Manual counting, Baker said, entailed subjective decisions, human error and politics. Rejecting the idea of the people of Florida recounting all the votes they cast for president, which would take about a week, Baker said that would just be extending a flawed process statewide. The vote-counting systems in Florida are not precision machinery, such as adding machines. They are computers, which are machines that obey orders. Hanging chad can flip open and close.
Detached chad can become stuck in the feed path, increasing double feeds and misfeeds. . . .
Peter Neumann, a senior computer scientist at SRI International and one of the leading authorities on computerized vote counting in the country, was similarly skeptical of precision vote-counting machinery. But hand counting is substantially more accurate in reporting the true intent of the voters. More in point, Neumann says, is the comparability of what happened to former Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay of Florida in his 1988 race for the U.S. Senate, which he lost by fewer than 35,000 votes out of more than 4 million cast. In 1988, in MacKay's four Democratic stronghold counties, there were 210,000 people who voted for president but did not vote in the U.S. Senate race. Three of the MacKay counties in 1988 are among Gore's big four recount counties.