Revista da EMERJ - V. 20 - N. 2 - Maio/Agosto - 2018

29  R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 20, n. 2, p. 8 - 53, Maio/Agosto 2018  cation of the election results of “virtually all legal consequence,” 97 it engaged in de novo review of the local canvassing boards’ decisions whether to conduct manual recounts after the certification deadline; by ordering the inclusion in the certification of all recounts com- pleted during the contest phase, it eliminated the statutory grant of discretion to the Secretary of State with regard to waiving the cer- tification deadline; it unreasonably construed the contest provision requiring that “legal votes” not be rejected to require the counting of “improperly marked ballots”; it refused to defer to the Secretary of State’s reasonable interpretations of state election law, as required by statute; and it unreasonably construed the statutory grant to state courts of the power to issue “appropriate relief” in contest actions to include a state-wide manual recount that could not possibly be completed in time to realize the state legislature’s “wish” to take ad- vantage of the federal safe harbor provision. It is fair to say that the protest and contest provisions of Flori- da election law are characterized by significant ambiguity, which for the most part never has been clarified by the Florida courts–unsur- prisingly, since the contest provisions were substantially overhauled in 1999. 98 On many of the statutory interpretation issues raised in Bush , reasonable people surely might differ. 99 Yet none of the Flori- da court’s interpretations are particularly “peculiar,” 100 and certainly none of them qualifies as “absurd,” 101 which is how the concurring opinion characterizes them. Florida election law clearly contempla- tes a contest to certified election results. The substantive standard that must be established for the contest to proceed is, in relevant part, the “rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.” 102 Given the closeness of the certified presidential election result in Florida–a margin of 537 votes for Bush–there is no doubt that the number of undervotes (esti- 97 Id . at 8 98 On the contrast between the new and the old contest provisions, see Gore v. Harris, slip opinion at 9 n.9 99 The dissenting opinions of Justices Souter and Breyer ably demonstrate how the Florida court’s interpretation of all the relevant statutory ambiguities were at least reasonable. See Bush , slip opinion at 2-6 (Souter, J., dissenting); id. at 6-8 (Breyer, J., dissenting). Several of the points made in this and the following paragraphs are also made in those dissenting opinions. 100 Id. at 9 (concurring opinion). 101 Id. 102 Fla. Stat. §102.168(3)(c) (2000).