I have a question or two which I have been unable to find the answers to.
A. I heard that some republican leaning counties were counted by hand. Which were they and why were they recounted (did Bush request it, or was it a malfunction issue?).
B. Do all of the counties in Florida use punchcards? If not, which ones do and dont and are they republican or democrat?
The specific point of all of this that it would seem that to reconsider and re-include undervotes in selectively democratic counties would necessarily skew the election in the democrats favor (statistically). This would seem to be an indefensible, especially in the face of the “every vote must count” and the “will of the people” claims of the democrats. To only re-include assessed undervotes in democrat counties and to exclude the ones in Republican counties will necessarily NOT give you a fair result. (Though a full state recount might have).
I have an answer to part of A and part of B, which I caught on the first day: Some of the counties never had machines. These are presumably the less dense, more dispersed counties full of lakes. Since each polling place has so few people, there’s no lines to worry about. Since the counting can be done faster than the big counties, there’s no speed factor on that end either.
Here’s a link provided in another thread to the Florida Dept of Elections site’s rundown of which counties use which system: http://election.dos.state.fl.us/votemeth/cvs.shtml The short answer is that they don’t all use punchcards.
I have heard that a few other counties did a manual recount. I don’t know if it is really true that these counties had done hand counts originally, since only Union County is listed as having hand tabulation, if I understand the info in that link right. (It is not always clear what each different system means.)
By the way, there was nothing to prevent Bush from asking for manual recounts in certain counties, and in fact it is Gore who at some point (perhaps too late…it’s not clear to me how the law works) proposed that they manually recount the whole state. Bush rejected that. He knows he wins if there are not hand recounts and he is quite likely to lose if there are even in the whole state. (Since apparently the punchcard ballots are more prevalent in the heavily Democratic counties…although I have heard some dispute on this point.)