According to multiple news reports, the ballots will be separated into different groups based on the ballot's markings. Cleanly punched or filled in ballots go in one pile, partially marked or partially punched ballots go in another pile, and things like dimpled chads go in another pile. Then they will simply report how many ballots went into each candidate's pile. They are not going to declare a winner, nor or they going to apply a single standard to counting improperly marked ballots. They are simply going to sort them and then report what they find.
According to the New York Times:
Some news organizations described a more modest goal of placing the uncounted ballots into different and, they hoped, relatively objective categories. Ballots with partially detached chads might be one category, for example, and those with indentations next to a candidate's names might be another. Any vote-tallying would be up to readers or viewers, the organizations said.
"We are not going to recount the Florida vote and decide what is not a legitimate ballot," Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said. "We would like to categorize the ballots according to a variety of conditions."
"What we want to do is show the general public what is on these ballots," said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Miami Herald, a newspaper represented here today. "I don't think we are going to count ballots as such, but we will record, document and tabulate them. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what qualifies as a vote."
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/19/politics/19BROW.html
According to ABC news:
Round Two How Will the Unofficial Re-Recounters Count? By Amanda Onion
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/rerecounts001218.html
“Our feeling is to do it right, we’d have to do a statewide count,”
says Earl Maucker, vice president and editor of the Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Then we may break it down — here are the totals counting the hanging chads,
here are the totals counting
dimpled chads, counting pregnant chads, and so on. We would try to
give the totals some context.”