After nearly three weeks of escalating political warfare that has made the Florida standoff a full-employment program for election lawyers, the overriding question is simple: Is there any way to salvage some legitimacy from the chaos that prevails in Florida?
The answer is yes - but doing so would require either bold court action or a measure of compromise from both camps.
The solution: a statewide hand recount with more forgiving voter-intent standards, plus inclusion of the overseas military ballots nixed for want of a postmark.
A week ago, such an idea might have seemed preposterous. But given the highly uneven approach taken last week to the partial recount - and given that pending legal challenges mean that a resolution of Campaign 2000 is, at a minimun, several days off anyway - it has become more reasonable.
A Florida-wide recount is certainly doable. Both the Florida Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court, which stepped into the case on Friday, have the power to order it. Alternatively, it would likely require an act of the Florida Legislature, to accomplish. And it would be a race against the Dec. 18 constitutionally stipulated meeting of electors.
A statewide recount is, admittedly, an imperfect solution, and it comes with a variety of logistical problems. Yet it remains the only alternative that could produce a credible result for either presidential hopeful.
Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin realized that the morning after the election. In a conversation with top Gore confidant and adviser Peter Knight, Galvin recommended trying to get a federal court to appoint a federal master, develop guidelines for judging ballots, and conduct a statewide recount.
''At least then, when somebody wins and somebody loses, there is a sense that this was not just a partisan tug of war,'' says Galvin, Massachusetts' top elections official.
He's hardly alone. ''At this point it seems to me the only answer that would appear fair to both sides is a statewide recount with clear standards,'' says US Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. ''That's the only way the public could be assured of a fair outcome.''
''It would be much fairer to have a statewide recount,'' agrees Phil Johnston, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee, who lost a 1996 race for Congress after a controversial partial recount in areas that favored his primary opponent. ''People would feel much better about the outcome, whatever it will be, if the entire states were recounted.''
To be sure, there are skeptics.
Interviewed on CNN last week, Montana Governor Marc Racicot, a key surrogate for Bush, poured cold water on the idea. ''I don't know how it is that the two candidates have the opportunity to even consider abrogating Florida law'' to have such a recount, Racicot said.
Second, even if the two campaigns agreed on the concept, ''Problem number two is setting the rules and getting agreement on the procedures of the recount,'' says Calvin Mackenzie, professor of government at Colby College.
But even in the list of negatives, there rests recognition of the idea's worth. And consider the alternatives. When final vote totals are turned in to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris at 5 p.m. today, Bush's lead may well have shrunk to 500 votes or less. And if Palm Beach County effectively eases its standard for judging voter intent, that lead could disappear altogether. If Bush does hang on, Gore will contest the results.
Should Bush emerge with a narrow victory, Democrats will never accord him any legitimacy, feeling as they do that if the voters were fairly counted, Gore would have won.
Conversely, if, after multiple legal challenges, Gore overtakes Bush, apoplectic Republicans will echo the accusation Bush made on Wednesday: ''The court rewrote the law. It changed the rules, and it did so after the election was over.''
Republican outrage will be heightened both because only pro-Gore counties enjoyed hand recounts and because aggressive Democratic efforts have, at least so far, excluded several hundred military absentee ballots that would likely favor Bush.
''Whoever wins the presidency will probably be viewed by the other side as being a fraudulent victor,'' laments US Representative J. Joseph Moakley, a South Boston Democrat. ''I think there is going to be a lot of venom because people are going to think their candidate got jobbed.''
Moakley's exactly right. But a statewide hand recount would remove most, if not all, of those objections.
Disputed ballots could be more clearly judged by scrutinizing them for voter intent. Yes, there's a risk of including as votes ballots where a dimpled chad might represent a last-minute decision not to vote, but surely many other pregnant chads represent not a hand stayed in mid-vote but rather an improperly executed ballot.
As Yale statistician Nicolas Hengartner told the Palm Beach County canvassing board on Friday, there are five times more unpunched presidential ballots (or ''undervotes'') on the state's punchcard ballots than in an optical voting system - and the odds of that being solely random chance is less than that ''of being hit by lightning five times.''
Thus, erring in favor of excluding ''undervotes'' to guard against including the stray ballots from voters who truly failed to express a presidential preference surely does a larger injustice to the will of the voters than a bias in favor of including those ballots.
But to truly be fair, a broader voter-intent standard would have to apply not just in Democratically inclined counties, but all across Florida, thereby including areas where Bush would be the beneficiary of recounting undervotes as well. Applying the same logic would mean allowing undated military ballots, since an absentee-vote application signals an intent to vote.
But if such a solution has the merit of being more nearly fair to each camp, the best argument for a statewide hand recount is that it would reassert a crucial objective standard of equity. Regardless of what the Bush and Gore camps would say, it's the remedy that would be viewed as legitimate by the maximum number of people since the goal would be not to contrive for partisan advantage, but rather to make a thorough, good-faith effort at discerning the real results of the Florida vote.
So how could such a statewide recount occur?
''The easiest way could be some sort of joint agreement by the candidates,'' says Galvin. The Florida Legislature could then pass a law allowing for the recount.
But the courts also clearly have the power to order that remedy. Indeed, in its decision last week, the Florida Supreme Court asserted that it had the power to order such a recount.
''I was astonished that wasn't part of the [Florida Supreme] Court's order,'' says Johnston, of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee.
Instead, the court noted that that was one possible remedy, but said it had declined to go that route because no party had requested such a recount.
But if that's the case, what was the justification when the high court enjoined Secretary of State Katherine Harris from certifying the machine-counted ballots? After all, neither side had requested that action, either.
So it's clear the court, while acknowledging its power to order a hand recount, was not eager to do so last week. Perhaps intervening events will persuade it to reconsider. With the Gore campaign set to contest the certified Florida results should the count continue to favor Bush, the Florida high court will likely have a second chance to fashion a remedy.
Or the US Supreme Court, which said on Friday it would hear Bush's appeal to disallow manual recounts, could order a statewide hand recount. That such a remedy isn't what Bush has requested may not matter to the high court.
''They are constrained only by their own sense of propriety,'' says attorney Harvey Silverglate. ''And as one of the late justices once said, we are not the Supreme Court because we are always right, but we are always right because we are the Supreme Court.''
The only absolutely concrete deadline, says Galvin, would be the Dec. 18 meeting of the electors.
Gore's camp has been open to a statewide recount. Bush's camp hasn't been receptive - though if Gore overtakes Bush or if the vice president's legal challenge meets with success, the idea of a statewide recount could become more attractive to the GOP.
As Bush said last week, complaining about the selective recounts, ''Americans want a fair and accurate count of the votes in Florida.''
Indeed they do. And unlike the Republican candidate, most Americans are not already convinced we've had such a count.
That's why, with three weeks to go before the Electoral College deadline, a statewide recount is still the most reasonable solution for making the best of a bad situation.
