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Why did Justice Stephen Breyer argue that the Florida recount should continue?

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U.S. presidential election of 2000 — Bush v. Gore A Florida judge examining a challenged vote at an operations center in Plantation, Florida, during a recount of the state's U.S. presidential election ballots, 2000.

In the case of Bush v. Gore, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that the Florida recount should continue primarily because he believed the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention was disproportionate to the issues at hand.12

Breyer contended that the Florida Supreme Court was in a much better position than the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether a remedial manual recount could have been completed before the Electoral College met on December 18. He pointedly observed that by halting the manual recount, the Court ensured that uncounted legal votes would remain uncounted, thereby crafting a remedy that was out of proportion to the asserted harm. Furthermore, he argued that this action ultimately harmed the very fairness interests that the Court claimed to be protecting.2

Generally, the dissenting justices maintained that the constitutional protection of each vote should not be subject to a rigid timeline, and they argued that the recount process, even if flawed, should have been allowed to proceed to ensure a fair and accurate determination of the election results.12