The Miami Herald did a statistical "what if" scenario.
If no one had ever heard of hanging chads, if the butterfly ballot had
never flown, if no voter had bungled in the booth, who would have won
Florida and the presidency of the United States?
herald.com
From the methodology which, to Ds is "compelling" and to the Rs is "voodoo"
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To estimate the intent of those who cast ballots that weren't counted, The Herald started with several
assumptions:
Everybody who cast a ballot, whether in person or absentee, actually intended to cast a legitimate
vote for one of the several presidential candidates.
Both undervotes (failing for whatever reason to successfully mark a ballot or punch out a chad) and
overvotes (selecting more than one candidate for whatever reason) should be counted as attempts to
vote in the presidential race.
The group of voters in each precinct who cast uncounted ballots are a microcosm of their neighbors
in that precinct, so that their collective choices of candidates would mirror the choices of those who
successfully cast ballots. In other words, the assumption is that political party preference does not
make voters more or less likely to cast an uncounted ballot.
Given those assumptions, The Herald analysis simply calculated the percentage of the successful
votes that Bush, Gore and the collective other candidates each received, and then divided up the
uncounted votes based on those percentages.
For instance, consider a hypothetical precinct in which there were 500 votes for Bush, 400 votes for
Gore, and 100 votes for all other candidates combined.
If this precinct also had 100 more ballots that weren't counted because of overvoting or undervoting,
then The Herald analysis would give Bush 50 of them (for a total of 550), Gore 40 more (for a total of
440) and the others the remaining 10 (for a total of 110.)
herald.com
... Mezz - Are we having fun yet? |
