The Court’s authority — possessed of neither the purse nor the sword — ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the Court’s complete detachment, in fact and appearance, from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces in political settlements. [...]

In past elections, so-called “faithless electors” cast innocuously eccentric votes that provided a quaint reminder of one of the archaic curiosities of the presidential selection process. After providing a rare element of surprise in the otherwise perfunctory Electoral College ritual, these independent spirits who voted for someone other than their party’s nominee would vanish from [...]

The most complicated bit of governmental machinery which the modern world has to exhibit is that which is employed in the selection of the chief executive officer…for the United States…It is almost marvelous that any people should have preserved political unity for a century under such a loose and decentralized system of election of its [...]

The dispute over the election has developed into a constitutional crisis. With George W. Bush claiming victory and Al Gore refusing to concede, the election’s outcome now seems destined to depend on judicial determination of complex and perhaps novel constitutional issues. Rather than attempting to resolve the actual vote count in the most equitable way [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention in the disputed presidential election was virtually inevitable, despite wishful predictions by Democrats that the Court would not meddle with state election law. As countless commentators have pointed out, the electoral impasse provides yet another illustration of the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville’s overworked observation that “scarcely any political question [...]

It should be obvious to everyone by now that no one ever will know which presidential candidate actually won more popular votes, either in Florida or nationwide. The Florida recount process can never yield an accurate result, for efforts to divine the meaning of the notorious chads are hopelessly compromised by the certainty of ambiguity [...]