Not to be abrasive but:
I have a feeling that the whole purpose of this Gore Campaign is to dupe the people into making him President.
should be submitted to the
Journal of Obvious Facts, published by the
Hot Water Society for Bimanualpigiolocation.
Anyway, back to the point: hand counting of votes is what most of the world does. Italy does it, Mexico does it, France does it ... and there are methods to make it reliable.
Actually more reliable than the bizarre US method, where you have poorly designed voting machines and no national control over the voting process (and no Election Tribunal or Election Institute).
For example, in the Italian vote every ballot is scrutinized by the voting section president, and recorded by the voting section secretary. In the section, during the voting AND the counting, there are "watchers", nominated by the political parties.
Voting is done by pencil and paper (using a kind of pencil that you cannot erase). The ballot boxes, after the counting, are stored, and our electoral law allows recounting by party request.
It is not a fraud proof system (to claim that would be idiotic), but it works fairly well.
Of course, such a scheme requires a large number of people that are actually interested enough in the elections to donate two days of their lifes in the interest of democracy. This could be a problem in the US, at least judging from the nodes about jury duty.
And another thing: the Mexico experience shows that, to guarantee clean elections, it helps to have something like a Federal Electoral Institute, that's to say an autonomous (like the Federal Reserve) body that watches over campaign expense, designs the ballots, prints them, distributes them, runs the elections and does the counting.