It is very significant that the first county in Florida to do a manual recount was Seminole county, a Republican leaning one, and Bush picked up a net lead of 98 votes in this recount, his largest in any of the 67 counties.
It is the totality of all votes in Florida that determines whether the Republican or the Democratic slate of electors are elected for the electoral college.
Therefore it will appear unfair if only a part of those votes are recounted by hand, esp. if such recount occurs in democratic leaning counties.
The right solution is to do a manual recount of all the Florida votes. Jeb Bush can do the right thing by asking all counties to do a manual recount.
But Republicans will not do this. Instead they will try to stop the recount in Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami Dade counties.
Why? Because, coincidentally or not, the republican leaning counties mostly use more modern voting machines where chances of miscount is less. Thus they do not expect to pick up as many "new" votes from those counties in a manual recount as Democrats are expected to pick up from the above mentioned four counties.
This will also explain the apparent statistical abberation of Gore picking twice as many new votes as Bush in the first recount (commented on on this thread by TraderGreg).
salon.com
At a Tallahassee press conference on Saturday,
Florida election officials revealed that in last
Tuesday's election, there were far more problems
in counties using the punch-card system than the
optical scan system, or OpScan. In punch-card
counties, 32 ballots per thousand cast had to be
invalidated. But in counties using the optical scan
system, or OpScan, only two per thousand were
thrown out. Around Florida, and throughout the
county, election reformers are trying to move
away from the punch-card system.
Massachussetts has stopped using them entirely;
so has San Francisco County.
Coincidentally or not, Florida counties using the
OpScan system tend to be Republican, while the
punch-card counties are disproportionately
Democratic. And one Republican county still
using punch cards, Seminole, voluntarily hand
counted its ballots when it conducted its
state-mandated recount last week -- and gave
another 98 votes to Bush, his largest county gain
in the recount.
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