Leaving aside the delicious spectacle presented by this representative of the party of yeoman farmers and agrarian, handmade resistance to the Godless age of rationality bowing before a clanking, ballot-tabulating machine, this argument is ridiculous. Trying to figure out whether a scrap of paper on a ballot is hanging or merely indented is not like parsing Georges Bataille, or reconciling wave and particle theory. Vote-counting is a Newtonian activity; this is a count, not an exercise in hermeneutics. To return to the instant replay metaphor, the play being reviewed isn't a murky pass-interference call -- it's a fumble, and not a particularly hard one to call -- with 50 cameras recording it. Manual recounts, under the supervision of representatives from each party, are obviously more accurate than machine counts. That's why there has never been any controversy over using them -- and why Gov. Bush himself signed a Texas law declaring that manual counts are preferable to machine counts.

Is there any doubt in any reasonable person's mind that, if the shoe were on the other foot, Baker, Rush Limbaugh, Sen. Connie Mack and the whole GOP shooting match would be screaming at least as loudly as the Democrats are now for a hand count? In fact, Mack won his Senate seat in Florida, beating Buddy MacKay in 1988, thanks to a hand count.

Equally insulting to the American citizens' intelligence is the oft-repeated canard that the Democrats are going to keep recounting "until they get the results they want." Of course the Democrats are urging recounts in areas where they expect to pick up votes -- but it isn't as if those votes are somehow being conjured up out of thin air. They're real votes that were missed by the machines. Contrary to GOP claims, there is nothing holy, nothing wrapped in the American flag, about computerized vote-counting -- and in a race this close, not to get the count as accurate as possible would forever leave a cloud of suspicion over the result. As long as Republicans have the right to demand manual counts in counties of their choice, this should be a nonissue.

In a more abstract sense, a manual count, precisely because it is so painstaking and laborious, pays eloquent homage to the irreducible unit of democracy: the individual citizen. What could be more fitting, in an election that may end up being decided by a single vote?

The Bush camp is still in thrall to the hallucination (whether it believes it, or is simply embracing it for its obvious strategic value, is unclear) that it has already won. It has started up the grand "Hail to the Chief" music, it has draped Bush in presidential splendor. From this delusive GOP perspective, the Gore camp's calls for recounts are attempts to overturn reality -- mean-spirited and un-American, "a black mark on our democracy and our process," as Baker intoned. If the Republicans can convince the American people that Gore is a sore loser, Bush can win -- so goes the strategy.

Where Bush's people got the idea they could convince the American people that they won -- with Gore leading in the nation's popular vote, holding a current edge in the Electoral College vote and chipping away at the 200-odd votes in Florida that give Bush his ONLY claim to victory -- is one of those mysteries that may remain forever insoluble. Certainly, the people aren't buying it: 72 percent of those polled say they want to wait for an accurate count. The longer the Bush camp clings to this arrogant strategy, the more credibility it loses and the more it poisons the atmosphere. (Highhanded attempts to hand Bush the victory by declaring that time has run out, like Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' declaration that all hand counts must be finished by Tuesday, don't help either.)

For their part, the Democrats have to give up their dreams of a legal magic bullet, which are equally deluded and divisive.

If both sides can agree on these ground rules, it won't make everyone -- maybe not anyone -- happy. But at least nobody will be able to call foul.

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