Over-votes cost Gore the election in FL
Palm Beach Post - Sunday, March 11, 2001
gopbi.com
So when will Dubyea be moving out of the White House?
By Joel Engelhardt and Scott McCabe, Palm
Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 11, 2001
WEST PALM BEACH -- Confusion over Palm
Beach County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore
about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he
needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead
in Florida and win the presidency, The Palm
Beach Post's ballot-by-ballot review of discarded
over-votes reveals.
The ballots show 5,330 Palm Beach County
residents, many of them in Democratic
strongholds, invalidated their ballot cards by
punching chads for Gore and Reform Party
candidate Pat Buchanan, whose hole on the
punch card appeared just above Gore's.
The ballots also show another 2,908 voters
punched Gore's name along with Socialist David
McReynolds, the candidate whose hole on the card appeared just below
Gore's. Both Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page
of the two-page ballot, while Gore's was on the left. The butterfly ballot
confusion didn't hurt just Gore: 1,631 people punched both for Bush and the
candidate whose hole was below his on the ballot, Buchanan.
The two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, add up to
6,607 lost votes for Gore and an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political
experts and partisan observers agree.
The Palm Beach Post review of 19,125 punch cards reveals, for the first time,
how a confusing presidential ballot forced the country into a contentious
37-day standoff in the courts and the streets. Those few thousand votes are
but a tiny slice of the 6 million cast in Florida, but in such a tight race, they
were the key to the state's 25 electoral votes and the Oval Office.
Even allowing that 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds -- which is more than their combined portion of Palm Beach
County's total vote -- that would still leave Gore with 6,541 additional votes,
more than enough to overcome Bush's statewide victory margin of 537 votes.
"What it shows is what we've been saying all along -- there is no question that
the majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore," said Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida.
Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, speaking for the Republicans, said:
"You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."
The over-votes can be divided into two types. Three-fourths of them were
punches for two candidates, most of which experts say can be attributed to
the ballot design. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts
called voter error, not a design problem.
Voters complained they were confused by a ballot in which the names of the
10 presidential candidates alternated on two pages. They expected Bush and
Gore to be the first two choices as required by Florida statute but instead
found Buchanan, on a facing page, nestled between them.
The result: People said they voted for Buchanan, then tried to correct their
mistake by voting for Gore. Others said they voted for either Buchanan or
McReynolds thinking the ballot allowed them to vote for both president and
vice president.
Many were Jewish retirees in southern Palm Beach County thrilled by the
chance to vote for a Jewish vice presidential candidate, Gore's running mate,
Sen. Joe Lieberman. Instead, they voted for the right-leaning Buchanan,whom
many Jewish voters consider to be anti-Semitic, or the left-leaning
McReynolds, an obscure candidate who received 308 votes in Palm Beach
County, almost half his statewide total of 622.
Forty-six percent of the Gore-Buchanan over-votes came from precincts where
the majority of voters were Democrats and 65 or older. Included in those numbers: In nine of the 10 precincts with the most Gore-Buchanan over-votes,
the majority of voters were both Democratic and 65 or older. Eight of the 10
precincts were in south Palm Beach County.
In comparison, about 38 percent of the people who voted in the Nov. 7 election in Palm Beach County were 65 or older, according to state records.
"These are people who knew how to vote. Typically they do it right. But the
butterfly ballot discombobulated them," University of California-Berkeley
Professor Henry Brady said. "Are these stupid voters? Or is it a stupid voting
system? There's certainly evidence here that these were not stupid voters."
The Berkeley professor calculated months ago that at least 2,000 of
Buchanan's 3,424 Palm Beach County votes were meant for Gore. If that were
true, Gore's total gain -- with the over-votes -- might have been as much as
8,600 votes. Based on similar calculations, Brady said few if any of the
over-votes involving Buchanan were actually meant for Buchanan.
Such conclusions are harder to come by for the 5,062 voters who punched
three or more choices for president. Twenty-eight voters selected all 10
presidential candidates.
These errors, which were disproportionately high in black-majority precincts,
appear to be made by people who don't know how to vote, said Anthony
Salvanto, a University of California-Irvine researcher who has studied a
computer database that recorded every clear punch on the ballots cast in
Palm Beach County Nov. 7.
Gore appeared on 80 percent of the over-vote ballots, 15,371 times on those
cards clearly punched for two or more candidates. Buchanan drew the
second-most punches on over-votes: 8,689. McReynolds appeared 4,567
times, the third most.
Bush received the fifth-most punches, 3,751; finishing behind Libertarian Harry
Browne, who amassed just 769 votes in the county but appeared on 4,218
over-vote ballots. The numbers total more than 19,125 because more than one
name appears on every over-vote ballot.
Two other common punches -- votes for Bush-Gore and for Gore with Browne,
who appeared immediately below Gore -- are not as clearly linked to the
butterfly ballot because they involve candidates on the same page, Brady
said.
Bush-Gore punches numbered 382; Gore-Browne, 1,305. That 77-23 percent
split is close enough to Gore's 62-35 percent victory in Palm Beach County to
support the idea that the Bush-Gore votes probably were meant for Bush and
the Gore-Browne votes probably were meant for Gore, Brady said.
Another explanation? The Gore-Browne confusion could be blamed on Gore
voters who saw the party name "Libertarian" in all capital letters and mistook
it for Lieberman, Salvanto said.
Can the voting difficulty really be ascribed to the butterfly ballot? Without a
doubt, Brady and Salvanto say. Consider:
Ninety-two percent of the voters who cast two votes for president did not cast
an over-vote in the seven-candidate Senate race, where the candidates were
all on one page, Salvanto found. That indicates they knew better than to
punch two candidates elsewhere on the ballot but were confused by the
presidential ballot's design, he said.
Voters at polling places were eight times more likely to over vote than
absentee voters, who filled out their punch card at home and did not use the
butterfly ballot, another indicator that the ballot, not the voter, was at fault,
Brady said.
The county recorded just 3,073 over-votes in 1996, less than 1 percent of all
ballots, when just four candidates' names were listed. It recorded 19,235
over-votes last year, 4.2 percent of the ballots.
While it is common for more people to vote for president than for senator, that
didn't happen in Palm Beach County. The county recorded 2,229 more votes
in the Senate race.
Eighty-three percent of Gore-Buchanan voters picked Democrat Bill Nelson for
U.S. senator, showing a likelihood they supported Democrats, Salvanto found.
Nelson received 62 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County.
The Post review of over-votes, conducted between Jan. 17 and Jan. 29,
illustrated the difficulty of hand recounts of punch-card ballots. Even the total
number of over-votes was difficult to pin down.
The county recorded 19,235 over-votes after its 10-day hand recount that
ended Nov. 26, second in the state only to Duval County's 21,942.
The Post counted 110 fewer over-votes than Palm Beach County's canvassing
board did. In 138 of the county's 637 precincts, the number of over-votes
shown to reporters by Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore's office did not
match the official tally. LePore declined to explain why the votes were not
shown and refused The Post's Feb. 13 request to look for them until April 2,
after the municipal runoffs will be over.
Most of the precincts were off by three or fewer ballots but 14 were off by 10
or more. To capture the missing ballots, The Post analyzed a computer
image, prepared by Salvanto, of the ballots in 13 of those 14 precincts.
Salvanto, a faculty fellow in political science, routinely reviews ballot records
from elections nationally. He requested the Palm Beach County computer
record shortly after the Nov. 7 election. His findings -- also based on an
incomplete record because 25 precincts had been erased -- closely matched
The Post's findings.
One-fourth of the 19,125 over-votes were ballots with three or more punches,
The Post found. These can't all be blamed on the ballot design, researchers
said.
Many voters ignored the right side of the ballot, mixing their votes among
candidates on the left side. For instance, the most common three-punch
wasn't Buchanan-Gore-McReynolds, which received 115 votes. It was
Gore-Nader-Hagelin, with 138, a combination that pointed to voters picking
among the six candidates on the left side.
And the fifth-most popular over-vote combination was a vote for Gore, Browne,
Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Socialist Workers candidate James
Harris and Natural Law candidate John Hagelin. That combination alone -- the
entire left side of the ballot except Bush -- drew 514 votes.
You could look at that pattern two ways, Salvanto said. "People voting for who
they approve of -- `I'll take any of these yahoos except for Bush.' Or, by
punching out a candidate you are literally punching out the candidate -- and
that's a Bush voter."
Ballots with three or more punches came from a disproportionately high
number of black neighborhoods, where a strong get-out-the-vote campaign
produced a historic turnout, The Post study showed. Of those 5,062
multipunches, 1,290, or 25 percent, came from precincts with a black
majority, which make up just 7 percent of all the county's polling places.
Black voters overwhelmingly supported Gore.
Questions raised by the election still resonate, raising a chicken-and-egg-like
argument over who to blame: machines or human error.
The U.S. Supreme Court used an equal protection argument to stop the
counting but did nothing about votes lost because some counties used
less-efficient voting machines, said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton.
He blamed Republicans for fighting the recounts.
"Voting is not supposed to be a puzzle. It is supposed to be an expression of
one's political will," Wexler said.
But the GOP is not to blame for the ballot confusion in Palm Beach County,
said U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach.
"We may have won the election and (Gore supporters) may be sorry we won
and may have compelling evidence of legitimate gripes, but don't direct them
at the Republican Party because we didn't design that ballot," Foley said.
The ballot's designer, LePore, a Democrat, has said she split the 10
presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print big enough for the
county's many elderly voters. It backfired, she admits, and she said she
would never make the mistake again.
Monte Friedkin, the county's Democratic Party chairman, who criticized
LePore's handling of the election, said while he understood the ballot-borne
confusion, the voter must take some of the blame as well.
"Frankly the system is bad, the machines are not user-friendly, but at the end
of the day it's as much the fault of the voter as the process. We can make all
the excuses we want, but the facts are the facts and George Bush is
president," Friedkin said.
While politicians vow Florida voters will never cast votes on punch cards
again, that isn't the only answer, said Palm Beach County Canvassing Board
Chairman Charles Burton. He pushes voter education in talks to Rotary Clubs,
suggesting county workers be assigned to polls as assistants and urging
residents to volunteer to help.
"You can spend $200 million," he said, "and you're still going to have votes
that don't count because you're still going to have mistakes." |
