And Still The Winner ...
MIAMI, Feb. 26, 2001
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Gore and Bush (CBS/AP)
Quote
"There were many people who expected there was a bonanza of votes here for Al Gore, and it turns out there was not."
Herald executive editor Martin Baron
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(CBS) A review of 10,644 uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County showed Al Gore would not have gained enough votes to overtake George W. Bush in Florida when those votes were combined with results from three other counties where the vice president requested manual recounts, a newspaper reported.
Gore would have gained no more than 49 votes in Miami-Dade, The Miami Herald reported in Monday's editions. When combined with Gore's gains in Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties, he would have not have overcome the Bush lead.
If a more stringent standard had been applied, Republican George W. Bush probably would have gained votes, according to the paper.
Democrats had widely predicted that Gore would have won the 2000 presidential election if a hand recount had been allowed to proceed. They had predicted a net gain of about 600 additional votes in Miami-Dade County alone. That would have been enough to overcome Bush's 537-vote margin in the whole state of Florida.
The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a hand count of ballots that didn't register a preference when votes were counted by machine. However, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the hand count, making Bush the next president.
The four counties used punchcard ballots, which state lawmakers are considering eliminating in favor of optical scanning equipment for the 2002 election in all 67 Florida counties.
The review, sponsored by the newspaper, its parent company Knight Ridder and USA Today, studied undervotes, or ballots where machines were unable to read votes for president.
"There were many people who expected there was a bonanza of votes here for Al Gore, and it turns out there was not," Herald executive editor Martin Baron said Sunday.
The newspaper found that 1,555 Miami-Dade ballots were marked in a manner that might be interpreted as a vote for Gore. An additional 1,506 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for George W. Bush. There were 106 markings for other candidates.
No markings for president were found on 4,892 ballots, and 2,058 ballots bore markings in spaces that had been assigned to no candidate. An additional 527 ballots were deemed to have markings for more than one presidential candidate.
The Herald used broad liberal standards, including counting every dimple, pinprick and hanging chad identified in the section for presidential votes on the ballots.
Republicans said the Herald's results indicated that Bush was always the legitimate winner.
"President Bush was lawfully elected on Election Day. He won after the first statewide machine recount," said Mark Wallace, a Miami lawyer for the Republican Party. "He won after the manual recount, and he won at the conclusion of all the litigation."
Democrats said the review shows neither side could have known how the recounts would turn out.
"This underscores how unpedictable the whole recount strategy was, on both sides," said Doug Hattaway, former Gore campaign spokesman. "This shows Bush's tactics of delaying and blocking vote counts didn't really benefit him."
The Herald and Knight Ridder retained a public accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, to conduct the inspection, which took more than 80 hours spread over nearly three weeks.
A BDO Seidman accountant sat in the Miami-Dade elections office and recorded information about each undervote. The ballots were handled by elections officials. A Herald reporter also reviewed each undervote ballot and made a separate and independent assessment of its characteristics.
A research firm hired by several news organizations, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, also is reviewing 180,000 Florida ballots that did not register a vote for president during machine counts.
The Palm Beach Post previously released the results of its own review of 10,600 Miami-Dade undervotes. In that count, the Post found Bush gained six more votes than Gore.
The Palm Beach Post, which used a more restrictive standard than the Herald, concluded that Bush would have gained 251 votes and Gore would have gained 245 votes. No overvotes, or ballots where machines detected more than one presidential vote, were counted.
The certified results in Miami-Dade were 328,808 votes for Gore and 289,533 for Bush, according to the Florida secretary of state's office. Statewide, Bush won Florida by 537 votes out of about 6 million cast.
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