The key to maintaining academic dignity is to ensure that you do nothing to the data other than eliminate errors. But while this approach may seem to improve accuracy, it actually leads to biased results. If you only clean the offending data points, then you will disproportionately keep erroneous data that agrees with your prior views. This leads many scholars to believe that data that is partially cleaned at the discretion of a researcher is worse than bad data. This lesson from the ivory tower has a clear implication for the current mess in Florida.
Hand counting ballots in only a few, carefully chosen counties is a sure way to bias the results.
Even if hand counting is more accurate than machine counting, there is a clear bias introduced because Al Gore chose which counties to hand count. Mr. Gore has selected the state and counties where recounting has the best chance of helping him. This is exactly the same as cleaning other data selectively. Naturally, if this opportunity for selective recounting becomes the norm, the floodgates will open and any candidate who loses a close election would be foolish not to demand a recount. The immediate implication of this is clear.