And in another major ruling, Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls denied Vice President Al Gore's protest of Florida election results Monday, citing "no credible statistical evidence" that the vice president would win the Florida election if the ballots in Miami-Dade County were recounted by hand.

Salon asked constitutional scholars what effect the rulings will have on the outcome of the election.

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Erwin Chemerinsky is a professor of law at the University of Southern California.

[Sauls' decision is] a definitive ruling in favor of Bush. At this point Gore's only chances are either for the Florida Supreme Court to reverse or to try to prevail in Seminole County, where a different trial starts on Wednesday. They're difficult options. It's difficult to get a court of appeals to reverse a trial court when the ruling is based on factual findings. And in the Seminole County case [the Democrats] are seeking the discard of ballots, and I think it's a very difficult result to seek.

Ultimately, Judge Sauls' ruling makes it less likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will ever issue a ruling in this case. The reality is, Bush is ahead by 537 votes right now, and the Supreme Court case concerns only 400 votes in Broward County. Whether the Florida Supreme Court decision stands or not is the difference between Bush being ahead by 537 or 900 votes.

At this stage, it's looking very good for Bush and bad for Gore.

Ronald Rotunda is a professor of law at the University of Illinois and served as assistant majority counsel on the Watergate Committee.

I predicted last week that the court would rule 9-0 on Monday, and send the case back to the Florida Supreme Court. This is a big victory for Bush because beforehand the Gore people were saying that the Supreme Court wouldn't take the case and that there weren't any federal issues involved.

Federal statute says that you can't change election rules after the election. Gore argued that there wasn't any change in the law because the Florida Supreme Court interpreted the statute. The argument of the Bush people was that this was a change in the law. Evidence that it was a change in the law was that the state's trial court had to be reversed by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court's summary wasn't a fair statement of federal law. It wasn't just the dates of the election that the court changed, but for the first time it allowed dimpled chads in on the precedence of other states. There weren't any precedents in Florida law for this. That's what I think is the clear federal issue.

Now the Florida Supreme Court may come right around and say that we're not changing the law and issue a different opinion. The question is this: Are they coming up with a new rule or are they making new law? The Gore people argued that there is no new statute. The court went past that and said that it includes case law. Gore also argued that state courts are free to interpret state law. But the U.S. Supreme Court said you can't just say that, it's not enough to get away from it.

The question of the U.S. Supreme Court is "Were you really interpreting different provisions of state electoral code or were you really balancing other interests from the state Constitution on the right to vote?" If it's the latter, then all Supreme Court justices agree that was incorrect. The U.S. Supreme Court also asked for something that the Florida Supreme Court never discussed: the source of its authority.

One of the things that this whole election has shown is that the states are quite casual in dealing with these ballots. In law, the chain of evidence would say that it's already been broken with all the lost and taped chads. That's a real problem for any real valid manual count because the evidence has been really manipulated and there's no chain of custody and that's a shame. That's a real problem for both sides. One would hope at the end of this election there'd be uniform federal standards.

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