere primarily not with individual rights, but …