Florida recount study: Bush still wins
Note from KLP: With the events of Sept 11th, honestly this count and recount ad nauseaum just doesn't matter...And on top of all of their counting....I don't see ANY notes about the military vote that not only wasn't even counted, but in some cases, the ballots were not even sent....
It's truly a good thing that the right man was elected President! President George W. Bush.
Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory
cnn.com
A county employee shows a ballot to a National Opinion Research Center
coding team. The coders marked their observations on specially designed,
triplicate coding forms. They were not allowed to confer.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election
in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide
vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still
have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago
conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media
companies, including CNN.
NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every
rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and
punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99
percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as
2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties
of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the
same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of
error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.
As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have
been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the
possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning
machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have
gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast
a valid vote.
In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to
rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by
537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to
one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.
Florida Supreme Court recount ruling
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme
Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not
yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida
election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out
of more than 6 million cast.
Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened
if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had
ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to
that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local
election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush
would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.
Gore's four-county strategy
Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily
Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study
indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still
would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.
The news media consortium then tested a number of other hypothetical
scenarios.
Use of Palm Beach County standard
Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for
determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined
that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a
chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar
marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted
statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore.
Inclusion of overvotes
In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential
election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened,
for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in
that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if
a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore
would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes.
A county worker displays an optical scan ballot through a viewing window.
The butterfly and caterpillar ballots
One of the most controversial aspects of the Florida election was the
so-called butterfly ballot used in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County.
Many voters came out of the polls saying they were confused by the ballot
design.
According to the study, 5,277 voters made a clean punch for Gore and a clean
punch for Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, candidates whose political
philosophies are poles apart. An additional 1,650 voters made clean punches
for Bush and Buchanan. If many of the Buchanan votes were in error brought
on by a badly designed ballot, a CNN analysis found that Gore could have
netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.
Eighteen other counties used another confusing ballot design known as the
"caterpillar" or "broken" ballot, where six or seven presidential candidates
are listed in one column and the names of the remaining minor party
candidates appeared at the top of a second one. According to the study, more
than 15,000 people who voted for either Gore or Bush also selected one
candidate in the second column, apparently thinking the second column
represented a new race.
Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column,
Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.
However, the double votes on both butterfly and caterpillar ballots were
clearly invalid under any interpretation of the law.
Limits of the study
The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago study was
commissioned by eight media companies -- The Associated Press, The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the St. Petersburg Times, Cox
Newspapers, The Washington Post and the Tribune Co., which includes the Los
Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun, as
well as other papers.
A county worker displays a punch-card ballot to a NORC coder.
NORC used experienced staff researchers to supervise and train a larger pool
of investigators, who then fanned out across Florida and personally examined
175,010 ballots provided by local election officials. The investigators
recorded exactly what they saw on each ballot but made no attempt to
determine whether the vote should have been counted.
From there, the media consortium took over, analyzing the raw data produced
by NORC and drawing conclusions for various hypothetical scenarios.
As with any large-scale study, the NORC data is subject to some important
limitations.
NORC reported serious problems with record keeping at many local election
offices. NORC relied on these offices to produce the rejected ballots, but
county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to
NORC investigators.
Although trained to produce accurate, impartial reports, the NORC
investigators are human and prone to human judgment and error. In
particular, NORC discovered that male investigators were more likely to
record marks on ballots than women. NORC also found a slight but
statistically significant relationship between candidate marks and the
investigators' party affiliation.
Most importantly, there is no guarantee that the judgments of the NORC
investigators would have matched those of local election boards had the
recount been permitted to proceed under any scenario. |
