Bush was wrong on two interrelated points:  1) he tried to convince us that neither Democracy nor Florida law care about votes not read by machines; 2) he only complained about the unequal treatment Florida voters received when it threatened to undermine his lead but not when that same unequal treatment provided the basis for his lead in the first place.  He used these points to purposely drag out the whole process long enough that eventually the clock ran out on Democracy.

Florida's election law, its constitution, and its legal precedence all make it clear that machines should not decide what is or is not a legal vote.  A legal vote is anything that indicates the intent of the voter.  Only Secretary Harris (one of Bush's Florida campaign managers), in a legal opinion she filed after election day, decided that legal votes were only those able to be counted by the machines and that manual recounts could only be used to count votes when the machines were malfunctioning.  However, Florida law clearly allows for manual recounts in select counties in close elections when there is vote tabulation error.  It does not stipulate as to what the cause of that error must be.  When 4 counties tried to follow this law, Bush tried everything possible to stop, stall, and frustrate this legally permissible process.  Not only did the state's highest court rule against Bush's campaign manager's attempts to make these manual recounts impermissible based on her post election guidelines, guidelines she established after the counts had started, but the 11th Federal Circuit Court refused to stop or overturn these manual recounts.

Bush could have requested manual recounts in other counties but chose not to.  Bush could have tried to take up Gore's offer to manually recount the whole state, but Bush would have nothing to do with that.  And when the Florida Supreme Court accommodated Bush's request to count all the undervotes across the state rather than only those in Dade County, he filed suit in the US Supreme Court to stop the very count his lawyers suggested to the court.  Why?  Primarily because he thought that such a count would violate the 14th Amendment (at least, that is the only reason the Justices felt was valid enough to stop the count).

However, this same lack of equal protection benefited Bush on election night when more of his voters got to vote on more reliable voting systems (click here for more details).  This same lack of equal protection benefited Bush when thousands of absentee ballots were counted differently in each county, including many that counted absentee ballots that they had never before considered legal ballots in previous elections (click here for more details).  Both these 14th Amendment violations gave hundreds, probably thousands of extra votes to Bush.  However, Florida's voting systems and apparently the absentee ballot counting procedures complied with Florida law despite these inherent inequities.  But when Gore tried to take advantage of other election procedures found in florida law that could also be considered unfair, Bush wrapped himself around the 14th Amendment and claimed that those provisions in Florida law must be unconstitutional.  In other words, Bush made much ado about the unfairness of using a statutory standard like "clear intent of the voter" to manually canvass ballots because it could undermine his lead, but had no problem with the unfairness of using voting systems of varying reliability for casting ballots because it probably gave him the lead.

Bush could have just let Florida law run its course and let the chips fall where they may, accepting the results of the systems inequities and flaws (some of which benefited him, some of which would have benefited his opponent) instead of fighting against the counting of votes.  However, a better approach would have been to reach out to Gore and reach some agreements about how to more fairly and accurately count all the votes, including a statewide manual recount of all the ballots skipped by the machines. 

Like Gore, Bush instead opted to pursue a win by any means necessary strategy rather than one based upon a respect for the sanctity of every citizen's right to have their vote counted.  Bush was clearly unconcerned with how the system treated millions of voters differently on and after election night, except when such variations threatened the certainty of his lead.  He then used both the changes in election law his campaign manager (Secretary Harris) made after the election and the 14th Amendment to protect himself and his claim to the presidency.

Click here to read about what Gore did wrong.