15 Years Later: Al Gore REALLY DID WIN the Presidential Election but GW Bush was appointed.

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/19/george_w_bush_vs_al_gore_15_years_later_we_really_did_inaugurate_the_wrong_guy/

Excerpted from "Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States"

Bush v. Gore is the US Supreme Court decision that has been credited with—or blamed for—ending the 2000 presidential election with its interrupted recount still unfinished. Bush and Gore, of course, were the two candidates: George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and son of the forty-first president, challenging the incumbent vice president, Al Gore. Bush v. Gore, the court case, is often used interchangeably as shorthand for Bush-versus-Gore, the entirety of the dispute over the outcome of the election.

But that dispute encompassed much more than just the US Supreme Court’s decision, which in truth did not even end the fight. Rather, the end came the next day, December 13, when Gore announced he would not attempt to renew the recount through additional proceedings in Florida’s courts. Had he done so, he and Bush conceivably might have pursued their fight all the way to Congress, as Hayes and Tilden had over the 1876 election. If Bush-versus-Gore had reached Congress it would have been the first real test of the impenetrably ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887, with unpredictable consequences. Thus it was Gore’s concession of December 13, and not the Court’s ruling of the previous day, that truly ended the fight for the presidency as a practical matter.