Bush Would Have Won! Or Would he?
The Miami Herald reports on its 'undervote' recount in Dade County. The only
thing that seems clear, however, is that the election process is flawed
BY JESSICA REAVES
time.com
Monday, Feb. 26, 2001 Monday was supposed to be a really big day for the Miami
Herald. After two months of squinting and peering at half-perforated and slightly
dented ballots, a band of ballot-counters hired by the newspaper to comb through
Dade County’s so-called "undervotes" were ready to hand over a verdict.
This was heady stuff; the newspaper set up a stand-alone section of its website
and prepared for a frenzy of activity. Would the recount results fuel Democrats’
conviction that the election was stolen by a partisan U.S. Supreme Court? Or
would the new numbers establish unequivocally that George W. Bush won the
presidency?
Perhaps, the optimists thought, the partisan bickering over legitimacy would end
once the "real results" were out in the open.
Then Monday dawned and the paper hit the stands. The news was bad for the
optimists, and, to a lesser extent, for Al Gore. After two months of work, the
data were conflicting at best. In a review of 10,644 undervotes, the paper
reported, Gore only gained 49 votes (1,555 to Bush’s 1,506). Those votes,
combined with the recount numbers Gore requested from three other counties
— Volusia, Palm Beach and Broward — and subtracted from Bush’s 730 vote
lead, would still have left Gore 140 votes behind Bush in the overall Florida
count.
Of course, Bush partisans crowed over the numbers, which came, after all, from
what was supposed to be a Gore stronghold. But there were also new points of
contention, all of which will likely be advanced enthusiastically in the coming
weeks by Democratic loyalists. While the recount, conducted by accountants
BDO Siedman for the Herald, used the most generous definition of "vote" to
tally numbers, the new numbers, they reminded anyone who’d listen, only
includes undervotes — those ballots whose chads were not fully detached.
One thing the new numbers do confirm is what is now almost universally
acknowledged to have been a strategic gaffe by the Gore camp: calling for
recounts in specific counties. Apart from fueling public suspicion that he was
cherry-picking counties apparently most beneficial to his cause — a tactic that
probably fueled opposition to his cause — it also appears that he had little to gain
in terms of votes by narrowing the recounts to so few counties.
The rest, however, is not so clear-cut. The recount, we are reminded, did not
include the 1,840 ballots where voters cleanly punched holes assigned to no one,
including 736 punched in the hole directly beneath Bush’s name and 1,017
beneath Gore’s. This phantom margin, apparently created by confused or
distracted or perhaps just not very bright voters, would be, of course, enough to
secure a Gore victory. If, that is, we were in the habit of counting votes next to
or beneath or slightly to the left of where voters are supposed to register their
vote — which we are not.
And it is perhaps in those floating, unassigned hole punches that the only
agreement over this election is likely to result. It seems inconceivable that
anyone, upon learning that fully 2,000 votes were firmly cast (in one county!) for
no candidate at all, could argue against revising our balloting systems. Those
votes, which will taunt Al Gore and 2,000 apparently disoriented Dade County
residents, are a clarion call for ballot reform.
After all, we practically beg people to vote. Why, then, do we design ballots that
manage to confuse enough voters that the outcome of a presidential election
could be in doubt?
As for a more complete view of the Florida vote, that will have to wait until two
separate counts of the whole state are completed. The Herald and its parent, the
Knight Ridder chain of newspapers has counted all but two counties. (Officials
in upstate Duval and Holmes counties have postponed the recount, fearing
further disruption if the ballots were subpoenaed in lawsuits.) Meanwhile, a
consortium of news organizations, including the Associated Press, the New
York Times and CNN, has hired the National Opinion Research Center, a
non-profit firm out of the University of Chicago, to examine nearly 200,000
ballots that did not register any vote at all, including ballots where no vote was
clearly marked, and where more than one vote was clearly marked. The NORC
report is due out in April. |
