The nearly dead heat outcome of presidential voting in Florida has produced the narrowest sort of partisan bickering. Instead, this is an opportunity on all sides to proceed in an orderly fashion and begin to address some lasting questions about the fairness of voting in the United States. Pacific News Service associate editor Andrew Reding is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, and is completing a four-year term as city councilmember in Sanibel, Florida.

I'm a Floridian, a registered Republican, and a nonpartisan city council member in Lee County, in one of the most conservative parts of the state. And I am appalled by the behavior of both sides in the dispute over the Florida recount in the U.S. presidential election.

Both the Bush and Gore campaigns, and their Republican and Democratic allies in Florida, have been allowing partisanship and self-interest to overshadow the national interest.

The only thing that should matter at this point is an accurate vote count to determine which candidate actually won a plurality of votes cast in Florida, however slender the margin.

That kind of count is impossible with the antiquated and insufficiently reliable machines used in most Florida counties. They use punch card ballots that can be read properly only if there are clean holes -- that is, the rectangular "chad" must be completely removed when it is punched with a slim metal prod. If the chad remains partially attached to the card it can obstruct the hole, causing the machine to not count the vote.

This happens only occasionally, and in most elections these errors are not sufficient to affect the outcome. But with only 300 votes separating the candidates out of more than 5.8 million cast, it obviously could decide the outcome.

The only remedy is a full manual count in all Florida counties that use the punch card ballots. But until last night neither side was proposing to do that.

George W. Bush wants the results of the machine recount accepted, plus late-arriving absentee ballots. His interest is transparent -- he has a slender lead in the inadequate machine recount, and knows that almost all the remaining absentee votes are from military personnel overseas, who consistently vote Republican by a wide margin.

As a fig leaf, he's relying on Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who co-chaired his statewide campaign and has said she would like a job in a Bush administration. She's trying to use a deadline for submission of results as a way to ignore manual recounts.

The Gore campaign, on the other hand, has been seeking a manual recount only in four heavily-populated counties that usually favor Democrats.

That's not fair either. If it is right to respect the votes of the mostly-Democratic elderly in Palm Beach County who inadvertently failed to completely remove the chad on their ballots, why shouldn't we be just as concerned with the votes of the mostly-Republican elderly in Lee County?

Gore's fig leaf is Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat who chaired Gore's statewide campaign, and who argues that it is up to each county to decide whether or not to do a manual recount.

Where's any evidence of concern for the national interest in all this?

Both sides are turning to partisan officials who focus on minor points of the law when there's something incomparably more important at stake: the legitimacy of an American presidential election.

There is only one way to settle that -- with a careful, unrushed, manual recount in all Florida counties that use punch card ballots. The Electoral College timetable allows plenty of time for such a recount. It's a small price to pay for a credible election.

To his credit, Gore finally proposed such a compromise Wednesday evening, but it was immediately rejected by Bush.

Such a resolution would still leave a lot of questions. Such as why all 25 electoral votes of a state that is split 50/50 should go to one candidate. Or why we allow parts of the country to use antiquated vote tabulating systems that do not guarantee accuracy. Or why we even maintain such an anachronism as the Electoral College, which can award the presidency to a candidate who does not even win a plurality of votes cast.