PHILADELPHIA As the Bush and Gore campaigns debate whether further ballot recounts in Florida will yield a more or less exact result, Dennis M. DeTurck, Ph.D., professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, says that more ballot recounting not less is most likely to produce a statistically accurate outcome in the Florida election.

Dr. DeTurck analysis indicates that to reach 95 percent certainty of the results in Florida, the votes would actually need to be counted roughly 16 times, with the 16 separate results then averaged.

"In the world of statistics, more data is always preferable," he says, acknowledging that time constraints and paper ballotsfragility make such a suggestion untenable.

This analysis is based upon the current margin of 300 votes out of some 6 million cast, equivalent to a spread of 0.005 percent. To reach that precise a level of accuracy on any experiment including the counting of ballots it would have to be repeated 100 million times, equivalent to approximately 16 recounts of all Florida ballots.