To: jlallen who wrote (9250 ) 1/6/2001 2:34:23 AM From: mst2000 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Actually, statistically, we have a pretty good idea. Undervotes and overvotes fall into 2 categories -- people who do not intend to vote at all (by not voting, or punching more than once on purpose), and those that intend to vote but don't succeed due to voter error or machinery difficulties. The former are neutral by definition and can be culled out - probably eliminating 50% or more of them (For example, of the 15,000 or so undervotes in Palm, at least 7,500 or more were clearly not intended to be marked in any way - no dimples, no perforations, nothing). The rest, because they primarily involve difficulties in recording the vote that don't discriminate demographically within a single voting district, but are random in the context of mechanical equipment that has problems. As a result, the breakdown will, statistically, tend to follow the vote percentages in the district as a whole (or more accurately, on a precinct by precinct basis). If you assume that the undervotes and overvotes are evenly spread throught the country, then chances are Gore will have over slightly more than 1/2 of the undervotes and overvotes that were intended to be voted, just as he had slightly over 1/2 of the votes that were actually recorded nationally. The problem is the assumption is wrong -- the undervotes are not spread evenly throughout the country - they are concentrated in more populous areas where they use punch ballots and older voting technology that has greater failure rates. In those areas, Gore did much better than Bush. So if anything, it is highly likely that Gore would get well over 1/2 of the 2-3 Million undervotes and overvotes as you put it, plus or minus 1 or 2 percent given the large size of the sample. Of 2.5 Million votes, Bush would have had to have gotten over 60% of the votes to have overcome Gore's national lead.
