11/10/00 2:55 p.m.
Handing It to Bush
The hand recount is a big worry for Bush, but perhaps a bigger one for Gore.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he risk of a hand recount in Florida is high for both candidates. For Bush, it threatens to reverse the razor-thin lead he appears to have. Any assumption that a recount by hand will be more accurate than one made by computer — because it is more tedious, or simply because it's the next level of appeal — should be discounted. There's such a thing as human error, and every reason to believe the result will be less accurate than those before it.

Today's Palm Beach Post, for instance, reports from what it calls "the most Democratic [county] in the state": "Four county officials — all of them Democrats — spent seven hours Wednesday examining every pencil mark on 2,073 ballots that had been rejected by Gadsden County's ballot screening machine to try to reconstruct what the voters meant."

Reconstruct what the voters meant? This, obviously, opens many opportunities for vote fraud. Republicans will be wise to have well-paid lawyers monitoring this whole process.

The risk for Gore, however, may be even greater. If the hand recount doesn't go his way, after all, he will have lost Florida three times: the election-night count, the machine recount, and the hand recount. Elections are not a best-of-seven series, and any legal challenge Gore intends to mount — perhaps on behalf of barking Palm Beachers who claim they couldn't read their ballots — will look petty. The Republican claim that he should do what Richard Nixon did in 1960 won't be simply a Republican claim. It will be made by others, too, and Gore will come under huge pressure to give up.

Sins of the Father
Perhaps there's a kind of poetic justice at work here, with a campaign headed by Bill Daley being encouraged to follow the Nixon precedent. Much has been made of the irony that Daley is Gore's frontman during this post-election crisis. In Republican political lore, his father, as mayor of Chicago, is reputed to have stolen Illinois for JFK in 1960. In a way, however, Gore is lucky to have Daley by his side right now. Consider the alternative: Tony Coelho, the man who Daley replaced a few months ago. Daley has his father's sin to live down; Coelho has his own.

The Electoral-College Campaign
It's a simple point, but it must be made as Daley runs around suggesting, as he did yesterday, that Gore is "the people's choice": Both Bush and Gore waged a campaign to win the Electoral College, not the popular vote. That's why TV viewers in Iowa and West Virginia saw lots of ads for the presidential candidates, but those in vote-rich states like New York and Texas saw relatively few. If this election had turned on the popular vote, Bush would have campaigned more in Manhattan and Gore would have spent some time in Houston — and perhaps, under these circumstances, Bush would have won the popular vote and Gore would have carried Florida. It's impossible to say, and it's irrelevant. What must be said is that this election had rules at the start, both candidates played by them, and they will soon determine a winner.