re: Actually, .......
If they had recounted according to the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court had never touched the case, the result would still have been the same:
Florida Supreme Court recount ruling
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.
Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.
Gore's four-county strategy
Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.
In other words, like Captain Kirk found out in the "Obsession" episode, had the U.S. Supreme Court done nothing at all, nothing would have changed. The Supremes still make a useful boogeyman for many Democrats, thought.
The counters had to construct some brand new scenarios to find one where Gore would win. Now that I think about it, maybe he would have, since after the other two official count methods had failed, no doubt the Democrats would have continued changing the counting rules until they finally won.
This is a fun issue: on some other boards I can have Democrats gibbering and foaming at the mouth in five minutes.