David Winer argues on Scripting.Com that whoever loses the recount in Florida should just concede the election,
Here comes an opinion. The time to be partisan is past. If the recount says Gore won, he won. If the recount says Bush won, same deal. The election is almost over. Further, elections always have flaws.
Of course this ain’t going to happen. With 63 of 67 counties reporting in the recount, Bush leads Gore by only 359 votes. Lets be blunt about this — the recount has to be inaccurate, and any subsequent recounts will suffer from inaccurcies as well. There is simply no way to reliably count roughly 6 million votes with the sort of precision to capture such an extremely small percentage difference. At this point, election officials might as well flip a coin to decide who won Florida.
Whoever is declared the loser in Florida is clearly going to sue, which is going to cause a lot of headaches because both candidates have won other states by a very small percentage of votes, and minor election mix-ups are the norm around the country as Deroy Murdock documents well in a column at the National Review’s web site. Normally such problems don’t affect elections because rarely are they this close.
In Wisconsin, for example, Gore won by only 6,000 votes out of 2.5 million votes cast — slightly more than two tenths of one percent difference. And talk about election fraud — Democratic activists were handing out packs of cigarettes to homeless voters.
If Gore is successful in getting courts to order yet another recount or a hands-on rather than electronic recount of some Florida counties, Bush is almost certainly going to respond by challenging Gore victories in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico and maybe elsewhere.
Winer is certainly right that given all of the fallout that happens if Gore or Bush lose the recount and then start mounting legal challenges, it might be best if the loser simply conceded for the good of the nation, but if Bush and Gore were the sort to go along with that idea they probably wouldn’t be in politics at this level (then again if Richard Nixon of all people could concede a tainted election to his opponent, surely Gore or Bush could muster up the moral courage to match Nixon!)