JUDGEMENT CALL: THE SUPREME COURT STEPS IN.

• Author: Savage, David G.

The Supreme Court's decision on Dec. 12 leaves states cross-examining how they run their elections.

The Supreme Court ended the great presidential election battle of 2000 with a short, unsigned opinion, but it may have opened the door to years of litigation over how elections are run in every state of the nation.

In calling a halt to the hand recounts in Florida, the justices said the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution requires votes be counted under fair, uniform and equal standards.

"Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another," they said in Bush vs. Gore.

The 5-4 majority ruled the Florida supreme Court had not set "the minimum requirements for nonarbitrary treatment of voters." Moreover, it was too late to set new standards because of the Dec. 12 deadline for resolving all controversies over the appointment of presidential electors.

The immediate impact of the ruling was predictable. With the hand recounts halted permanently, Vice President Al Gore conceded the election within 24 hours. But the long-term impact of the Court's ruling is uncertain.

ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE

Some experts on voting rights said the decision revives the "one person, one vote" doctrine that drove the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s. Before then, rural areas in many states had power in the legislature that was far greater than their numbers would suggest. For example, a rural county with 50,000 residents might have had the same one vote in the state senate as the urban county with 500,000 residents.

But beginning in 1962, the Supreme Court said these disparities are unconstitutional because they violate the voter's right to have his or her vote count equally. "The right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise," the Court said in the 1964 case of Reynolds vs. Sims. This passage was repeated in the Bush vs. Gore opinion.

During the 1960s, these court decisions forced the states to redraw the lines for voting districts so that they were roughly equal in population. Now, some lawyers think the Court's latest opinion will force legislatures to adopt standard systems for counting votes.

Columbia University Law Professor Samuel Issacharoff, a voting rights expert, said the opinion offers "a reinvigoration of fundamental rights doctrine in the area of voting, and that could be very positive. Parts of the opinion read like it came from the Earl Warren Court" of the 1960s, he said.

It "certainly opens up a new avenue of litigation about voting, or at least it potentially does," added Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, a former clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In nearly every state, there are different means of counting votes. Many counties use the now...