Bush wins! Gore wins!
It depends, study finds
The Los Angeles Times
unionleader.com
WASHINGTON — If the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed Florida’s courts to finish their abortive recount of last year’s deadlocked Presidential election, President Bush probably still would have won by several hundred votes, a comprehensive study of the uncounted ballots has found.
But if the recount had been held under new vote-counting rules that Florida and other states now are adopting — rules aimed at recording the intentions of as many voters as possible — Democratic candidate Al Gore probably would have won, although by an even thinner margin, the study found.
The study provides evidence that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore than for Bush — but so many Gore voters marked their ballots improperly that Bush received more valid votes. As a result, under rules devised by the Florida Supreme Court and accepted by the Gore campaign at the time, Bush probably would have won a recount, the study found.
The study, a painstaking inspection of 175,010 Florida ballots not included in the state’s certified tally, found as many as 23,799 additional, potentially valid votes for Gore or Bush.
The significance of these ballots depends on whose standards are used to determine their validity. Under some recount rules, Bush wins. Under others, Gore wins. But in almost every case, the outcome still is a virtual dead heat, with the two candidates separated by no more than a few hundred votes out of nearly 6 million cast in the state.
Manchester, N.H., City Clerk Leo Bernier said the laws in place at the time of an election should mandate the outcome of that election.
“We shouldn’t be looking back, we should go with what the law was during that election,” he said.
However, Bernier said election laws should always be changing to reflect changing times and technology. He said he is in favor of having a full review of every election to look at the day’s activities and determine if and where improvements to the process can be made.
“It’s a process that always needs to be worked on . . . After every election there should be a commission that reviews the activities and looks for improvements,” he said. “Where can we improve, what can we have done better?”
Bernier said these reviews need to be done even after successful elections because the business of elections has become full-time and very complex.
“Nobody ever challenges the election process until something happens,” he said. “With changing times, we need to change the law . . . We’ve always got to be on top of it.”
Early this year, eight major news organizations commissioned a definitive examination of the uncounted ballots in an effort to answer some of the key outstanding questions after the 2000 Presidential election.
The review found that:
Bush probably would have won any recount of “undervotes,” ballots that were rejected because they registered no clear vote for any presidential candidate. By contrast, Gore would have won most recount scenarios that included “overvotes,” ballots that showed votes for more than one candidate. However, Gore’s lawyers never pressed for overvotes to be recounted.
Ballot design was a key factor. Although the Florida fiasco initially focused on the “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County, the voters’ error rate was even higher in some counties that used more modern optical scanning systems but had equally confusing ballots.
Hand recounts can be reliable, but only if the rules are clear. The researchers who examined the ballots agreed on the marks they saw more than 97 percent of the time. The scarce disagreements came mostly when they were asked to judge whether a voter who failed to punch a clear hole in a ballot had left a “dimple.”
Some Florida counties handled their ballots so carelessly after election night that county officials could not say with any certainty which ballots had been counted and which had not.
Democrats long have contended that a plurality of Florida voters intended to cast their ballots for Gore but that thousands spoiled their votes because of confusing instructions, badly designed ballots or other obstacles. The study adds evidence to bolster that case.
In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, in the northeast corner of the state, a remarkable 21,855 ballots were invalidated because voters chose more than one Presidential candidate. The county’s official sample ballot erroneously instructed voters to “vote all pages.” With 10 Presidential candidates spread across two pages, following that instruction produced an overvote.
Of those voters who made the mistake of voting once on each page, the study found that 7,794 voted for Gore (plus another candidate), while 4,705 voted for Bush (plus another). That’s a potential net for Gore of 3,089 votes, enough to carry the entire state.
Voters in Palm Beach County, where the butterfly ballots listed Presidential candidates on facing pages, cast 19,218 overvotes. More appear to come from Gore voters than from Bush voters.
The study found that 11,140 voters in the heavily Democratic county punched a hole for Gore and one other candidate; only 2,298 punched a hole for Bush and another candidate. |
