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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (121963)	1/14/2001 6:30:33 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

I don't understand how you'd think a president-select/election thief-type would make for a better president. The majority mandate of voters came down on the side of the principles Democrats espouse, rather than what's on the GOPwinger plate. Statistical Analysis Would Cheer Gore By Dan Keating Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 5, 2000; Page A24 As his chances of claiming the presidency become slimmer, can Vice President Gore go down believing that in a world of perfect voters, he would have won? Yes, according to a study done of uncounted ballots in every precinct in Florida by an Arizona State University professor on behalf of the Miami Herald. The study by journalism professor Stephen Doig, a former Pulitzer Prize winner at the Herald, looked at more than 185,000 ballots that did not register a presidential choice, either because no vote was detected on the ballot or because the voter selected two presidential candidates, which voids any vote in that race. He assumed that those uncounted ballots would have fallen to Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the same pattern as the ballots that were counted in the same precinct. Doig found, as other studies have noted, that a preponderance of the uncounted ballots were in Gore strongholds. So, if they had counted as votes, Gore would have won Florida. If every single one of the ballots were a vote, Gore would have won by around 23,000 votes--a victory of less than one-half of one percent. But since Bush's 537-vote majority is so slim and the miscast ballots were so skewed to Democratic precincts, not all the ballots would have to count to make Gore the winner, Doig said. He said yesterday that critics of his study have attacked the extreme possibility that every single voter intended to express a choice for president. But even at the other extreme--that less than 10 percent of the miscast ballots were intended to be votes--Gore would still have won, he said. Doig found the uncounted ballots were more likely in counties that use punch-card machines, and especially in the two punch-card counties that had the most famously confusing ballots: Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot and Duval County's list of presidential candidates spread over two successive pages. "All I've really done with my study is underscore how flawed and fragile the voting systems in a lot of Florida counties were," he said. "They had always been that way, we just never knew it until we had an election that was this important and this close." Critics of the study for the Herald said that some voters intentionally leave their ballots blank and other intentionally vote for more than one candidate as a form of protest. They also complained that the behavior of other voters is insufficient to guess the intentions of a blank ballot, and that pretend scenarios about invalid ballots are meaningless. Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew was quoted by the Miami Herald calling the study "statistical voodo," "hocus pocus" and "an utterly unfounded statistical process." One aspect of Doig's analysis may buoy Voters News Service, the news organization cooperative whose Election Day exit polling indicated that Gore won the state. "What my data shows is actually what VNS found," Doig said. "Exit polling was based on people coming out of the precinct saying, 'I voted for so-and-so.' Those people didn't know their vote really didn't count." © 2000 The Washington Post Company