News
Sunday, January 14
Miami-Dade ballot recount
By Clay Lambert and Bill Douthat, Palm Beach Post Staff
Writers
Sunday, January 14, 2001
MIAMI -- George W. Bush would have gained six votes more
than Al Gore if all the dimples and hanging chads on
10,600 previously uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County
had been included in the totals, according to a review by
The Palm Beach Post.
That result would have been a hard blow to Al Gore's hopes
of claiming the presidency in a recount. Before the vice
president conceded last month, the Gore camp had
expected to pick up as many as 600 votes from a
Miami-Dade recount -- barely enough to overtake Bush's
razor-thin Florida lead. Instead, The Post's review indicates
Gore would have lost ground.
If everything were counted -- from the faintest dimple to
chads barely hanging on ballots -- 251 additional votes
would have gone to Bush and 245 more would have gone
to Gore, The Post review showed.
The review, concluded last week, also showed that the vast
majority of ballots rejected as under-votes (meaning there
was no clear punch for any candidate) when counted by
machine appeared, in fact, to cast no vote for president.
About 7,600 under-votes had no mark at all on the
presidential column, or in rare cases included multiple
votes that defied judgment. Most of the voters who did not
indicate a vote for president did punch choices in other
races.
But at least 2,257 voters apparently poked at their ballot cards without properly inserting them
into the voting machines. Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy said that's
because the voters failed to follow directions.
Of these miscast votes, 302 more would have gone for Gore than Bush, under Leahy's theory.
Even if those votes had been cast correctly, however, it would not have changed the outcome
of a presidential election that turned on 537 votes for Bush in Florida.
"In other words, Dade was a wash," said Ivy Korman, director of special projects for the
Miami-Dade County supervisor of elections. "And, knowing our county the way that we do, that
is why we didn't feel the need to do a manual recount."
Gore easily carried the county by more than 39,000 votes on Nov. 7. The certified results in
Miami-Dade were 328,808 for Gore and 289,533 for Bush, according to the Florida secretary of
state's office.
Counts' results will vary
The Miami-Dade canvassing board abandoned its manual recount Nov. 22 after counting 140
of the county's 616 precincts. And four teams of judges in Leon County were about halfway
through Miami-Dade's disputed ballots Dec. 9 when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped all
recounts in Florida. No results were released from the judges' partial recount.
The Post's review of all the under-votes is the first of several planned or under way. Later this
month, a consortium that includes The Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times
plans to begin looking at the under-votes in each of Florida's 67 counties. The Miami Herald
and USA Today are doing a similar review. The Herald/USA Today review, using accountants,
is expected to be finished in Miami-Dade this week.
Because of varying judgments by reviewers on how each ballot is marked and the inevitable
human error that occurs when thousands of ballots are examined by hand, results of the reviews
by newspapers are almost certain to differ.
Furthermore, experts say no count -- whether done by hand or by machine -- will ever be exact.
Computer industry consultants estimate the error rate for counting punch cards could run as
high as 1 percent and varies with the number of times the cards are handled.
(For example, results changed in 313 of Palm Beach County's 531 precincts when the ballots
were counted by hand.)
In the 37-day contest of Florida election results, Gore had hoped to find a mother lode of votes
in heavily Democratic South Florida to overtake Bush. A manual recount in Broward County
added 567 votes for Gore. Although it did not meet the deadline, the manual recount in Palm
Beach County would have added 174 votes.
The Bush campaign contended the recounts were unnecessary because Bush won on Nov. 7
and in the mandated machine recount conducted Nov. 8.
Pattern in mis-punches?
In the Miami-Dade under-vote, the largest group of marked ballots was the 2,257 cleanly but
inaccurately punched cards. During the media review, Leahy, the elections supervisor,
demonstrated how many voters might have punched odd-numbered chads, which didn't
correspond to any of the 10 candidates for president named on the ballot.
Miami-Dade elections officials assigned only even numbers to the presidential candidates --
No. 4 for Bush, No. 6 for Gore, No. 8 for Libertarian Harry Browne and so on.
Leahy showed that when punch cards were laid over the ballot booklets instead of inserted into
the machine the arrow corresponding to Bush appeared to point to the No. 5 chad rather than
the proper No. 4 chad. Likewise, the arrow for Gore appeared next to the No. 7 rather than the
correct No. 6.
The Post found 1,023 cleanly punched holes at No. 7; Leahy speculates these may have been
attempts to vote for Gore. There were 721 clean punches at No. 5; these could have been
attempts to vote for Bush. The Post also found 129 more odd-numbered marks that were not
clean punches, such as dimpled or partly detached chads.
Miami-Dade elections officials have been aware since November that a small percentage of
voters wrongly punched odd-numbered chads. The Post's tally of 2,257 clean punches in the
presidential column is about one-third of 1 percent of the 653,963 ballots cast in the county.
Korman said the instructions were clear and appeared in both English and Spanish on ballot
cards and machines.
"You can lead some people to water, but you can't make them drink," she said.
Larry Klayman is chairman of Judicial Watch Inc., a governmental watchdog group conducting
its own review of under-votes in eight Florida counties.
"These are interesting findings and point to the need for a new system," Klayman said. "The
system we have is broken."
Klayman said his organization would intervene on behalf of a lawsuit filed Thursday by the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties
Union, claiming that irregularities in Florida's vote amount to a denial of the equal protection
guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Question of equal protection?
Judicial Watch supports the claim that the NAACP and ACLU make regarding equal protection,
but it does not support their claim that there is also evidence of racial discrimination in the
outcome of the presidential election.
The Post review, however, found that the rate of voting mishaps was greater in black-majority
precincts than elsewhere. While 1.6 percent of all votes cast countywide for president were not
counted because they were considered under-votes, that rate was 2.7 percent in the 112
precincts with a black majority.
In the 24 precincts where a majority of voters were 65 or older, 2.1 percent of the voters cast
under-votes, while 1.4 percent of the voters in the 217 Hispanic-majority precincts delivered
under-votes.
For example, in Precinct 513 in northwest Miami-Dade, where blacks make up 96.3 percent of
the registered voters, 7 percent (28 voters) miscast ballots.
Thomasina Williams, an attorney representing the NAACP and other civil rights groups suing
the state and seven counties over the election, said black precincts in Miami-Dade could have
had more problems because they may have been using older, less reliable voting machines
and were assigned poll workers with less training.
"Predominantly black areas fall prey to that because they don't get the same service," said
Williams, who filed suit in federal court in Miami Wednesday asking that the punch-card system
be eliminated.
Miami-Dade elections officials were not available Friday to comment on Williams' claims.
The Post also found some voters used pens or pencils to shade or circle their choice for
president. The outcome in such cases was a tie: 23 votes each for Bush and Gore.
Also among the ballots were 24 cleanly punched votes for Bush and 35 for Gore that had not
been counted by the machines. One theory: The chads had been dislodged sometime after the
initial machine count and during the seven occasions Leahy estimates in which the ballots
were handled since the election.
Media review called waste
Republicans are conducting their own review of disputed ballots in Florida. Mark Wallace, a
Miami attorney representing the state's Republican Party, said the media's review is a waste of
time.
"It doesn't matter what the outcome is," he said. "The fact that we gained votes is fine and
dandy, but the things you (The Post) counted didn't correspond with the law."
Calls to the Democratic Party were referred to the Democratic National Committee, which did
not immediately return calls.
Staff writer Brian Crecente, database editor Christine Stapleton and clerk Janis Fontaine
contributed to this story.
bill_douthat@pbpost.com
clay_lambert@pbpost.com |
