Maybe you're right about your theory, but based on the above investigations, he won the vote anyways.

CNN says exactly the opposite! “Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”

Counting undervotes isn't my theory. It was Gore's theory of which votes should be counted. Gore never argued overvotes--where a voter had marked multiple candidates--should be counted. The recount studies show that Gore would have lost under the only recount approach the Gore campaign actually pursued.

Of course, the whole thing was completely stupid. They should have stopped with the second machine recount. It was completely insane to entertain the idea that you should try and guess what voters meant when they didn't completely punch a ballot, or punched more than one candidate. The proper thing to do is exclude all ballots where the voter failed to fill out the ballot properly.