The greatest new variable this year, to be sure, is the voting machines themselves. Will they perform without mishap after all? Will the presidential election in Florida be the anticlimax that members of both parties should fervently hope it will be: a clean election with a winner undisputed by all? In dozens of local elections across the state, there is indeed cause for that hope. In poor, black Gadsden, the county with the highest spoilage of votes (12 percent) in 2000, the error rate in 2002 dropped to less than 1 percent. Shirley Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, credits new, precinct-based optiscans for that success—along with her own emphasis on stringent, relentless voter education.

Yet even if the machines appear to work, who’s to say they won’t have been hacked? While elections officials in Florida seem to take on faith the security of their E.S.&S. machines, the state of Ohio isn’t so sanguine. In 2003, Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell commissioned a Detroit-based computer company to test his state’s voting machines. The results were not encouraging. In the E.S.&S. machines, the review discovered one potential high-risk area, three medium-risk, and 13 low-risk areas. Instead of multiple passwords that could be set at each polling place to enhance security, E.S.&S. had made two of its three passwords for each machine “hard-coded,” or immutable, so that the same two passwords were used for every machine manufactured. The review also concluded: “There is no use of encryption on the iVotronic or on the data transferred to and from the iVotronic. There is a risk that an unauthorized person could gain access to the data.” An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the iVotronic does have its own form of encryption, and adds that the study’s programmers were assigned to hack into each system, and proved unable to breach the iVotronic, proof the iVotronic is secure. But Blackwell was unpersuaded. Speaking about all the touch-screen systems tested, he said, “I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected and system security is bolstered.” (E.S.&S. says it’s in the process of enacting design or programmatic changes to comply with Ohio’s requests.)

Heeding critics’ concern over touch-screens’ lack of a paper trail, the G.O.P. issued a glossy flyer in July urging Republicans to shun them in favor of absentee ballots. An embarrassed Governor Bush quickly disavowed the flyer, but the point was made: for all his own secretary of state had done to talk up touch-screens, the problems of the last months had stirred doubts in both parties that Florida’s election of 2004 would be any cleaner, or clearer, or more conclusive than the nightmare of 2000.

“Having spent lots of money, passed lots of laws, made lots of speeches, held commission hearings and the like, if anything, we’re worse off than we were four years ago,” says Gore lawyer Kendall Coffey, “in that [in] some of the key counties that could hold not only the key to Florida but the key to the nation’s future you do not have a legitimate recount vehicle. Because they have touch-screens without a paper trail. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that makes hanging chads the good old days, but that’s the reality of the 2004 elections in Florida.”

The Court’s proceedings are shrouded in secrecy, and the law clerks, who research precedents, review petitions, and draft opinions, are normally notoriously, maddeningly discreet. In addition, Rehnquist makes them all sign confidentiality agreements, then reiterates the point to them in person. A surprising number of clerks talked to Vanity Fair for this article, however. They all drew clear limits on what they would say. They would not discuss conversations with their respective justices, nor disclose any documents they might have retained. “In this administration, the F.B.I. is likely to come after us,” one explains. To the inevitable charges that they broke their vows of confidentiality, the clerks have a ready response: by taking on Bush v. Gore and deciding the case as it did, the Court broke its promise to them. “We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk says. “Our secrecy was helping to shield some of those actions.” Furthermore, the clerks’ story is admittedly skewed. Even under normal circumstances, they see only a fraction of what goes on at the Court. The justices always discuss and decide cases behind closed doors, without anyone else around; their clerks learn only what their bosses care to tell them. That was particularly true in Bush v. Gore, whose momentousness and haste ensured shorter paper and gossip trails than usual.

The clerks’ attention was not distributed evenly. Unfairly perhaps, their accounts, and their vitriol, focus more on the “swing” justices purportedly in play—Kennedy and O’Connor—than on those who were seemingly more partisan, but managed to be unobtrusive: Rehnquist and Thomas. But if this account may at times be lopsided, partisan, speculative, and incomplete, it’s by far the best and most informative we have. Journalists and academics who follow the Court rarely venture beyond its written opinions, as if there is almost something impertinent about doing so. Eventually—one scholar put it at around 2019—historians will dip into the papers of the justices, but until then it’s unclear how much of what they did they committed to print.