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Politics : Why is Gore Trying to Steal the Presidency? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ellen who wrote (3241)	12/3/2000 3:21:48 AM
From: Tom D	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 3887

Gore Won. Miami Herald. In a race so tight, it may never be known for certain. But an analysis commissioned by The Herald of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537. It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword "the will of the people.'' But it is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes. Reaction to the analysis from the two camps locked in an exhausting and tense legal battle was radically different. The Gore campaign called it "compelling evidence,'' and the Bush campaign dismissed it as "statistical voodoo.'' One fundamental flaw, Republicans argued, was an assumption that every voter actually intended to cast a vote in the presidential race. A large majority of ballots in the disputed counties of Palm Beach and Duval didn't even have a dimple on them, said Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew. "If you want to divine voters' intent when there isn't even a mark on the ballot, you'd do better to hire a palm reader than a statistical analyst,'' he said. But Stephen Doig, a professor at Arizona State University who crunched the numbers for The Herald, defended the analysis. For example, he said, even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that 90 percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip the race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore -- about 1,400 votes. miamiherald.com Also see miamiherald.com Tom D