David Boies: Al Gore won the popular vote, which in every other democracy is the vote. But of course in the United States, we have what is called the Electoral College, where each state gets a certain number of electoral votes, and those go — with two small exceptions — those go all to one candidate. So if somebody wins California by 50.0001 percent, and somebody loses California by 49.9999 percent, what happens is, all of California’s electoral votes go to the winner. So in a winner-take-all situation, you can get a situation where somebody wins by the popular vote but doesn’t get a majority of the electoral votes. In the 2000 election, it was clear Gore won the popular vote, but the electoral votes — he needed four more electoral votes to be elected. Florida had — and I don’t remember the exact number — but had many times more than what he needed. But if he lost Florida, because he lost all the Florida votes, Bush would be elected president. So the election really came down to Florida. All the other states had been decided. Florida was still undecided. And there were only a few hundred votes that separated the two candidates. And what Florida provided, and had provided for 80 years, is that in those cases you have a manual recount of all the ballots. And the reason for that is that Florida has four different kinds of vote-counting machines. There are four different machines that are used to record votes in different parts of the state. And in order to make it all equal, you’ve got to have a recount that allows people to have a consistent result, which is what the manual recount is designed to do. And we had litigation in Florida as to whether or not we would get that manual recount, and the Florida Supreme Court ultimately held that, “Yes, there has to be a statewide recount. We’re going to recount the entire state to be fair, and we’re going to decide the winner based on the actual voter intent of the particular ballots.” That was what Florida law had always been. The Bush camp appealed that to the United States Supreme Court, and they had two arguments. One argument was a legal argument that said the Florida courts can’t do that, because only the Florida legislature can do that. The Supreme Court rejected that argument six to three. They also, however, argued that the vote count ought to be stopped because it somehow violated the Equal Protection Clause. That decision was five to four against us, and it was a decision that the Supreme Court initially made on a Saturday without ever hearing argument. They heard argument two days later and came out with the same result. But they initially stopped the vote counting before they even had an argument, over the very bitter dissent of four of the Justices. But in our legal system, when the United States Supreme Court makes a decision, that’s the end of the road. There isn’t anything else you can do.