STAT EXPERTS SAY ODDS ARE STILL
AGAINST AL
Monday,November 20,2000
By DAN MANGAN and STEVE DUNLEAVY
Al Gore is facing long odds - statistically speaking - to make up the
930-vote gap between him and George W. Bush in the Florida hand
recount on which he has pinned his hopes.
"It's unlikely," Bruce Hansen, economics professor at the University of
Wisconsin, said of Gore's chances of picking up enough votes to win the
presidency.
Hansen said Gore could win an extremely narrow victory - perhaps as
close as a single vote - if he gets lucky, under statistical projections.
But in any event, a hand recount will not be the slam-dunk that many
Gore supporters were counting on.
As of yesterday, Hansen was projecting that a recount in Palm Beach,
Broward and Miami-Dade counties would boost the vice president by
anywhere from a low of 533 votes to a high of 934 votes.
Both the top and low ends of the range each have only about a 2.5 percent
chance of occurring under the projections, he said.
And to get to that top end - which as of yesterday's totals would give
Gore only a four-vote lead - "Gore will need several things working in his
favor," Hansen said.
One of those things would be for Gore to get one so-called "pregnant
chad" - or a dimpled ballot hole - for every two "hanging chads" that go
his way, Hansen said.
Hanging chads are ballots that have pieces of paper hanging from the holes
next to a candidate's name. They have been accepted as valid votes, as
have ballots that are dimpled, rather than pushed all the way through, by
some recounting counties.
If the recount results in that 1-to-2 dimpled-to-hanging chads ratio, "then
we could get to a dead-even heat," Hansen said.
"It all comes down to dimples," Hansen said. "It's pretty shocking to
[say] that a presidential race has come down to that, but that's what
happens when it's a 50-50 race."
John Irons, an economics professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts,
thinks Gore has better chances, but still gives the vice president only a 50
percent shot at pulling ahead through a recount.
"But I believe that hinges on whether you count the pregnant chads," he
said.
And Irons says Gore supporters are wrong to assume that the 19 votes he
picked up in an initial test hand recount in 1 percent of Palm Beach
County precincts can be extrapolated to 1,900 votes for 100 percent of
the precincts.
"Those were majority, very Democratic precincts," Irons noted, pointing
out that less-heavily Democratic areas would not be as likely to follow
that projected trend. "You're unsure if that 19 is going to hold for the rest
[of the counties]."
Judge Charles Burton, chairman of the all-important Palm Beach
canvassing board, said the hand count has not shown any appreciable
swing either way.
"I'm not doing the tally, quite obviously, at this stage, but my general
impression is no dramatic swing in the votes," he said.
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