Off Topic: Miami-Dade ballot recount
By Clay Lambert and Bill Douthat,
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 14, 2001
MIAMI -- George W. Bush would have
gained six votes more than Al Gore if all
the dimples and hanging chads on
10,600 previously uncounted ballots in
Miami-Dade County had been included
in the totals, according to a review by
The Palm Beach Post.
That result would have been a hard blow
to Al Gore's hopes of claiming the
presidency in a recount. Before the vice
president conceded last month, the Gore
camp had expected to pick up as many
as 600 votes from a Miami-Dade
recount -- barely enough to overtake
Bush's razor-thin Florida lead. Instead,
The Post's review indicates Gore would
have lost ground.
If everything were counted -- from the
faintest dimple to chads barely hanging
on ballots -- 251 additional votes would
have gone to Bush and 245 more would have gone to Gore, The
Post review showed.
The review, concluded last week, also showed that the vast
majority of ballots rejected as under-votes (meaning there was no
clear punch for any candidate) when counted by machine
appeared, in fact, to cast no vote for president. About 7,600
under-votes had no mark at all on the presidential column, or in
rare cases included multiple votes that defied judgment. Most of
the voters who did not indicate a vote for president did punch
choices in other races.
But at least 2,257 voters apparently poked at their ballot cards
without properly inserting them into the voting machines.
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy said
that's because the voters failed to follow directions.
Of these miscast votes, 302 more would have gone for Gore than
Bush, under Leahy's theory.
Even if those votes had been cast correctly, however, it would not
have changed the outcome of a presidential election that turned
on 537 votes for Bush in Florida.
"In other words, Dade was a wash," said Ivy Korman, director of
special projects for the Miami-Dade County supervisor of
elections. "And, knowing our county the way that we do, that is
why we didn't feel the need to do a manual recount."
Gore easily carried the county by more than 39,000 votes on Nov.
7. The certified results in Miami-Dade were 328,808 for Gore and
289,533 for Bush, according to the Florida secretary of state's
office.
Counts' results will vary
The Miami-Dade canvassing board abandoned its manual
recount Nov. 22 after counting 140 of the county's 616 precincts.
And four teams of judges in Leon County were about halfway
through Miami-Dade's disputed ballots Dec. 9 when the U.S.
Supreme Court stopped all recounts in Florida. No results were
released from the judges' partial recount.
The Post's review of all the under-votes is the first of several
planned or under way. Later this month, a consortium that
includes The Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York
Times plans to begin looking at the under-votes in each of
Florida's 67 counties. The Miami Herald and USA Today are
doing a similar review. The Herald/USA Today review, using
accountants, is expected to be finished in Miami-Dade this week.
Because of varying judgments by reviewers on how each ballot is
marked and the inevitable human error that occurs when
thousands of ballots are examined by hand, results of the reviews
by newspapers are almost certain to differ.
Furthermore, experts say no count -- whether done by hand or by
machine -- will ever be exact. Computer industry consultants
estimate the error rate for counting punch cards could run as high
as 1 percent and varies with the number of times the cards are
handled.
(For example, results changed in 313 of Palm Beach County's
531 precincts when the ballots were counted by hand.)
In the 37-day contest of Florida election results, Gore had hoped
to find a mother lode of votes in heavily Democratic South Florida
to overtake Bush. A manual recount in Broward County added
567 votes for Gore. Although it did not meet the deadline, the
manual recount in Palm Beach County would have added 174
votes.
The Bush campaign contended the recounts were unnecessary
because Bush won on Nov. 7 and in the mandated machine
recount conducted Nov. 8.
Pattern in mis-punches?
In the Miami-Dade under-vote, the largest group of marked
ballots was the 2,257 cleanly but inaccurately punched cards.
During the media review, Leahy, the elections supervisor,
demonstrated how many voters might have punched
odd-numbered chads, which didn't correspond to any of the 10
candidates for president named on the ballot.
Miami-Dade elections officials assigned only even numbers to
the presidential candidates -- No. 4 for Bush, No. 6 for Gore, No.
8 for Libertarian Harry Browne and so on.
Leahy showed that when punch cards were laid over the ballot
booklets instead of inserted into the machine the arrow
corresponding to Bush appeared to point to the No. 5 chad rather
than the proper No. 4 chad. Likewise, the arrow for Gore
appeared next to the No. 7 rather than the correct No. 6.
The Post found 1,023 cleanly punched holes at No. 7; Leahy
speculates these may have been attempts to vote for Gore. There
were 721 clean punches at No. 5; these could have been
attempts to vote for Bush. The Post also found 129 more
odd-numbered marks that were not clean punches, such as
dimpled or partly detached chads.
Miami-Dade elections officials have been aware since November
that a small percentage of voters wrongly punched odd-numbered
chads. The Post's tally of 2,257 clean punches in the presidential
column is about one-third of 1 percent of the 653,963 ballots cast
in the county.
Korman said the instructions were clear and appeared in both
English and Spanish on ballot cards and machines.
"You can lead some people to water, but you can't make them
drink," she said.
Larry Klayman is chairman of Judicial Watch Inc., a governmental
watchdog group conducting its own review of under-votes in eight
Florida counties.
"These are interesting findings and point to the need for a new
system," Klayman said. "The system we have is broken."
Klayman said his organization would intervene on behalf of a
lawsuit filed Thursday by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil
Liberties Union, claiming that irregularities in Florida's vote
amount to a denial of the equal protection guaranteed by the U.S.
Constitution.
Question of equal protection?
Judicial Watch supports the claim that the NAACP and ACLU
make regarding equal protection, but it does not support their
claim that there is also evidence of racial discrimination in the
outcome of the presidential election.
The Post review, however, found that the rate of voting mishaps
was greater in black-majority precincts than elsewhere. While 1.6
percent of all votes cast countywide for president were not
counted because they were considered under-votes, that rate
was 2.7 percent in the 112 precincts with a black majority.
In the 24 precincts where a majority of voters were 65 or older,
2.1 percent of the voters cast under-votes, while 1.4 percent of
the voters in the 217 Hispanic-majority precincts delivered
under-votes.
For example, in Precinct 513 in northwest Miami-Dade, where
blacks make up 96.3 percent of the registered voters, 7 percent
(28 voters) miscast ballots.
Thomasina Williams, an attorney representing the NAACP and
other civil rights groups suing the state and seven counties over
the election, said black precincts in Miami-Dade could have had
more problems because they may have been using older, less
reliable voting machines and were assigned poll workers with
less training.
"Predominantly black areas fall prey to that because they don't
get the same service," said Williams, who filed suit in federal
court in Miami Wednesday asking that the punch-card system be
eliminated.
Miami-Dade elections officials were not available Friday to
comment on Williams' claims.
The Post also found some voters used pens or pencils to shade
or circle their choice for president. The outcome in such cases
was a tie: 23 votes each for Bush and Gore.
Also among the ballots were 24 cleanly punched votes for Bush
and 35 for Gore that had not been counted by the machines. One
theory: The chads had been dislodged sometime after the initial
machine count and during the seven occasions Leahy estimates
in which the ballots were handled since the election.
Media review called waste
Republicans are conducting their own review of disputed ballots
in Florida. Mark Wallace, a Miami attorney representing the
state's Republican Party, said the media's review is a waste of
time.
"It doesn't matter what the outcome is," he said. "The fact that we
gained votes is fine and dandy, but the things you (The Post)
counted didn't correspond with the law."
Calls to the Democratic Party were referred to the Democratic
National Committee, which did not immediately return calls.
Staff writer Brian Crecente, database editor Christine Stapleton
and clerk Janis Fontaine contributed to this story.
bill_douthat@pbpost.com
clay_lambert@pbpost.com
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