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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (9529)	1/26/2001 12:05:00 AM
From: George Coyne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

"In the first two precincts in which I participated, Gore would have picked up 175 votes." Assuming what? ..that every double punch with a Gore punch was really a Gore vote? Gimme a break!

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (9529)	1/29/2001 1:13:39 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 10042

Additional discarded voted in Florida election-Mephisto By Jeff Zeleny Tribune Staff Writer January 28, 2001 ORLANDO -- More than 1,700 votes that showed a clear choice in Florida's bitterly contested presidential election were discarded in the 15 counties that had the highest rate of rejected ballots, a Tribune Co. investigation shows. An examination of discarded ballots from those counties found that in 5,000 other cases, apparent presidential votes were lost because a variety of mistakes made it impossible to be certain of the voter's intent. Contrary to popular perception, the highest rates of discarded ballots in Florida's contentious race for the presidency came from 15 counties that used paper ballots filled in with pencils, not the counties that used the punch card ballots that were at the heart of the state's recount controversy, the investigation by three Tribune Co. newspapers shows. The findings underscore that the problems with the election went beyond the controversial punch cards and involved confusing ballot designs, inconsistent counting methods and election officials who never examined paper ballots rejected by tabulating machines on Election Day. The 15,596 discarded paper ballots in the 15 counties, reviewed in a joint project by the Chicago Tribune, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, were identified by election officials as so-called overvotes or undervotes, rejected by counting machines because they contained multiple votes for president or no vote at all. Most of the counties in the Tribune Co. study are small, rural and predominantly Republican, representing just 4.6 percent of the 6.1 million Florida ballots cast in the Nov. 7 election. But because of flaws associated with the type of voting equipment used in those counties, they accounted for 8.6 percent of the state's rejected ballots and taken together registered the highest rates of lost ballots anywhere in Florida. While all but one of the 15 counties examined were won by George W. Bush, the study found that most of the disqualified votes were intended for former Vice President Al Gore. In fact, had canvassing boards tallied those ballots during Florida's prolonged election battle, Gore may have seen a net gain of 366 votes in these selected counties. Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. But the significance of the potential votes in the ballots reviewed so far cannot be determined without examining all 180,000 ballots rejected in the state's 67 counties. A consortium of newspapers, including five from Tribune Co., is preparing to review all of the rejected ballots. That effort could take months. chicagotribune.com