>> I have no objection to recounts. <<
It looks to me like all your general objections the the procedure here apply to recounts of any election. If what you're trying to say is that all Democrats are so partisan that none of them can be trusted in public office, that's an interesting position.
Ideally, the two sides would have sat down a day or two after the election, when it was apparent we had a mess to deal with. They would have agreed on standards for the recount that was mandatory under Florida law anyway, including absentee ballots. This would have included manual versus machine, and the problem of those infernal chads. The largest error rate was in the machine counting of punch-card ballots, so fairness suggests recounting all those manually. The error rate for the two ways of counting marked ballots is a wash, so either method seems fair, as long as it was applied uniformly. If this involved modifying the schedule, they could have gotten a declaratory judgment from the Florida SC.
Gore belatedly offered something like this, but the Bushies turned him down. There are two possible reasons for this. The quantitative reason is that recounting the punch-card ballots accurately would have handed the election to Gore. The emotional reason is that when Bush heard the networks announce that he won, his mind was closed to any compromise. |
