>>I don't think people are upset about the recount. It's that third recount and then the handcount, and the denial of military ballots that is upsetting. It smacks of third world country election engineering.
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>Like Doug before, you're implying that there have been four counts. I've seen no evidence of that. There was the Election Day count, the required recount (because the vote was so close), and in a few places, a manual recount. Most places counted twice, a few counted three times. To the best of my knowledge, no counties have counted four times.

Tamar,

What they are refering to is Palm Beach and Miami-Dade doing a sample count to determine whether they could justify a full manual recount (by showing that the machine counts missed valid votes which they did) thus, a very small percentage of votes might have been counted 4 times. The Republicans are simply being disingenous in continuing with Bakers endless mantra "there has been a count, there has been a recount, there has been a recount of the recount..."

What I don't understand is how the Dems have completely missed the boat in their arguements for a manual recount. First, it is allowed by law. the Repubs attempt to discredit and halt the manual counts is a serious breach of due process. At first they wanted to dismiss the recounts off hand. Only later, after it was disclosed that Texas law permits manual recounts as being more reliable than machine recounts did they start the "flawed because of no standards" argument (which I believe has some merit but just means you decide on a standard, not toss the whole process and claim victory).

Second, Baker has put so much faith in the machine count as being reliable and unbiased, but no one has pointed out that the machine recount reduced Bush's tiny lead by over 5/6 (to 0.005% of votes in Florida. The certification has pushed it up to a whopping 0.009%). So much for accurate counting.
The makers of the 30+ year old machines admit that even in the best of circumstances the machines are not 100% accurate. Add to this old and faulty punching machines and human error and you are probably way over a significant percent of misread votes to call into question the current lead. For this type of analysis, humans are much better suited although it takes them much longer (there was letter to the editor about this by a mathmatician (CNN or NYTimes) in which he explain why humans are better at, ironically named, fuzzy logic (wow, Bush might actually be smarter than he appears!)).

But, besides the problems with the counts, I think a bigger problem is the obviously flawed Butterfly ballot. It really doesn't matter whether it was approved by some democratic hack and published in the paper. Any system which results in the voiding of 10% of the vote and a high percentage of votes being miscast for some rightwing nut case in a single county is not fair. The Repubs arguement of "tough luck" if people are so stupid that they nullified their ballot doesn't hold water for me. We count votes from stupid people everywhere else, why do we have to dismiss the ones in Palm Beach. What can you do about it is a different question. Not much I think short of calling for a new election in that county or the state but I don't think that is a viable or even practicle possibility.

I think that if Gore can't get a manual recount (and get a selective victory), or if he does and it turns out that there aren't enough votes, he should concede.

But, in the same vein, Bush should stop acting like more people voted for him in Florida than they did for Gore. The errors just happened to go in his favor.

Ken