"As long as I count the votes,” Boss Tweed once infamously said, “what are you going to do about it?”

Vote counting has undergone substantial reforms since the corrupt days when Mr. Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine controlled New York. But this month’s experience in Florida shows just how political the process of counting votes remains in this country.

In the end, partisans count votes: Elected or politically appointed officials control the process at the local level, partisan state officials control it at the state level, and judges subject to partisan pressure make the final calls.

Here is how that has worked so far in Florida: Several canvassing boards controlled by Democrats voted to do manual recounts in counties where Democrat Al Gore would probably pick up votes. The Republican secretary of state then moved to block or ignore the hand recounts, a strategy that benefited Republican George W. Bush. And now the state Supreme Court, which happens to be made up of six judges appointed by Democratic governors and one jointly by a Democratic and Republican governor, will make what may be the final call.

While that might not seem perfectly neutral, election experts say the system has its merits, especially in states where there is at least some semblance of a two-party system. “The potential for mischief is greatest in states where the process is solely controlled by one party,” says David King, an associate professor of public policy with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “Clearly, Florida is very competitive. There’s strong competitive party organizations everywhere.”

“We don’t live in a Platonic society where we’re filled with neutral, nonjudgmental people,” adds Jan Baran, a Republican election lawyer in Washington. “We hope people are engaged in politics and committed to one position or another.”

Or do we? A nonpartisan group that trains elections officials, the Houston- based Election Center, in 1997 adopted a code of ethics for secretaries of state and other election officers that included the principle, “As the public’s guardians of freedom within a democratic society, we are responsible for the integrity of the process. Our role demands that these principles must be placed above personal or partisan gain.” The group’s executive director, Doug Lewis, said he believes most election officials subscribe to the idea. “We’ve set very, very high standards in the first code of ethics. Most of the secretaries of states have that nailed to the wall now.”

But Florida’s system for counting votes and settling disputes nevertheless is fairly representative of the rest of the country. In most states, the secretary of state oversees elections; most are elected and a few are either appointed by governors or by state legislatures. Local election officials, even when elected in nonpartisan races, have ties to either Republicans or Democrats just by virtue of having been involved in previous political. Even in states or local governments where elections officers are appointed to such posts, their benefactors are almost always partisans.

State court judges called on to settle disputes likewise are partisan creatures. The ultimate arbiters are the state supreme courts, most of which are occupied by either elected justices or, as in Florida, appointed jurists who are subject to retention votes.

Such facts create inevitable perceptions of conflict: Is Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris a Republican really following the state law as she understands it or is she merely interpreting it to favor Mr. Bush, whose Florida campaign she helped run? Did the Democrat-dominated canvassing boards in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties opt for hand recounts to find out the true will of the people or to help Mr. Gore?

To cynics, the answers may be obvious, but experts say such questions neglect the balance such conflicts bring to the system. In the past century, state and local governments opened the election process to much more public scrutiny, including side-by-side oversight by partisan parties. With power at stake, warring parties hold their opponents to the highest standards, thereby creating the best chance for a fair system. And with multiple levels of government involved, it is hard for any one party to control the process from top to bottom.

There have been attempts to try alternative methods, but none have caught on. A handful of U.S. jurisdictions have attempted something like the English system, where career bureaucrats are the final arbiters of election disputes. Thirty of Texas’s 254 county commissions appoint elections supervisors for life.

While that may insulate election officials from partisan pressures, however, it doesn’t guarantee partisan politics will stay out of the process, says the Election Center’s Mr. Lewis. That is because county commissions can just eliminate the position.

But an English-type system would make election supervisors akin to federal judges, who are appointed for life by the president, as long as the Senate approves the choice. There has been near unanimity among legal experts for years that it would make just as much sense to insulate state judges in the same manner. “

Maybe this situation will raise awareness of why you need a neutral, independent arbiter who isn’t subject to an election,” says Elizabeth Dahl, deputy director of the Constitution Project, a nonprofit group.

But so far, the public has had little interest in giving up its right to choose who runs state courts. Just last week, Florida residents resoundingly voted against making county and circuit judges appointed positions subject to retention votes, leaving in place the state’s direct election system for judges. That illustrates perfectly the public’s longstanding resistance to losing a hand in choosing its judges.

In 1910, some 14% of all state trial judges were appointed, with some then subjected to retention elections. Nearly a century later, the figure has inched up only to about 23% says Roy Schotland, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center and expert on state judges’ elections.

“The point is, after all the effort - the entire legal establishment, the national bar association, nearly all state bars, all the people who want to get rid of election contests for judges - look at the progress they’ve made,” Prof. Schotland ironically remarks.

There are moves afoot, however, to clean up the judicial-election process. Next month, the chief judges of 17 of the nation's most populous states will convene a first-of-its-kind summit meeting in Chicago to discuss the growing problems of judicial elections. The agenda will include the increasing cost of such campaigns and how to keep tabs on where the contributions come from.

Mr. Baran is philosophical about calls to reform the vote-counting systems: “I think when we will look back on this, we will think it a very orderly process, even if it doesn’t seem so now,” he says. “It’s a huge testament to the fact in our society we have a legal structure that accommodates all these conflicts without civil war.

The Politics of Balloting
In most states, secretaries of state are the chief elections officers despite being elected to office themselves. Similary, state supreme courts have the final word on most election disputes, though most states supreme court justices are identified with a political party and elected to office or are subject to reconfirmation by election.