Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said Sunday prolonged electoral wrangling in the courts could hurt democracy in the United States.
"No court should decide an election," Kissinger said in an interview published in the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
He said that when the recounting is over in the state of Florida "I hope strongly that the loser will publicly recognize his defeat and rule out further judicial steps."
He said he thought this was what the American public wanted and that if a court ordered a new vote in a Florida district "this would be in manifold ways an undemocratic vote . . . since suddenly the fate of the whole country would depend on a small, small group of people."
"If every election is contested in the courts, then the democratic process will suffer enormously," Kissinger said.
Electoral authorities in Florida said early Sunday they had completed their manual recount of ballots cast in Palm Beach County in the US presidential election.
The hand count began Saturday, despite a lawsuit filed by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush seeking to block the Palm Beach recount and manual recounts in three other Florida counties.
The four manual recounts were requested by the Democratic campaign, which hopes that the results will tilt the presidential election to Al Gore, Bush's Democratic challenger.
Bush adviser James Baker essentially urged Gore to concede defeat -- even though the Republican candidate only had a razor-thin advantage over his rival – BERLIN (AFP)
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