by conservatives who had always been about "states rights". In the 2000 election they over-ruled the state's own laws on how ballots were counted. Conservatives loathed the 14th Amendment, until they saw a perverse way to use it to get their guy elected. If the roles in Bush v. Gore had been reversed, there is no way they would have ruled as they did.
To quote Vincent Bugliosi, no commie pinko liberal, but a respected Republican from back in the day when such things existed:
Now, in the equal protection cases I've seen, the aggrieved party, the one who is being harmed and discriminated against, almost invariably brings the action. But no Florida voter I'm aware of brought any action under the equal protection clause claiming he was disfranchised because of the different standards being employed. What happened here is that Bush leaped in and tried to profit from a hypothetical wrong inflicted on someone else. Even assuming Bush had this right, the very core of his petition to the Court was that he himself would be harmed by these different standards. But would he have? If we're to be governed by common sense, the answer is no. The reason is that just as with flipping a coin you end up in rather short order with as many heads as tails, there would be a "wash" here for both sides, i.e., there would be just as many Bush as Gore votes that would be counted in one county yet disqualified in the next. (Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the wash wouldn't end up exactly, 100 percent even, we'd still be dealing with the rule of de minimis non curat lex--the law does not concern itself with trifling matters.) So what harm to Bush was the Court so passionately trying to prevent by its ruling other than the real one: that he would be harmed by the truth as elicited from a full counting of the undervotes?
And if the Court's five-member majority was concerned not about Bush but the voters themselves, as they fervently claimed to be, then under what conceivable theory would they, in effect, tell these voters, "We're so concerned that some of you undervoters may lose your vote under the different Florida county standards that we're going to solve the problem by making sure that none of you undervoters have your votes counted"? Isn't this exactly what the Court did?
If the roles were reversed, and a NC Dem administration was pushing rules that were going to result in Republican voters being disenfranchised, you can be damned sure the Scalia Five would be on the scene to save they day, staying any onerous last minute changes.
It will be interesting to see how Kagan rules on Wisconsin's voting law.
The right cannot win without cheating and the fix is in.
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It's the only way these RW snakes can win. How very obvious and sad a tactic in our so-called democracy.