Election2000: 'Process must be fair'

'Process must be fair'

©Associated Press

Excerpts from remarks Wednesday by George W. Bush:

No matter who you voted for in this election, whether you supported Vice President Gore or whether you supported me, all Americans want a fair and accurate count of the votes in Florida ...

As we work to conclude this election, we should be guided by three principles: This process must be fair, this process must be accurate, and this process must be final.

First, the election must be fair: fair to voters throughout America, fair to voters in Florida, and fair to voters in different counties in Florida. I honor and respect the value of every single vote. That's why my campaign supported the automatic recount of all the votes in Florida.

Everyone in Florida has had his or her vote counted once. Those votes have been recounted. In some counties they have been counted a third and even fourth time.

And that brings us to the second principle: accuracy. This process must be accurate. As Americans have watched on television, they have seen for themselves that manual counting, with individuals making subjective decisions about voter intent, introduces human error and politics into the vote-counting process.

Each time these voting cards are handled the potential for errors multiplies. Additional manual counts of votes that have been counted and recounted will make the process less accurate, not more so.

Third, not for the Vice President Gore, or for me, but for America, this process must have a point of conclusion, a moment when America and the world know who is the next president. ...

The next and final deadline comes Friday at midnight, when overseas absentee ballots must have been received to be counted in Florida. I don't know who these ballots will support and neither does Vice President Gore. ...

The way to conclude this election in a fair and accurate and final way is for the state of Florida to count the remaining overseas ballots, add them to the certified vote, and announce the results as required by Florida law. ...

Once this election is over, I would be glad to meet with Vice President Gore, and I join him in pledging that regardless of who wins after this weekend's final count, we will work together to unite our great country.