All along, Gore's mantra was count all the votes.  However, the strategy he employed throughout the process focused only on counting all the ballots in certain counties were he did well.  Perhaps Gore honestly believed that he really won Florida anyway, so it was acceptable to only focus on the counting of votes in four democratic counties.  However, he should have tried to get every vote counted across the state, like his post election campaign motto suggested.

At the very least, he could have filed manual recount requests in every county across the state just to say he at least tried to get a statewide recount.  Then, after the election was certified, he could have contested the certification not only because of the number of uncounted ballots in Dade County, but because of all the uncounted ballots across the entire state.  It was a well known fact that about 180,000 ballots across the state remained uncounted.  Some of these were ballots intentionally left blank by voters (i.e., a silent protest if you will), but it would be difficult to argue that all of these ballots could be classified as such, especially based on historical data concerning the number of people who purposely leave their ballots blank.  Therefore, it would not have taken much to provide substantial evidence that several thousands of these ballots probably contained clear votes that were simply missed by the machines and not intentionally left blank.  These votes, as it could have been argued in the courts, represented a significant number of rejected ballots that could have affected the outcome of the election (this is one of the statutory thresholds for a successful contest under 102.168).

From the beginning, Gore should have been fighting to have all the votes counted in Florida, not just all the votes in Dade, Volusia, Broward, and Palm Beach.  While this latter approach was certainly in accordance with Florida's election law (despite efforts by Secretary of State's Harris to try and change the election law after election day to make Gore's strategy illegal; click here for more details), it was certainly neither glaringly patriotic nor philosophically consistent.  Gore, like Bush, opted to pursue a win by any means necessary strategy rather than one based upon a respect for the sanctity of every citizen's right to have their vote counted.  Click here to read about what Bush did wrong.