SCOTUS bails out by making the CO ballot case one of states rights. Like most deep state appointed bureaucrats they avoid the tough questions.
"...In early December, 2000, a young lawyer in Washington, D.C., named Gerard Magliocca stopped in front of the Supreme Court building. The question of who had won the Presidential election, on November 7th, remained unresolved. George W. Bush and Al Gore were separated by mere hundreds of votes in Florida, and the Bush campaign had sued to stop a recount. The Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, so Bush appealed to the United States Supreme Court. While the nine Justices deliberated, the country was fixed to television news of “butterfly ballots” and punch-card “hanging chads.” At the courthouse, the scene was quiet. “There was a TV reporter standing on a box outside to get the building profile in the shot,” Magliocca told me. “I asked if he’d heard anything yet, but he hadn’t.”
Magliocca was a second-year associate at the white-shoe firm Covington & Burling. He was a Republican who’d graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for the enduring Second Circuit judge Guido Calabresi. Election law was a relatively narrow discipline, concerned with voting rights, campaign finance, and redistricting; Bush v. Gore was unprecedented. “At the time, everybody said, ‘This is a question about who won Florida. Elections are always decided by the state Supreme Court. Why would the U.S. Supreme Court get involved? They don’t have jurisdiction,’ ” Magliocca recalled. “That all turned out to be wrong.”..."---Tammy Kim for The New Yorker Feb 07