On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision in the Bush v. Gore case. It put an end to the disputed presidential election held that year.
The five-person majority found that the State of Florida was obliged to report its final presidential election results by December 12th, and thus that manual recounts of the returns in that state had to stop.
That finding preserved George W. Bush’s tiny lead of 537 votes out of almost six million cast, thereby giving him Florida’s 25 electoral votes and, as a direct result, a majority of 271 (one more than needed) in the Electoral College tally.
That result was highly controversial because his opponent, Albert Gore, Jr., won the national popular vote by over half a million, which was roughly 0.5% of all votes cast. For the first time in modern U.S. history, the candidate who won the popular vote had been defeated.
In a way, the entire controversy stemmed from what sociologist Robert Merton liked to call “the law of unintended consequences.” That phrase has come to be understood as a warning that intervention in a complex system tends to create unexpected and often undesirable results.
The U.S. Constitution is one such complex system, and making changes to it can sometimes produce those kinds of outcomes. The change at issue here is the little-remembered 20th Amendment, which was adopted in 1933. It shortened the interval between the presidential election and inauguration of the winner from about four and a half months to two and a half months.
Instead of inaugurating the newly elected president on March 4th, as had been the practice earlier, he or she would be sworn in on January 20th. The 20th Amendment also shrank the interval between the election and the swearing in of newly elected members of Congress. Henceforth, their terms would commence on January 3rd.
Those changes were made to prevent a recurrence of the situation that took place in the winter of 1932-33, when the defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover remained in office until March 4, 1933.
The newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt, was unable to take any steps to combat the Great Depression until then, during a time of real economic emergency, while Hoover remained rigidly resistant to changing the government’s economic policies.
Making the changes contained in the 20th Amendment substantially reduced the likelihood of a similar period of governmental paralysis during a crisis, but unintentionally created a different kind of problem.