| To all,The only fair way to initiate a recount in Florida would be to hand count ALL ballots. Why? The nature of hand recounts is that there will be additional votes garnered by both candidates, since the machine does not pick up pin pricks or other slight perforations. Moreover, it is a mathematical certainty that in a county where there are more votes for one candidate that another, that trend will continue for the candidate who leads in that county. In short, Gore will clearly benefit in this partial recount since he has requested recounts in those counties where he received a plurality of the votes. This is truly unfair to Bush, since Bush is not receiving the benefit of a similar recount in such counties as Duval County, where he received a majority of the votes. Was there an unusually large number of spoiled ballots in Palm Beach County? Absolutely NOT. In Duval County with a smaller population and vote, there were more spoiled ballots than in Palm Beach County. And in my home county of Cook County Illinois, there were something like 120,000 spoiled votes out of 2 million. Thus there was nothing unusual about Palm Beach County. In short this partial recount of counties is an outrage, because it hits to the core of one man one vote, simply because a manual recount dictates that more votes will be counted in those counties where such recounts are held. |
