>- Supreme Court getting involved into elections in a state, which is AFAIK, a strictly state matter; feds have no jurisdiction. How was this countered? No way.

Hi Dragan,
If you are going to argue the law in the U.S. there are plenty of references available Dragan. First it is important to understand the electoral process (including deadlines), state law, federal law, that there are both state and federal supreme courts, and the difference between their roles and how the U.S. Supreme Court got involved.

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/election/electionross5.htm
http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/pub_info/system2.shtml
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/sunstein/chapter9.html
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/sunstein/chapter1.html
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/00-949.pdf#search=%22supreme%20court%20bush%20gore%22
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2000
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010205/bugliosi

(Note: As usual the wikipedia links are very information but there is no legal scholar guaranteeing their accuracy - especially not when it comes to constitutional law)

from http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-1437.html

A summary:

The Supreme Court actually interposed itself into the election contest three times. Only the last two are known as Bush v. Gore. In the first of these cases, Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, the Court hoped to end the election crisis by putting a stop to the Florida Supreme Court's decision to extend the time for certifying the vote past the period set by state law. But by the time the Court began hearing arguments in the appeal on December 1, the certification had already occurred. The embarrassed justices sent the case back down to the Florida Supreme Court, instructing the lower court to rewrite its opinion so that it would not create a conflict between state and federal law.

A week later, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of ballots. Unlike its earlier decision, however, this one was not unanimous. With the Florida justices split 4-3, the U.S. Supreme Court once again exercised its discretionary appellate review jurisdiction and granted certiorari, or review, to Bush v. Gore. The day after the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a recount, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a temporary stay, or delay, in enforcing the Florida Supreme Court's order. The U.S. Supreme Court justices, too, were narrowly divided, 5-4. The five justices voting in favor of the stay were the same five conservatives who had been moving the Rehnquist Court to the right for more than a decade. The first hearing of Bush v. Gore telegraphed to the nation what would happen if the Court took further action in the case.

The Court's third and final intervention in the 2000 presidential election came just days later. In its unsigned opinion, the Court explained that it had voted 5-4 to put a stop to the Florida recount. Allowing the recount to go forward, the Court said, would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back down to the Florida Supreme Court, which had no alternative but to dismiss it. The presidential election of 2000 had been decided, in essence, by the vote of one Supreme Court justice.

Precedents
Bush v. Gore wasn't the Court's first foray into the realm of king making. The election of 1876 pitted Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York, against Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican governor of Ohio. After the votes had been counted, it seemed that Tilden had won the popular vote and had 184 uncontested electoral votes to Hayes's 165. The magic number was 185 electoral votes. Twenty votes of the Electoral College were still up for grabs, however — all but one of them in the southern states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. (The exception was Oregon. They always have marched to a different drummer.)

The Twelfth Amendment stipulates that in a contested presidential election, "The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted." Because in 1876 Congress was equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democrat-controlled House set up an electoral commission to decide who would become president. The Senate chose three Republicans and two Democrats to sit on the commission, and the House chose two Democrats and three Republicans. The remainder of the commission was to consist of five justices of the Supreme Court. The bill setting up the commission named two Republican justices and two Democratic justices, but let those four select their own nonpartisan tiebreaker.


The only truly neutral member of the Court at the time was David Davis. But Davis resigned from the Court almost immediately, leaving only Republican justices as alternatives. Joseph Bradley, seemingly the least partisan of those remaining, was selected as the final member of the commission. To no one's great surprise, the commission voted along party lines, selecting the Republican Hayes. Democrats, who were mostly Southerners, cried foul, claiming that Davis, and perhaps Bradley, had been subjected to political blackmail. When the uproar threatened to derail the orderly transfer of power, a deal was struck. The Republicans agreed to withdraw the federal troops still occupying the South in the wake of the Civil War, to appropriate funds for Southern improvement, and to appoint at least one Southerner to the cabinet. In return, the Democrats agreed not to delay Hayes's inauguration. It was a flat-out political deal, and ever since its implementation, the Court has been criticized for having played a part in what many saw as outright log rolling.

And the winner is . . .
Why, then, did the Supreme Court agree to get back into the fray after the election of 2000? In a sense, the justices had no choice. When the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore proved too close to call, the contestants resorted to a series of lawsuits in an effort to settle the matter. These suits proceeded simultaneously in the state court system and in federal court. The cases largely concerned the matter and manner of vote counting (and recounting) in the pivotal state of Florida. There were charges of voter intimidation, ballot rigging — all manner of political shenanigans. Something had to be done.


Here is a link for alittle humour:

http://www.iknowwhatyoudidlastelection.com/bush-supreme-court.htm

(I like that one best :o)

I am sure that after reading all of the information in all of these links that it is still no clearer than before (well at least that is the case for me!)