Bush could still hang on, Herald analysis suggests
Gore may not reap enough votes across the state to overcome Bush's 154-vote lead.
ANDRES VIGLUCCI, PETER WHORISKEY AND GEOFF DOUGHERTY
viglucci@herald.com
The court-ordered hand recount in Florida's presidential election won't produce a windfall for either candidate, but there are several scenarios under which Republican George W. Bush could eke out a victory, a Herald analysis suggests.
While Vice President Al Gore fought hard for recounts in three Democratic South Florida counties, the precinct-by-precinct analysis suggests he may not reap enough votes across the rest of the state to overcome Bush's current 154-vote lead.
By a conservative calculation, Bush would actually net 40 votes from the recount of about 60,000 undervotes, boosting his lead to 194.
Under a more-aggressive projection -- one in which dimpled ballots count as votes -- Bush could win the state by 278 votes.
The recount could be fraught with ironies on both sides: Gore, who fought for recounts and once proferred a statewide recount as a concession to Bush, may have won a Pyrrhic victory.
Bush, who opposed recounts and derided the inclusion of dimpled chads in vote totals, may see his presidency win legitimacy and public acceptance through a process that he fiercely opposed.
But the analysis rests on certain assumptions, and slight differences in voting trends could turn the outcome in Gore's direction. To win, however, Gore would have to garner 4 percent more of the undervotes than he gained in the previous tally, the analysis suggests.
Two assumptions are critical to the analysis: First, how many new votes will canvassing boards find in the so-called undervote ballots under review -- those for which the reading machines record no votes?
Second, how will those new votes break down by candidate?
The Herald analysis assumes that the canvassing boards will turn up about the same percentage of new votes from examining undervotes as did their counterparts in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade during recounts already held there. Those figures range from 8 to 25 percent, depending on the strictness of standards used to evaluate the ballots.
The analysis also assumes that those new votes will break down in the same way that already-counted votes in those precincts did. If a precinct voted 2-1 for Gore, for instance, it is assumed the new votes from that precinct will go to Gore in the same proportion. If, however, Democrats tended to undervote more often than Republicans or vise versa, then the advantage would shift.
To be sure, recount standards will vary widely from county to county. The Florida Supreme Court, which ordered them to count the undervotes, did not provide any specific guidelines.
If the canvassers use the relatively strict Palm Beach standard -- where dimpled ballots are counted only if races on the rest of the card also display dimpled chads -- the state vote would be too close to call. The analysis yields 40 new votes for Bush.
Bush stands to gain even more if canvassers use Broward's liberal ``a dimple is a vote'' standard, which Republicans ridiculed.
Under that scenario, Bush's lead would be pushed to 278 votes.
A key reason Bush may benefit: two of the biggest Democratic counties in the state -- Broward and Palm Beach -- have already been recounted in full and will not repeat the exercise. So has Volusia County, which went for Gore.
Bush won a majority of the votes in the rest of the state, so newly discovered votes may favor him, too. The more liberally the ballots are considered, moreover, the more votes Bush will net.
Last week, the Herald published a broader analysis suggesting that, if all ballots in Florida had been properly filled out and counted, Gore probably would have carried the state. That study, however, also included thousands of so-called overvotes, or double-punched ballots, which don't factor into the court-ordered recount. Many of the overcount votes came from heavily black and Democratic precincts.
Last week's study suggested Gore would win if only undervotes were counted. However, that hypothetical analysis was based on a different model, including figures from all 67 counties. In the one, four counties -- Miami-Dade, Duval and the Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach -- are not being recounted.
For this analysis, The Herald examined voting trends in 4,600 precincts in the 63 counties that reported spoiled votes and that will probably be included in the recount. Thirty-seven of those counties don't report undervotes separately from overvotes, so in those counties The Herald estimated based on the undervote pattern in the rest of the state.
Since the Nov. 7 election, spoiled ballots have been the subject of lawsuits and controversy.
Democrats contend that many of the undervotes came from voters who failed to fully penetrate punch cards because of frailty or faulty voting equipment.
Republicans argue that those ballots are intentional abstentions by voters who could not settle on a presidential choice but wanted to vote in other races. |
