Each county used its own standard to manually recount each vote, and Bush argued that some counties would have more lax standards than other counties.

One option is to manually recount all ballots.

And I said we would therefore vigorously oppose the idea of selectively recounting manually the votes in four heavily Democratic counties.

Ms. Harris cited a provision of state election law that could be read as requiring that counties "manually recount all ballots," in case of dispute.

Because the statute says they can only - if they decide upon a manual recount, manually recount all the ballots.

On the morning of Dec. 22, they said they were going to manually recount all of the undervotes.

In addition, an election official is unable to manually recount ballots in the event of a dispute.

And it argued that manually recounting only part of the ballots was illegal.

"Accordingly, to the extent that this court manually recounts any ballots at all, it must recount ballots from all other counties as well."

They made it clear that the ostensible question before the court, whether the votes now being manually recounted would count, was only part of the problem.