I never lie.............WIRE: 07/14/2001 11:05 pm ET
Florida Counted Flawed Absentee Ballots-Newspaper
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Florida election officials, under intense pressure from Republicans after the U.S. presidential election, accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws, the New York Times reported in its Sunday editions.
The newspaper, which conducted a six-month probe into the closest presidential election in U.S. history, said its study found no evidence of vote fraud by either the Republican or the Democratic parties.
The study, which appeared on the newspaper's web site prior to publication, found that 680 of the 2,490 overseas ballots were questionable votes. Eventually, George W. Bush beat Al Gore by a 537-vote margin in Florida in last November's U.S. presidential election and as a result won the White House.
A Harvard expert on voting patterns and statistical models, who was asked by the paper to comment on the outcome of the election had the flawed ballots not been counted, said there was no way to declare a winner with a mathematical certainty.
Gary King, the expert, estimated that Bush's margin would have been reduced to 245 votes, the newspaper reported. Discarding the questionable ballots would have given Gore only a slight chance of winning, King said.
The flawed votes included ballots without postmarks or postmarked after the election and others that lacked witness signatures or were mailed from towns and cities within the United States. There were even ballots from voters who voted twice.
The investigation involved collecting copies of nearly all the overseas ballot envelopes that arrived after Nov. 7. The information was stored in a database for statistical analysis. Thousands of pages of election documents and canvassing board meeting transcripts were examined. More than 300 voters in 43 countries were interviewed, the report said.
SIMILAR DEFECTS TREATED DIFFERENTLY
The study found noticeable differences in how Florida counties treated ballots with similar defects. For example, counties carried by Gore counted two in 10 ballots not mailed on or before Nov. 7, while counties carried by Bush accepted six in 10 similar ballots.
"Bush counties were four times as likely as Gore counties to count ballots lacking witness signatures and addresses," the Times reported.
Of the 680 flawed ballots, 344 were found to lack evidence they were cast on or before Election Day and instead had late, illegible or missing postmarks, while 183 ballots carried U.S. postmarks.
There were 96 ballots that lacked the required signature or address of a witness, while 169 ballots were cast by unregistered voters, were unsigned or had not been requested, as required by federal law. Five ballots were received after the Nov. 17 Florida state deadline and 19 voters cast two ballots, both of which were counted.
The number of flaws exceeded the number of defective ballots because many of the 680 flawed ballots had multiple defects, the newspaper reported.
Under Florida law, overseas ballots must bear clear evidence they were cast on or before Election Day and mailed from outside the United States, the Times reported. Ballots must have foreign postmarks and each must have either "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day.
GOP FOCUS ON COUNTIES WITH MILITARY VOTERS
The Times study shows the Republicans' main goal was to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Gore.
The Democrats were preoccupied mostly with manual recounts in several heavily Democratic counties.
Benjamin Ginsberg, the Bush campaign's national counsel, recalled those days as being "as hardball a game as any of us had ever been involved in."
Judge Anne Kaylor, chairwoman of the Polk county canvassing board, told the Times the combination of GOP pressure and court rulings caused it to count some ballots that would probably have been considered illegal in past years.
"I think the rules were bent," Kaylor, a Democrat, was cited as saying. "Technically, they were not supposed to be accepted. Any canvassing board that says they weren't under pressure Is being less than candid."
Ginsburg added: "We didn't ask anybody to do anything that wasn't in the law as it existed on Election Day."
Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, told the Times: This election was decided by the voters of Florida a long time ago. And the nation, the president and all but the most partisan Americans have moved on."
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