Miami Herald’s Recount Results were Sloppy, Incomplete
by Eric Alterman
The results are in. The hysterical anger and political maneuvering that prevented a final tally of the votes in Florida’s presidential race was for naught. According to a recount of Miami-Dade County, led by the Miami Herald, a hand recount would have given Gore only another 49 votes there.
Even when added to the Gore vote tallies in Volusia, Palm Beach and Broward counties, Bush still comes out ahead by 140 votes. You would think this figure would finally end the 2000 election controversy. You would be wrong.
The Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder, retained a public accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, to conduct the review. Spending more than 80 hours during a three-week period, the reporters and accountants examined every “undervote” separately and recorded their findings.
Of course, each time the votes were counted they changed ever so slightly. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is never so true as in the necessarily subjective case of vote counting. Hanging chads fall off, pregnant chads give birth, writing becomes smudged, etc.
Unfortunately, the Herald recount proves only one thing: Al Gore and his campaign pursued a remarkably foolish and self-defeating post-election strategy. In picking only five counties in which to ask for a recount, the Gore campaign made two fatal mistakes. First, they gave the impression that they were hoping to cherry-pick the result by asking for recounts only in those counties where they had the most to gain. This played into Republican accusations that Gore was no more interested in a fair vote count than was Florida Secretary of State and Republican insider Katherine Harris; rather, Gore was arguably trying to lawyer himself into the presidency by hook and by crook.
Second and most damning, this strategy was not only counter-productive from a public relations standpoint; it was destined to lose. Had Gore won with a five-county undercount-only strategy, this victory would likely have been overturned by the Florida legislature, or if necessary, the U.S. House of Representatives. And as we saw in the end, the Supreme Court was also willing to place its own credibility on the line in the end if there were no other way to overturn a questionable Gore victory.
The only way for Gore to address all of these potential pitfalls would have been to undertake the strategy suggested in this space when the battle was still raging: to call for a full hand recount in Florida. A call for a complete recount would have provided a masterstroke of favorable publicity for the Gore team. What’s more, according to the evidence available so far, it would have worked.
When the Supreme Court made its final election ruling last December, one argument it gave for overturning the Florida high court’s pro-Gore decision was the Florida court’s refusal (at the Gore’s team’s request) to consider the 110,000 “overvotes,” where a machine count recorded more than one vote for president. When examined by hand, however, many of these votes turned out to be legal, as both the punch card (or check mark) matched the name of the candidate written in.
In late December, the Orlando Sentinel took a look at about 3,000 overvotes in Lake County. The paper found more than 600 valid ballots that had been ignored by the machines, with Gore picking up 130 even in this heavily pro-Bush county. In late January the Chicago Tribune reported that in 15 Florida counties with a particularly high rate of overvotes, more than 1,700 votes that showed a clear choice had been discarded. Most of the counties in the Tribune’s study were small, rural and predominantly Republican. Yet even so Gore’s net gain was 366 votes. And a Washington Post review of the computer records of 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida’s largest counties reported that overvotes trended toward Gore at a rate of three to one.
Add these together, even with the new undervote count, and Bush is back cutting brush in Crawford, Texas, while Al Gore is your new president. But because it chose to ignore these legal votes in its own recount, the Herald/Knight Ridder effort is an expensive waste of time, useless for everyone but Bush/Republican propagandists. It will be a test of the media to treat these results with the critical scrutiny they deserve. (One paper which has already failed this test is USA TODAY, which ran the Herald results under the misleading headline, “Recount Study: Gore Still Loses,” thoughtlessly accepting the Herald’s flawed counting standards.)
We will not have a genuine answer to these recount questions until the consortium of eight newspapers that has contracted for a much fuller investigation than the Herald’s finally completes its report. This might be months away. Having shot itself in their collective feet over and over during this election, it might behoove media mavens to keep their mouths shut and their powder dry until we have a better understanding of what the Florida vote-undervotes and overvotes—really tells us.
I’m not holding my breath.
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to MSNBC.
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