So changing the strict rules is fair when it's to allow in overseas votes that aren't poperly validated, but when it's to allow in domestic votes that were in on time but haven't yet been properly counted, that's unfair?

Or the other way round. Depending on what result you want to get in the election.

Maybe the Gore camp were saying "if you insist on the strict and inflexible letter of the law, that should apply to both sorts of votes" - which seems fair enough.

If they were in fact trying at the same time to exclude the overseas votes and yet include the domestic ones, they are just about as dirty as the Bushy crowd. Pretty dirty by any normal standards of political decency.

But in any case all this is totally irrelevant. The only thing that should be on the table, is ensuring that all the votes of everyone are properly and fairly counted, without the political preferences of those involved playing even the slightest part.

From what I've seen on TV the people actually doing the count are trying to achieve this - with teams of both Republicans and Democrats looking at every vote, and agreeing together on how to allocate it. Which is not difficult. It just needs people who have a sense of personal honour and fairness.

Maybe the delay in carrying out these counts, and the inability of those in charge to recruit enough people to carry them out on a wide enough scale and far far more quickly, is an indication that "people who have a sense of personal honour and fairness" are not that easy to find in America.

Which I think is the most surprsing thing of all, because, on the whole, I have always thought that that would be quite an accurate way of describing typical Americans, even if it doesn't describe some of thye people, they elect to office. And it's certainly an image of America that a lot of Americans seem to carry about with them.