I’d like to commend Jake Pierson for his letter in Thursday’s paper and expose some lesser known inconsistencies in the vice president’s reasoning.

The main inconsistency, of course, is that as soon as Mr. Gore succeeded in having unpunched and dimpled ballots counted in just three democratic counties (using a precedent in Illinois that turns out to be false), we had the inherently unfair situation of having a vote counting standard in three counties different than that in the other 64.

This flies in the face of the Gore camp mantra that “Every vote must count.”

What about dimpled ballots in the other 64 counties? If we want every vote counted, shouldn’t we do this across the entire state?

At this point Gore supporters are quick to point out that Gore proposed a statewide hand recount. This is a nice sounding suggestion, but unfortunately the vice president’s actions are directly contrary to it.

He did not insist on counting every vote in Florida as he claims to want, but said that if Gov. Bush would agree to a statewide hand recount, he would abide by the result.

Mr. Gore did not ask his opponent’s permission for any of the other strange and frivolous things that he has done since election night, so why did he on this occasion?

Answer: Because he knew Bush would never accept it, giving him the perfect excuse to count to his heart’s content by his own liberal standards.

If the vice president truly had this all encompassing concern that every vote be counted, he should accept nothing less than a statewide hand recount.

But of course, as we have seen, he is perfectly content to let only certain votes be counted in exactly the way he prescribes. This involves counting dimpled ballots which have a ten year history in these counties of not being counted. This means that it is not actually recounting that was done in Florida — it was conversion of undervotes to Gore votes.

In Broward county, some ballots were counted for Gore if there was only a miniscule mark in the presidential column but all other offices were clearly punched out, just as long as the voting pattern was democratic.

This is blatantly wrong. Polls show that 2 percent of voters did not vote in the presidential race, many of whom do not approve of Gov. Bush or Vice President Gore.

Why shouldn’t their voices be heard? So the next time you here the vice president begging to count the thousands of ballots which have “never been counted” (which in reality have been counted twice but not the way Gore would like for them to be counted), remind yourself that there are many thousands more identical republican ballots that will never be recounted either.

Daniel Hummer

Junior

Chemistry and geology