Bush vs Gore

There is an interesting editorial in todays NYT concerning the Supreme Court Bush vs Gore ruling that handed the presidency to GW Bush. Here is the basis of the ruling:

“Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms,” the court declared, “the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

But this editorial argues that valuing one person's vote over another is happening all the time.

If this equal protection principle is taken seriously, if it was not just a pretext to put a preferred candidate in the White House, it should mean that states cannot provide some voters better voting machines, shorter lines, or more lenient standards for when their provisional ballots get counted — precisely the system that exists across the country right now.

In making the Bush vs Gore ruling, the court said it pertained only to that particular case. However, this flies in the face of stare decisis which says courts cannot make a ruling that applies only to a single case.

Elections that systematically make it less likely that some voters will get to cast a vote that is counted are a denial of equal protection of the law. The conservative justices may have been able to see this unfairness only when they looked at the problem from Mr. Bush’s perspective, but it is just as true when the N.A.A.C.P. and groups like it raise the objection.

Attempts to use this decision to increase the fairness of elections have thus far failed.