The Last Handful

A week after we voted, our presidential election remains no less in doubt, indeed even more in dispute, than it was on election night. There is no good reason to rush to judgment if waiting might increase the fairness to voters.

Ballot recounts in a number of Florida’s 67 counties have slightly raised the vote totals of both Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore, while narrowing Bush’s lead. But many ballots remain in dispute, including about 430,000 in Palm Beach County alone. County officials say that recounting them by hand might not be completed until Sunday. But Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, says state law requires vote counts to be turned in by 5 p.m. today. Harris expects to certify the election results by Saturday afternoon. Democrats have gone to court to get the deadline extended. If it isn’t, the initial vote totals will be judged final by the state.

This deadline seems in direct conflict with the ruling Monday of a federal judge in Miami who refused a Republican request to order hand-recounting halted, properly holding that the question is one for state courts. Although extending the vote-counting deadline is expected to favor Gore, several thousand absentee ballots from Floridians living abroad are to be counted by Friday; in past elections Republicans have taken a majority of those votes.

Elections are intended to let the people, not the courts, decide who will govern. It’s clear that some Florida ballots were not properly counted, possibly skewing the initial results. Were the election not so close, the glitches would not be in the spotlight, but they cannot be ignored now. We’re not talking about the poorly designed ballots in several counties, which apparently caused a number of voters to nullify their ballots by voting for two candidates. Improperly marked ballots cannot be accepted in any jurisdiction, and there’s no reason why they should not have been discarded, no matter what the confused voters intended. But if 5% of the voters in Palm Beach County were confused by the ballot, 95% were not. At issue is whether all of those votes were accurately tallied. A preliminary recount indicates they were not, mostly because the aging punch-card technology, much like California’s, is easily confused by incompletely punched ballot holes. That’s why a recounting by hand is called for now--and by the next election, an overhaul of the nation’s ballot machinery.

The federal deadline for states to settle election disputes is Dec. 12. Florida can be ready well before then, perhaps by this weekend, if hand-counting proceeds and overseas absentee ballots are all tallied. A relative handful of votes will decide who becomes the next president. It’s imperative that those ballots be counted fairly and accurately.