What you guys are missing is that there can be no such thing as a correct count in this situation. No other county in the U.S. hand-counted their punch card votes. Some Republican, some Democrat. Other areas had other voter irregularities, some Republican, some Democrat.
Let’s turn this into a scientific exercise, and get away from the partisan stuff. Let’s say the election was an experiment. We would measure the results, and then say, “X percent of the people voted Republican, with a margin of error of y%”. That’s the best we can do. In the past, the percentages were always greater than the margin of error, so it was a non-issue.
So what happens when your result falls within the margin of error? You have a null result. The ‘signal’ is hidden in noise. In this election, both the popular vote and the electoral college votes are overshadowed by election ‘noise’.
What the Gore camp is taking advantage of is the fact that the precincts currently in the limelight are heavily Democratic. So he’s trying to get the vote counted there in a different way, hoping that it will win him the election.
But even if it does, the results are STILL in the range of ‘noise’, and it would be no more correct to state that Gore represents the will of the people as it would Bush.
So somewhere along the way you have to make an arbitrary decision to stop. The Bush people are saying that the right time to stop is after a second machine count to verify that their are no gross irregularities. The Gore people are saying, “But wait! This particular state is really, really close, and we’re sitting in an area full of Democrats! Let’s pick over it and see if we can’t cough up enough votes to make US technically the winner.”
If this were science and not an election, the results would just be deemed inconclusive. But a good scientist would NEVER just pull out a selected area that supports the conclusion he wanted in the first place and try to be more ‘accurate’ in interpreting just that one piece. That biases the result.
In this case, calling the election ‘inconclusive’ is not an option. Someone has to be president. Since the will of the people is unknown (and will remain that way no matter how many recounts there are in Florida), the choice boils down to political manoevering, which both camps are engaged in, and which is not very democratic.