Short answer: A single vote means nothing in Democracy unless it is counted, but Democracy does not work unless all the votes are counted.  Both candidates have made sure that this never happens -- Bush has made every effort to stop uncounted votes from being counted (a rather bizarre stance to take in a Democracy) and Gore has made every effort to count uncounted votes only in 4 large counties that he won (a perfectly legal strategy under Florida law, but hardly patriotic).  Either way, Democracy loses because we do not have a full count of the votes yet (as Bush argues), nor will we if Palm Beach's and Dade's uncounted votes are added to the tally (as Gore argues).
 

Long answer:
Saying hand counts in Florida Calling are unnecessary because the votes have been counted and recounted is patently false.
At least 16 counties did not recount their ballots, settling instead to simply report their original count (not surprisingly many of
those were Republican counties).  More importantly, tens of thousands of ballots across the state have yet to be counted, either
the during the first count or the mythical recount.  Why?  It is not because they don't have a vote on them, but because the
machines can't read them.  Thus, they were not counted the first time and, since most counties did not canvass these ballots as Florida requires, they were not recounted.  Only in about a dozen counties is it fair to say were all the votes were counted.

Of course, this happens in every election -- machines fail to read ballots that contain votes.  It is not a travesty of Democracy
to leave those ballots uncounted in most cases because the margin of victory is large enough that the "will of the people" is
obvious.  But when the margin of victory is well within the margin of error caused by machine errors, ballot errors, and voter
errors, the next step must be to count those tens of thousands of votes that were never counted in order to determine the
outcome.

Having the right to vote means nothing unless your vote is actually counted.  Any government can hold a vote, but only a
Democracy dictates that those votes are actually counted.  Now, we have a situation in which tens of thousands of people,
Republicans and Democrats alike, stood in line and exercised their right to vote.  They cast votes under the assumption that
their vote counts, like every vote in America.  Yet, because the ballot they voted on are less than perfect, the hole they
punched for their candidate did not go through completely.  When races are close, the universally accepted method for
determining the votes on those machine unreadable ballots is a hand count.

It is true that Bush lead after the first vote by 1,700 votes, and is still in the lead after a second count of about a third of the
ballots by only 300 votes.  Should the remaining uncounted ballots not ever be counted simply because the Bush Campaign
and the Florida Secretary of State are pleased with the current count?  If we let Democracy dictate our actions rather than
partisan politics, the next step must be to count, for the first time, those tens of thousand of ballots across the state on which the
people have voiced their preference only to have them silenced by machine error.  Do we really want to elect the leader of our
Democracy without counting as many votes as possible to determine the true will of the voters?  Do we really want to allow
someone to be our leader who seems to disagree with the fundamental Democratic principle of actually counting the votes
because the ones that have been counted thus far give him the lead?  The message from the Bush Campaign is to stop the
democratic process of vote counting and declare a winner because I am in the lead by 300 votes, even though tens of
thousands of votes have never been counted.  Personally, I prefer to let Democracy run its course and let the votes tell us who
should win Florida, not the Secretary of State and the Bush Campaign.