Goreâs counsel W. Dexter Douglas wrote this: ãThe Florida lawyers with experience applying election laws believed that a protest, which would result in selected counties conducting the counting through their canvassing boards, was not the best and most likely way to obtain a fair count.  Instead, this group of lawyers urged that individual protests be abandoned and that an election contest under Florida law be filed after the Secretary of State certified the winning slate on November 20, 2000.ä  A Look BacköOne Lawyerâs View, 13 U.Fla.J.L.&P.Polây. at 15, 16.
    In the same journal, Bushâs counsel Barry Richard has written: ãThe chosen counties shared two factors.  They each had a relatively high vote total, and the machine total had given Gore a substantial margin of victory in each of them.ä  Richard, supra, at 2.
 

FredWooch@aol.com wrote:

 In a message dated 11/14/2003 12:03:13 PM Pacific Standard Time, sjmulr@wm.edu writes:

Personally, I thought at the time that the only acceptable solution was to
immediately call for a statewide recount of all legal votes, under and over
votes, rather than waste time with the county-specific challenges the Gore
team started out with.  But I wasn't there at the time, so that's easy for
me to say

I have tried to put most of this out of my memory, but what's left is sending me a little signal that one of the problems with a statewide recount is that the quirky Florida law required that recount requests be made to individual counties, with the supposed reasons for the request, very shortly after the initial counting of the votes, and without little time for investigating the grounds.  I also seem to remember, as unbelievable as it may be, that the elections official(s) in each county had the discretion whether to grant the request or not (hence, the Dade County officials' reversal of their initial willingness to recount).  So I think we need to be a little more sympathetic to the decisions made by the Gore folks in hindsight.   Fredric D. Woocher
Strumwasser & Woocher LLP
(310) 576-1233
fwoocher@strumwooch.com