No voting system, and certainly not the system that Florida had in place last November, is capable of handling this close an outcome with 100 percent uncertainty. No media review is, either. That scenario was never seriously contemplated by any judge or state official. This is not the final word on the subject. Five months after Election Day, the polls are still open in Florida, so to speak.
Several precincts remain to be heard from.
A second media recount is still in progress, this one conducted by a media consortium that includes the New York Times and the Washington Post. In news stories Thursday, both papers took gentle jabs at the numbers offered up by their rival vote counters and suggested that their own results might be different in some respects. Legally, these ballots were considered uncountable, and rightly so, but both media groups have been studying them and will report their findings in the weeks to come. For the Democrats' theory of what went wrong in Florida to retain merit, the overvotes must provide the hard evidence - in the form of thousands of ballots on which confused residents of Palm Beach and other counties cast confused votes for Gore and someone else. The existence of those ballots, and in large numbers, is at the heart of the Democratic contention that more people went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Gore than Bush and that the system failed them miserably.