WASHINGTON
HERE'S THE IDEA: first, you count and recount, not a complicated proposition unless you want to restrict it. There's no reason for any counting to be going on beyond Nov. 17.
And then you consider challenging the result, a truly dangerous idea unless it is accompanied by clear limits on scope and duration. They should apply to the candidates, both of them, recognizing that citizens in a free country never lose the right to go to court.
With such limits in place (for example, a commitment not to appeal rulings by trial court judges in Florida), there is no reason for there not to be a generally accepted president-elect by the end of the month, or long before the Dec. 18 moment when the state's 25 electoral votes are supposed to be officially cast in Tallahassee.
My sense is that the top command for Al Gore would agree to something like that and that the top command for George W. Bush would not.
The reason is that Gore has at least a decent chance of making a case on the facts and the law in state court; the reason Bush would not accept a restriction on the scope and duration of any dispute is that his people will want to retain the option of ultimately fixing this case in the House of Reprsentatives, just as Rutherford B. Hayes did in 1876 in a fight that also involved the state of Florida's electoral votes.
Right now, there is no question at all about the enemy of a fair resolution of a contested election result - it is speed.
Speed kills common sense and a lot more, and it has been doing so in this historic tussle for the presidency for nearly a month.
Politically, the absurd news media need to declare elections all but over even before they are, produced the ridiculous consensus following the third debate in St. Louis that George W. Bush was ''ahead'' and likely to be elected.
Politically, speed also ruined election night. It's hideous enough that the news media consortium for ''projecting,'' instead of counting, election results in Florida, produced the same mistake twice in the same night.
What's worse is that this completely false image of a state swinging one way and then another and then back has substantially helped create the atmosphere that made assertions of funny business credible from the get-go.
Now that those assertions are before us, speed is again the enemy of justice. It's not just that Bush is seeking to divert attention to his possible nominees to the Federal Trade Commission; it's more seriously his attempt to declare a recount over while it's still going on, and to oppose requests that counting be done by hand and not just by machine, in several of Florida's 67 counties. His message is that all ongoing activity in the state is pro forma, that ''we'' already know the result.
Less attention has been paid to the fact that a circuit court judge in Palm Beach has already said there will be no official ceritification of the results (not in the county and not statewide) without a hearing next week, and that the Bushies have opposed every request for counting ballots by hand, so far to no avail.
No one can know for sure how a full and complete count and recount will come out. But we do know it is no more than a week away from completion, so why oppose the most careful method of recounting in favor of the fastest?
Similarly, an airing in court of complaints about the balloting process is hardly fraudulent in a state whose Supreme Court has ruled that the proper test of a nominal result is whether there is reasonable doubt that it in fact reflects the will of the electorate. Instead of prejudging these complaints, a free society hears them in an impartial setting.
Gore could be guilty of sore-losing guerrilla tactics if he merely unleashed a flood of lawsuits. But a commitment not to appeal expedited trial court rulings would put the shoe on the other foot.
Would Bush agree to such a restriction, or would he insist on his right to fix this case the same way Hayes did 124 years ago? For that, they called the Ohioan ''RutherFraud'' for the four pointless years of his ''presidency.''
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
