Republican operatives, as a key factor in "preventing the stealing of the 2000 presidential election". The suppression of vote pairing. Several websites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas. For example, the Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore, and the Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This would have allowed Nader to get his fair share of the vote and perhaps to cross the nationwide total vote threshold to allow the Green Party to participate in the presidential debates in the 2004 election, while helping Gore to carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the websites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them to reluctantly shut down. The ACLU got involved in a legal (not political) effort to protect the sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Jones seven years later. The vote-pairing sites allegedly tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who voted for Gore. The actions of the Florida Supreme Court. At the time, 6 of the Court's 7 justices were Democrats. It was argued, particularly by Republicans, that the court was exceeding its authority and issuing partisan rulings biased in Gore's favor. On November 17, the court acted "on its own motion" to stay the official certification of the election until it could hear Gore's appeal of Harris's decision to reject late-filed hand recounts, while specifically allowing counting of absentee and other ballots to continue, an action the Gore legal team did not request. Similarly, in 4–3 split decision, on December 8, the court ordered a statewide counting of undervotes, which the Gore team had also not requested. James Baker, among other Republicans, in speaking of this ruling, accused the court of being "inconsistent with Florida law", on which basis Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats argued that the Florida Supreme Court was simply trying to ensure a fair and accurate count. While the Bush campaign opposed the Gore campaign's requests for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties, they quietly accepted manual recounts from four Republican-leaning counties. Polk, Hamilton, Seminole, and Taylor Counties, which used the more reliable optical scanners, decided to manually examine unreadable ballots (both undervotes and overvotes) during the counties' electronic recounts, in accordance with those counties' existing policies (see County-by-county standards