A few days ago, Brian Lehrer, journalist and public radio host in the United States, played a fragment of Democratic Vice President Al Gore’s victory speech on December 13, 2000, after the Supreme Court decided by six votes to five that Florida had to stop the recount in the decisive state that year for the outcome of the presidential elections.
The Supreme Court thus sanctioned the victory of Republican George W. Bush. Gore had won the popular vote, but under the US electoral system, Bush would be president based on electoral college votes, which are awarded by each state based on its population and who has won the majority of votes there. Thus the result in Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes, was frozen. In total, across the country, Gore had received 537,179 more votes than Bush.
