Recount Reality?

from our new best friend, Keith Olbermann:

(Chief political correspondent of Newsweek, Howard) Fineman put it in terms that the mainstream can’t ignore. He told me he’d talked to Ohio’s Mr. Blackwell earlier in the evening. “There in fact will be a recount,” Howard said with a sigh that encapsulated all of the Florida 2000 Experience. “We will be talking about chads once again.”

As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bush’s 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out — and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger — the Provisionals plus the “Undercount” could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots “where it looks like nobody marked anything” when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohio’s strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid.

Good. Maybe if this election is overturned, we can actually get some postive things done around here (see "Our Leader?" post below).