Confusing ballot cost Gore 6,607 votes in Florida county, paper reports
Looks like this shows Bush is an illegitimate and US Supreme-Court-Appointed By-1-Vote President.. not to mention of course losing the popular vote
The US always goes around the world complaining about banana-republic rigged elections.. they better look at home.
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A ballot design that confused voters into
chosing two candidates cost Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore
6,607 votes in Palm Beach County, the Palm Beach Post newspaper reported in
Sunday editions.
The newspaper counted more than 19,000 overvotes, or ballots on which more
than one vote was recorded for a presidential candidate. It concluded the net gain
of votes for Gore would have been 10-times more than he needed to erase
Republican George W. Bush's slim margin of 537 votes in the state.
Many voters complained the butterfly ballot was confusing because candidates'
names appeared on both sides of the punchcard with holes in the middle. They
expected the holes to select Bush and Gore to be the first two choices as
required by Florida statutes but instead found Reform party candidate Pat
Buchanan, on a facing page, located between them.
The newspaper's review indicated 5,330 ballots were thrown out because voters
punched chads for Gore and Buchanan, whose name appeared just above
Gore's.
Another 2,908 voters punched Gore's name and Socialist David McReynolds, the
candidate whose name appeared just below Gore's.
Bush lost 1,631 votes because people selected both Bush and Buchanan.
Buchanan's name appeared just below Bush on the ballot.
The two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, add up to 6,607
lost votes for Gore.
"What it shows is what we've been saying all along there is no question that the
majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore,"
said Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida.
Former Montana governor Marc Racicot, a vocal Bush supporter, dismissed the
findings.
"You're trying too hard to find a correlation here," Racicot said.
"You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended."
The Post reported even if one per cent of the 6,607 votes were intended for
Buchanan or McReynolds - more than their combined percentage of Palm Beach
County's total vote - Gore would still have received 6,541 votes.
Three-fourths of the overvotes had punches for two candidates, most of which
experts said can be attributed to the ballot design. The rest were for three or
more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem.
There were 5,062 voters who punched three or more choices for president.
Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates.
The newspaper's review of overvotes was conducted between Jan. 17 and Jan.
29.
In a story published Saturday, the Post reported Gore would have gained 784
votes in Palm Beach County if every ballot that had a hanging chad, pinhole or
dimple was counted.
Had The Post's standard been used and its tally applied without any changes in
counting procedures in Florida's 66 other counties, the tally also would have
erased Bush's victory margin in the state.
In Palm Beach County's official 10-day manual recount, Gore gained 174 votes.
Those were not counted in the statewide tally because the county canvassing
board missed the deadline by two hours.
The newspaper looked at the 9,150 ballots county officials said had no vote for
president - commonly called "undervotes" - and found 5,736 had a mark for either
Bush or Gore. There were 462,350 ballots cast in the county, which Gore carried
by an almost two-to-one margin.
During its manual recount, the Palm Beach canvassing board members - who
were all Democrats - struggled over which ballots should be counted, so board
chairman Charles Burton went to court in hopes of having a firm standard set.
But Judge Jorge Labarga ruled the board should judge every ballot on its own
merit and count those where the voter's intent could be determined. The board
counted very few dimpled ballots.
The newspaper's examination of ballots the board rejected broke them into three
categories.
The paper found Bush would have had a net gain of 14 votes if the canvassing
board had counted the 62 undervotes that had a hanging chad. That's where a
candidate's square is partially detached or is hanging from the ballot.
But, the newspaper found, Gore would have had a net gain of 25 votes if the
canvassing board had also counted the 313 ballots where light could be seen
through the perforations or through a pinhole in the square. None of the corners of
these chads was detached.
Finally, the paper found Gore would have had a net gain of 784 votes if the board
had also counted the 5,361 ballots that had a dimpled chad, which means the
chad had an indentation but no light could be seen through a pinhole or its
edges.
Burton pointed out a problem with the Post's method. If the canvassing board had
counted dimpled chads as votes, it would have had to reject the ballots where
voters made a clear punch for one candidate and made a dimple for another
because that would have reflected an overvote. It is unknown how many ballots
would have been disqualified if that had been done.
The Post is not the only newspaper reviewing Florida ballots. Two groups are
conducting examinations in all 67 counties.
The first group, which consists of the Miami Herald, its parent company Knight
Ridder, and USA Today, completed its examination in 65 of 67 counties as of
Wednesday.
The other group consists of The Associated Press, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, CNN, the Palm Beach Post, St. Petersburg Times, the Wall
Street Journal and Tribune Publishing, which owns the Orlando Sentinel and the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel. As of Tuesday, it still had 20 counties remaining.
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