Carrying out a fair count is not difficult. It happens all over the place. It just happened in your northern neighbour.It probably happened in most parts of the USA last month. Bush's advisers know it's not difficult. That's not why they've been jibbing at the idea.

Does anyone doubt that the reason they objected to a manual count was because they wanted to hold on to the wafer-thin majority that they had on the non-manual count.

Doug, you said you don't have double standards, and I believe you. If Gore had been ahead, by however narrow a margin, you would have been against him making any efforts to have a manual recount. I doubt if all that many people in the Bush camp would be with you on that, but fair enough, it's an arguable position, though I'd disagree with it. I'd always be in favour of a manual county in a close vote, regardless of who was ahead or behind, and I'd be very very suspicious of any candidate anywhere who tried to obstruct a recount. The electoral system in my part of the world is far from perfect, but I have never heard of anyone trying to do that.

I doubt if you are the only honest perosn around. All that's needed for a fair count is to get a few honest people who don't have double standards to do the counting. Counting in pairs.

"Fair" need not mean absolutely perfect. In almost every case there really is no problem in determining whether an attempt has been made to vote for a candidate, but there would probably be some cases where a voter had made an attempt, but not effectively enough to register a mark, and they'd be rejected in a manual count. But they'd be the exception. Teams of fair and honest counters wouldn't have any difficulty in reaching an agreed judgement on those kinds of things.

In any case, that is all beside the main point I was trying to make, which was about "the way that people at all levels seem have lined up on all this, not on the basis of what is the fairest way of counting the votes, but on the basis of what is the way of counting the votes which is most likely to favour their preferred candidate."