for
GORE VOTES
...www.bushwatch.com
for
GORE VOTES
...www.bushwatch.com
"The US Commission on Civil Rights issued a preliminary report Friday that provided damning evidence of the systematic and intentional disenfranchisement of voters by Florida officials during the 2000 presidential election. The commission presented facts that lead inexorably to the conclusion that the state administration, headed by President Bush's brother, Governor Jeb Bush, made decisions on and before election day all but assuring that a high percentage of likely Democratic voters would either be blocked from voting, or prevented from having their votes counted. Summing up the evidence collected to date by the commission, Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said, “Voter disenfranchisement appears to be at the heart of the issue. It is not a question of a recount or even an accurate count, but more pointedly the issue is those whose exclusion from the right to vote amounted to a ‘No Count.'” The vote in Florida was pivotal to the outcome of the presidential election. Although Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote nationally by a margin of nearly 600,000, Florida's 25 electoral votes determined the winner of the Electoral College vote, and therefore the presidency. Throughout the five-week period following Election Day, when the result of the presidential election hung in the balance, the Bush camp committed all of its resources to preventing an accurate count of votes in Florida in order to maintain its official margin of a few hundred votes. In the end, the US Supreme Court intervened to override a state high court ruling and stop a manual recount of votes, thereby handing the election to Bush.
"The US Commission on Civil Rights held two hearings, one in January in the state capital of Tallahassee, the other in February in Miami, where over 100 witnesses testified under oath. Among the witnesses were Governor Jeb Bush, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Director of the Florida Division of Elections Clayton Roberts and other state and county officials. Also testifying was a representative of Database Technologies, the firm contracted by the state to carry out an election-roll purge of alleged felons, as well as several voters who were either barred from voting or who had great difficulty doing so. The commission found that prior to election day key state officials anticipated, on the basis of voter registration figures, that there would be an increase in voter turnout, but failed to ensure that precincts in all communities received adequate resources to cope with the greater influx of voters. These officials knew that thousands of first-time voters, especially in working class and minority neighborhoods, would be going to the polls. The clear implication of Berry's statement is that state officials acted in such a way as to make it more, rather than less difficult for these voters—largely Democratic—to exercise the franchise. (Berry avoids naming the “key officials” to whom she alludes, but it is only logical to assume they include Republican operatives such as Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush himself). "The commission notes that many African-Americans were unable to cast their ballots because they were assigned to polling sites that had insufficient manpower or other resources to confirm the eligibility status of all those seeking to vote. Berry also cited old and defective election equipment found in poorer precincts, and said the unequal allocation of resources, including voting technology and procedures, resulted in a diminished opportunity for certain groups to have their votes counted. Too few poll workers were adequately trained and too few funds were committed to voter education activities, she said.
"Berry came close to alleging criminal violations of federal voting rights laws, saying “evidence may ultimately support findings” that Florida officials violated these laws by knowingly using an inaccurate database to purge alleged felons from the state's roll of registered voters. Berry's report stated: “Non-felons were removed from voter registration rolls based upon unreliable information collected in connection with sweeping, state-sponsored felony purge policies.” (Florida is one of a number of states in the US that bar people convicted of felonies from ever voting, even after they have served their prison terms or paid their fines.) The testimony of Database Technologies executive George Bruder was particularly incriminating. In his February 16 appearance before the commission, Bruder testified that the state Division of Elections set the criteria for people to be included on the list of supposed felons. He said Florida election officials were warned their criteria for a database would lead to many inaccuracies, but the officials “wanted false positives on search parameters to cast as broad a net as possible.”
"Other findings cited by the Commission include:
* At least one police checkpoint was set up on election day near a polling station in a minority neighborhood, prompting voters to complain of police intimidation;
* College students and others submitted voter registration applications on a timely basis, but in many instances these applications were not processed in time for the applicants to receive voter registration cards;
* Many Jewish and elderly voters received defective and complicated ballots that may have produced “overvotes” and “undervotes;”
* Some polling places were closed early and some polling places were moved without notice;
* Many Haitian-American and Puerto Rican voters were not provided language assistance when required and requested;
* Persons with disabilities faced accessibility difficulties at certain polling sites;
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it is not necessary to prove deliberate or intentional discrimination against citizens, only that certain practices resulted in the disenfranchisement of those whom the statute is designed to protect. Practices, the commission noted, “are illegal when they have the effect of restricting opportunities for people of color, language minorities, persons with disabilities, and the elderly to participate fully in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.”
"In her conclusions, Chairwoman Berry was careful not to state explicitly that Jeb Bush, Harris or other Florida officials were guilty of violating voting rights. However, her preliminary report provides a picture of pervasive fraud, manipulation and intimidation, which can be explained rationally only as the outcome of a deliberate policy. Moreover, the ferocious effort of Republican officials, both nationally and in Florida, to block manual recounts after election day is consistent with a policy of suppressing votes on election day itself. The commission plans to hold further hearings and issue its official report the first week in June. Whatever its final conclusions, the facts already assembled confirm that the 2000 presidential election was decided on the basis of an assault on the principle of popular sovereignty, and that the Bush administration is the illegitimate product of a sweeping attack on the democratic right to vote.
"Within the political establishment, there is no significant opposition to this attack on basic rights. Throughout the election crisis the Democrats concealed the extent of the conspiracy against democratic rights and sought to prevent any intervention...against the political coup that placed Bush in the White House. The Democrats have since bent over backwards to provide Bush with political legitimacy. The news networks and print media have gone to extraordinary lengths to make the stolen election of 2000 a non-story. They have adopted a policy of self-censorship when it comes to news items casting light on the illegitimate pedigree of the Bush administration and the threat to democratic rights embodied in his government. Their treatment of the interim report of the US Commission on Civil Rights—an agency of the federal government—is a case in point. Berry's politically explosive report was the lead story on CBS radio news at 11 AM Friday, shortly after the report was issued. That was apparently the first and last mention of the commission's interim findings by any national broadcast news outlet. CNN's Headline News, which purports to present the latest and most important news items every half-hour, made no mention of the commission report. None of the evening network television news broadcasts—neither NBC, nor CBS nor ABC—devoted so much as a sound bite to the commission report. This was obviously considered the type of news that is better kept from the general public." --Jerry White
"On February 26, the Miami Herald declared "Undervotes Support Bush Win." USA Today said "Recount Study: Gore Still Loses." Once again, the public could hear the unmistakable sound of the corporate media slamming the steel door shut on Gore's chances of finally proving that he won Florida. The essence of the Herald/USA Today story is that their recount of 10,644 undervotes produced a net gain of only 49 votes for Gore. So if the Gore campaign had succeeded in persuading Katherine Harris to wait for the completion of recounts of undervotes in four counties - Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia - Gore would not have gained enough votes to overcome Bush's 537-vote lead, according to the Herald and USA Today. But this is simply false. On January 27, the Palm Beach Post completed a recount of 4,513 uncounted votes in Palm Beach and reported a net gain of 682 votes for Gore. Combined with the 49 votes from Miami-Dade, Katherine Harris would have had to certify a Gore victory by 194 votes.
"But this argument is largely pointless, because Katherine Harris refused to wait for those recounts. As a result, the election ended up in the hands of the Florida Supreme Court. And after listening carefully to the argument from both sides, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the only fair and accurate way to determine the winner was to recount the votes in EVERY county. The Florida Supreme Court did two things: first, they ordered Harris to include the partial recounts in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, which added 383 votes to Gore's total and reduced Bush's lead to 154. Then they ordered all of Florida's counties to start counting. And as the nation watched, election workers in all of Florida's counties began reviewing every uncounted vote. This was the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court threw a thunderbolt from the sky. Violating every principle of Anglo-American law, a narrow partisan Republican majority declared that a fair and accurate recount would cause "irreparable harm" to George W. Bush. They overruled the Florida Supreme Court and ordered a halt to Florida's recount. As the nation watched in shock, election workers throughout Florida stopped counting and went home.
"This injunction by the U.S. Supreme Court has been universally denounced. A group of law professors from across the country - now numbering 637 - ran an ad in the New York Times declaring: "By stopping the vote count in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court used its power to act as political partisans, not as judges of a court of law." Two days later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its final ruling in Bush v. Gore. Once again, a narrow Republican majority ruled in favor of Bush. Many judicial scholars believe this was the Supreme Court's most lawless and outrageous ruling since Plessy v. Ferguson. Because the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount, Americans still do not know who really won Florida. But we at Democrats.com have been carefully tracking the partial results reported by news organizations throughout Florida. We even hired a team of our own to count the votes in Gadsden County.
"As of today, Gore leads Bush in Florida by 1,017. This tally includes recounts conducted by the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the Tampa Tribune, the Naples Daily News, and Democrats.com. It includes a gain of 682 votes for Gore in Palm Beach - which was more than enough to erase the 537 Bush lead certified by Katherine Harris. It also includes unexpected gains for Gore in Republican counties like Lake (130) Hillsborough (120), and Gadsden (40). Still, these recounts vastly understate Gore's victory because they focus on undervotes, rather than overvotes. According to a study by the Washington Post, Gore would have gained 28,510 votes if all of Florida's counties used an "instant-check" voting machine that detected overvotes and gave voters an opportunity to fix their ballots. These more expensive machines were used to a greater extent in Republican counties, a critical "equal protection" issue that was ignored by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the coming weeks, the recount of Florida's 67 counties will be completed. Then - and only then - will the American people know who really won Florida.
Given Gore's current lead, we fully expect Gore to be declared the winner. And then Americans will have to confront the fundamental question: how did George W. Bush steal the Presidency? When the Republican propaganda machine tells us to 'get over it," we quote Florida Congresswoman Corrine Brown, who said: "We will NEVER get over it. We will take this to our graves!'" --Bob Fertik, 2/27/01
Orange County's hand recount of all 282,000 ballots, completed this week, found 401 previously uncounted votes for Bush or Gore. An Orlando Sentinel examination of hundreds of other ballots that could not be counted by machines found 398 more. Had all those ballots been hand-counted, Gore would have seen a net gain of 203 votes in Orange County.
Clear votes found by county officials: Bush 170, Gore 231
Additional votes that canvassing board would have counted: Bush 128, Gore 270
Total: Bush 298, Gore 501
Net gain: Gore +203
-- Source: Sentinel research, Orlando Sentinel, 2/10/01
"According to the official certified tally, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes in Florida. But Gore gained 120 votes in an unofficial look at Hillsborough County's disputed presidential "undervotes" by the Tampa Tribune. A net total of 97 of the new Gore votes were from dimpled chads. Gore picked up 28 votes from ballots with various types of hanging chads. Bush had a net gain of 5 votes from 89 ballots that were clearly punched through but were not read by the machine. In a Dec. 30 article, the Tampa Tribune included the dimpled chads to come up with the total figure of Gore picking up 120 votes county-wide. A recent recount of ballots in Lake County by the Orlando Sentinel gave Gore an additional 130 votes. Lake uses a computerized optical-scan system, so chad interpretations did not come into play. If you add the 250 additional Gore votes from Lake and Hillsborough to the votes the Florida Supreme Court ruled should have been included in the final count -- 215 additional votes the vice president gained in Palm Beach County that were disallowed by Secretary of State Katherine Harris because they were late; plus 168 votes Gore picked up in the partial recount of heavily Democratic precincts in Miami-Dade, which were also disallowed -- Gore is ahead by 96 votes in Florida....And the vote counting continues." --Anthony York, 1/4/01 (more)
GWEN IFILL: You've also made a reputation for yourself as an international election monitor, yet you said that you wouldn't have even stepped into Florida. You wouldn't have even touched that.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No.
GWEN IFILL: Can the United States still be a beacon of democracy in this way, in the electoral process, after what we've been through?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, I think as a matter of fact the United States still a beacon of democracy to most people in the world. This past year, the Carter Center monitored six elections in the world. Three were in Latin America and the others were in Asia and Africa. But we have certain minimal standards in a country before we will go in there at all. And we would not dream of going into a country that had election laws like ours, where there is such a vast chasm in some central nonpartisan or bipartisan agency deciding on election arguments. And also, where every precinct, every voting place can have a separate kind of voting mechanism, and where the interpretation of what is a good vote or a bad vote depends, almost exclusively, on local officials' prejudices. So we require uniformity in the type of voting and in the standardization of what is a good vote, and we also require that a central election commission be available, on a nonpartisan basis, in order to make judgments during a contest period immediately before, during, or after an election. --PBS Interview, 1/10/01
WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 — Vice President Al Gore's nationwide lead in the popular vote has grown by about 200,000, to more than half a million, since Dec. 18, when the Electoral College sealed his fate and made Gov. George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States. A state-by-state survey by The Associated Press of the final certified results put Mr. Gore's popular vote edge at 539,947, up considerably from the lead of about 337,000 that was widely reported in the first several weeks after the election. The totals were 50,996,116 for Mr. Gore and 50,456,169 for Mr. Bush. Much of the increase came in California, New York, and other, smaller states that went for Mr. Gore, said Curtis B. Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan research group that has followed presidential elections for a quarter-century. Election officials in California and New York said today that the bigger numbers for Mr. Gore were not hard to explain. Mr. Gore carried both states easily. Both had large numbers of absentee ballots, which could not be counted immediately, and, because absentee votes generally do not vary sharply from election night returns, it was predictable that the absentees would widen the vice president's lead.
Mr. Gans said that in 1996, President Clinton's lead over Bob Dole grew by some 200,000 votes from election night until all absentee ballots were counted and all the votes certified, a fact all but forgotten except by political trivia buffs. "But it didn't matter," Mr. Gans said, in a race that the incumbent won by more than eight million popular votes and by a 379-to-159 advantage in the Electoral College. In the 1960 election John F. Kennedy had the electoral vote edge and a 114,673-vote margin in the popular vote over Richard M. Nixon. A total of 68.8 million votes were cast for president. Eight years later Mr. Nixon won the Electoral College and a popular vote margin of 510,645 out of 73.2 million votes cast for president.
The 2000 election, of course, will be remembered as the first in 112 years in which the leader in the popular vote lost the White House because his opponent prevailed in the Electoral College. Mr. Bush got 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed for a majority and five more than Mr. Gore, who lost one vote in the Electoral College when a Washington, D.C., elector left her ballot blank to protest the District of Columbia's lack of voting power in Congress. Mr. Gore won New York State, 4,107,697 to 2,403,374, or by some 1.7 million votes. Lee Daghlian, the chief spokesman for the state's Board of Elections, said today that about 360,000 absentee ballots were requested, and that about 260,000 were returned in time to be counted. In New York, absentee ballots must be postmarked no later than the day before the election and received no later than a week after the election.
Mr. Daghlian said absentee balloting was about 20 percent higher this year than in 1996. He speculated that the presence of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut on the Democratic ticket might have caused more American Jews to mail ballots from Israel. It was clear on election night that Mr. Gore had carried California in a landslide, so it was expected that the nearly 1.5 million absentee ballots that arrived in time to be accepted would sharply augment his victory — and they did. The final certified totals in California were 5,861,203 for Mr. Gore and 4,567,429 for Mr. Bush. Alfie Charles, a spokesman for the California secretary of state, Bill Jones, said that the percentage of Californians voting by absentee ballot had been increasing, and that about one-quarter now did. (Californians can vote absentee without showing a compelling reason. Their ballots must arrive by Election Day to be counted.)
David Damron, Ramsey Campbell and Roger Roy of the Sentinel Staff Posted December 19, 2000
TAVARES -- An inspection of more than 6,000 discarded presidential ballots in Lake County on Monday revealed that Vice President Al Gore lost a net 130 votes that were clearly his even in a conservative GOP bastion that President-elect Bush dominated as a whole. The tally of uncounted ballots by the Orlando Sentinel was the first outside review to be completed in any Florida county since the U.S. Supreme Court halted a statewide recount on Dec. 9. At that point Bush's ever-fluctuating lead over Gore was just 154 votes -- and the margin might have been shaved to a mere two dozen had the Lake ballots been counted. Similar ballots were counted elsewhere. The review found 376 discarded ballots in Lake that were clearly intended as votes for Gore: In each case, an oval next to his name was filled in with a pencil and the voter mistakenly filled in another oval next to a spot reserved for write-in candidates, writing in Gore's name or running mate Joe Lieberman's there as well. Another 246 such ballots showing clear votes for Bush and running mate Dick Cheney were thrown out. Had all such ballots been counted, the result would have been a net gain of 130 votes for Gore.
Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew said the Sentinel was engaged in "mischief making" by treating "illegal votes" as legal votes. He argued that a 7-2 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed such tallies should not count, and the Sentinel would only be irresponsibly "inflaming public passions" by playing the numbers up as certain or clear. "To publish illegal votes as legal votes would be to mislead the readers and the public," Eskew said. "These are illegal votes, and your paper is publishing them as legal votes." The findings in Lake are just one piece in a statewide mosaic to be assembled in coming weeks and months as outsiders look at ballots that didn't count on Nov. 7. Newspapers including the Sentinel are banding together to inspect many of the approximately 180,000 ballots cast statewide but not tallied in the presidential race either because no vote could be detected by a machine or because voters marked more than one choice for president. A review likely to be much more tedious than the one in Lake began Monday in Broward County, where a study of 6,600 punch-card ballots began.
But the Lake numbers are significant even in isolation. Republicans had argued all along that Gore's push for recounts in heavily Democratic counties like Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward was selective and unfair because it would have skewed results in his favor. But the Sentinel review shows how he might have recovered votes even in a county where Bush beat him by 15 percentage points. And ballots exactly like those rejected in Lake -- and now called "illegal" by Eskew -- were counted by canvassing boards in places such as Orange and Seminole counties and are now part of the certified totals. Lake reported 3,114 so-called "overvotes" in its certified presidential results, and county officials had been preparing to evaluate those ballots as part of the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court halted that effort the next afternoon, Lake officials had already sifted through 91,989 ballots cast countywide to segregate the presidential overvotes as well as about 3,000 overvoted ballots rejected by tabulation machines in other races. It was this pool of more than 6,000 ballots examined by three Sentinel reporters under a Florida public-records law request. Reporters were not allowed to touch ballots, but the newspaper paid for three election workers to spend the day holding them up for inspection. The process was observed by representatives of both parties.
The count went quickly because voter intent was easily detectable. Lake ballots are marked with pencils and tabulated with optical-scanning devices. There are no issues of "dangling chads" or "pregnant chads" to contend with, as there are in counties that use punch-card voting systems. If Florida's recounts had continued, the Lake County ballots examined by the Sentinel could have swung the presidential election, said Bob Poe, chairman of the state Democratic Party. When the recount was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, "we were within 113 or 114 votes," Poe said, referring to claims that Gore was gaining more ground even that Saturday before the recount was halted. "This would have put Gore over the top." Bush's official margin of victory was 537 votes, the number certified by Secretary of State Katherine Harris two weeks before the Florida Supreme Court's last recount order.
GOP partisans say they don't put much stock in any new numbers coming out of Florida now. Bush spokesman Eskew said GOP observers watching the Lake review on Monday dispute the accuracy of the Sentinel's inspection. They claimed that as many as 29 votes counted as write-ins for Gore by the Sentinel were actually written as "Gore and Cheney'' or Gore and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the ballot. But such ballots were specifically excluded in the Sentinel's methodology. The review also found -- but did not count -- hundreds more questionable ballots that machines tossed aside or local election officials deemed invalid. Many of these arguably could have been judged as intended for a single candidate. Some of those were ballots in which the voter penciled in the oval next to the name of more than one candidate, but then tried to erase one. On some ballots, the voter nearly rubbed through the paper trying to erase a vote.
Others voted for more than one candidate, sometimes a half-dozen, then made X's through most of the names. In many cases, it wasn't clear whether they meant to select the candidates who were X'ed out, or those who weren't. On other double-voted ballots, the voters' intention was spelled out, however awkwardly: Some made notations next to one of the votes, including "no," "wrong one," "mistake" and "not." These hundreds of more marginal ballots -- which the Sentinel did not include in its tally -- also fell heavily in Gore's favor. Lake also reported 245 "undervote" ballots, in which counting machines could discern no votes. Only 50 of those undervotes were separated by election officials before the federal high court stepped in. An examination of those ballots by the Sentinel found only a dozen that could be counted. Of those, Bush and Gore had six each. But those were not included in the newspaper's tally. On some, voters had used an ink pen rather than a pencil, and the machines were apparently unable to detect their vote. Others circled the candidate's name or put an X or check mark next to a name or in one case the party designation.
But on most undervote ballots, there were simply no signs of a vote for a presidential candidate. The Lake overvote totals put Republicans in an odd spot. It's one they may often find themselves in during the next few weeks. But regardless of what the overvotes show, Lake's GOP Party Chairman Dan Semenza said, "they don't count." "You newspaper people are just trying to stir things up." Elections experts say Democrats are more likely to be undereducated, older, less affluent, or first-time voters -- all groups more prone to muddle a ballot.
So Poe said he wasn't surprised that most of the flawed ballots were from Democratic voters, even though Lake is predominantly Republican. "My people are economically disadvantaged; some people don't read very well," Poe said. Many may be immigrants who don't read or speak perfect English, he said. The reason these votes weren't counted Nov. 7 is somewhat confusing. On election night, Lake's canvassing board decided in a 2-1 vote not to count ballots that included an unqualified write-in candidate. Bush and Gore were not legal write-ins, they decided.
They made the same decision in the congressional races on the ballot and wanted to be consistent, canvassing-board member and County Judge Donna Miller said. But Catherine Hanson, a Lake canvassing-board member and county commissioner, said Monday that if she could do it all again, in a race this close she would have looked at and counted clear votes that the machines skipped over. "We were trying to do our best. It was consistent with what we had done in the past," Hanson, a Republican, said Monday. "I wouldn't say it was a mistake, but we would have done it differently if we know what we do now."
By Mickey Kaus Posted Thursday, Dec. 28, 2000, at 1:15 a.m. PT
Can we forget about John Ashcroft and go back to the Florida recount for a moment? The press has long since left the theater, and the final credits have almost finished rolling, but there's another plot twist to the story. A pretty big one. I'm referring to the "press recount" conducted last week by the Orlando Sentinel in Lake County, a fairly small, 90,000-vote county in central Florida that George Bush carried by 15 percentage points. You wouldn't expect a Lake County recount to reveal many new votes for either candidate. After all, the county uses the supposedly more accurate optical-scanning voting system, in which voters mark their ballots with a pencil--no chad-producing "punch cards." What's more, the 3,114 ballots examined by the Sentinel were "overvotes"--ballots the optical scanning machines had rejected because they detected marks for more than one presidential candidate. If you followed the coverage of the recount, you know that overvotes were not a central focus of the Florida fight. Instead, the recount controversy centered on "undervotes"--ballots on which machines detected no presidential vote at all. It was undervotes that Gore was desperately trying to get manually counted and that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered counted before that count was stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.
What could overvotes yield, anyway? If a ballot is marked for two candidates, it's irretrievably spoiled, right? True, some people--including Bush lawyers seeking to discredit an "undervote-only" recount--raised the possibility that some overvotes might be salvageable if, say, voters actually wrote "I want Bush" on their ballots. But this possibility seemed almost theoretical. "There's nothing in the record that suggests there are such votes," Gore attorney David Boies asserted confidently when asked about the possibility in oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. We now know how wildly off-base Boies was. We know because in Lake County the Sentinel examined 3,114 overvotes. And one-fifth of them contained exactly the "write-in mistake" that Boies had dismissed as nonexistent. More perversely, the majority (376) of these ballots were clear votes for ... Boies' client, Gore. "In each case, an oval next to his name was filled in with a pencil and the voter mistakenly filled in another oval next to a spot reserved for write-in candidates, writing in Gore's name or running mate Joe Lieberman's there as well," the Sentinel reports. Some 246 ballots contained the same Write-In Mistake, except that the voter both marked and wrote in "Bush." But, all told, Gore would have gained 130 votes in this one measly little county had its overvotes been manually tallied. In retrospect, it seems glaringly obvious why voters would make the Write-In Mistake. If you're a first-time voter, after all, and you see a ballot that says "Mark your candidate" and then another line that says "Write-in," you might easily think that the latter phrase was instructing you to write in your candidate's name--just to be sure! Sort of like a check, where you write the dollar amount with numerals and then write it with letters as well. It's actually quite amazing--with all the talk of voter confusion, butterfly ballots, and the like--that nobody realized this simple mistake would be so common. Nobody until now, that is.
The Lake County numbers contain another stunning surprise, in that they dramatically validate what might be called the "Sloppy Dem Thesis"--the folk wisdom that says Democratic voters (being less experienced, or less well-educated, or less anal, or whatever) tend to make ballot errors more often than Republican voters. Lake County, remember, is a Republican county that Bush carried by a wide margin. Yet the recoverable ballot errors (at least the overvote errors) ran heavily in favor of Gore. (Even other, more problematic ballots that the Sentinel didn't count--such as when a voter attempted to erase one mark--"fell heavily in Gore's favor.") If Gore picked up votes on a recount in Lake County, where wouldn't he pick up votes? The writer Murray Sayle once joked that there are only three real stories in journalism: 1) "Arrow points to defective part;" 2) "We name the guilty man;" and 3) "Everything you thought you knew about this subject is wrong." The Lake County story comes close to qualifying for the third category. Consider its apparent implications: Gore was mistaken: Gore went for hand recounts in four Democratic counties rather than a broad statewide recount. He's been criticized for grabbing at a quick political advantage instead of taking a gamble and doing the "right thing." But it's now clear that the right thing wouldn't have been much of a gamble for him at all. If the Sloppy Dem Thesis is as correct as it was in Lake County, Gore would have gained votes all over the state, in pro-Bush counties as well as Democratic counties. Gore was doubly mistaken to focus, laserlike, on the undervotes, ignoring the potential harvest of uncounted votes in the overvotes that resulted from voters making the Write-In Error.
Gore was a total fool, in particular (and in hindsight), to ignore the massive overvote of 21,000 ballots in Duval County. According to Richard Cooper's post-mortem in the Los Angeles Times, Gore aides assumed these votes were unsalvageable. Only after the deadline for requesting a recount had passed did the Gore team meet with local allies and learn that many of the overvotes contained the Write-In Error--and might have been counted for Gore. The press was equally wrong to follow Gore's lead and cover the recount as if the undervotes were the whole story. Gore and the press also missed the boat by focusing almost exclusively on the voting problems in "punch-card" counties. Optical-scanning counties may have held large troves of votes, too. True, it's not clear how many optical-scanning counties decided, as Lake County did, to not examine overvotes for the Write-In Error. (At least two jurisdictions in fact counted such votes, according to the Orlando Sentinel.) The Sentinel is even now trying to find out how many other counties acted as Lake County acted. But, since Lake alone yielded 130 new net Gore votes, it would only take three or four similar counties (out of 38 using the optical-scanning system) to put Gore over the top. The whole chad debate was unnecessary! By focusing on "punch-card" undervotes, Gore was inextricably drawn into the murky and morally ambiguous world of chad. He wound up throwing the full force of his advocacy behind the highly questionable Delahunt standard, under which merely "dimpled" chad can be counted as clearly intended votes. But if the Lake result is indicative, Gore didn't need dimpled chad! He would almost certainly have won a full statewide recount under the strictest chad standards--if, that is, the recount included the overvotes in the punch-card and optical counties. The whole debate over dimples was a needless drain of Gore's legal and moral resources.
James Carville was right! He boasted that Gore would win a recount even without dimpled chad. Kausfiles was wrong to ridicule Carville for this boast. James Baker was right--in a strategic, not moral, sense--to fight all manual recounts instead of seeking his own hand counts in pro-Bush counties. The Lake County result shows that even in Bush counties a hand recount would probably have helped elect Gore, thanks to all the Sloppy Dems. Kausfiles was also wrong to suggest that Baker "blew it in Florida" with this "no recount" strategy. Please don't click here to see just how wrong. Slate's "Ballot Box" was wrong, in hindsight, to estimate that Bush would win a statewide recount under strict standards but lose under loose standards. We now know Gore would probably have won under either standard. Jacob Weisberg made it clear that his Slate calculation assumed that the Sloppy Dem Thesis was invalid (which it clearly didn't turn out to be in Lake) and that overvotes didn't matter (which it's now clear they do).
The Florida Supreme Court was wrong to order a statewide recount that was seemingly confined to undervotes. The overvotes should have been recounted, too (though if Gore had won with only the undervotes, then counting the overvotes would probably have only widened his margin of victory). But Lake County officials say they would have examined their overvotes if the recount had gone forward, and the circuit court judge presiding over the recount probably had authority to order that other overvotes be examined as well. So maybe the Florida recount would eventually have been fairer than it at first appeared. But the Florida court was very clearly wrong, in retrospect, when it allowed a count of both undervotes and overvotes in mainly Democratic precincts in Miami-Dade County while adding to those results a count of only undervotes in mainly Republican precincts. The only way that apple-orange sandwich could be fair is if recounting overvotes never yielded anything. But we now know that overvotes can contain a huge (one in five) stash of salvageable ballots. Finally, the exhausted post-concession press has been wrong in failing to give the Sentinel story the play it deserves. The New York Times' news pages, according to Nexis, have simply ignored the Lake County recount and its implications. (Only Maureen Dowd's op-ed column has mentioned it.) A recent NYT editorial defending the utility of press recounts didn't bother to note the Sentinel's effort, even though it helps make the editorial's point.
Vice President Al Gore topped George W. Bush by 120 votes in an unofficial look at Hillsborough County's disputed presidential ``undervotes'' by The Tampa Tribune. Gore captured 999 votes and Bush, the president-elect, gained 879 votes in the first manual recount of Hillsborough's 5,533 ballots that machines could not read. Results in Hillsborough, one of the most hotly contested Gore- Bush battlegrounds, are a microcosm of how Bush's razor-thin Florida margin could have changed if some 60,000 disputed undervotes in 67 counties were examined by hand statewide. Susan MacManus, political science professor at the University of South Florida, said the results will still be disputed, even once historical perspective is gained. ``There's always going to be controversy about the standards used. People will say different standards were used by different media,'' she said. Hillsborough is significant because it had Florida's fourth-highest number of undervotes, after Miami-Dade's 10,750, Palm Beach's 10,582 and Broward's 6,686. Sometimes, machines miss votes on these ballots when, for example, a chad isn't fully dislodged from a punch card.
News organizations, including The Miami Herald and a consortium led by The New York Times, are conducting statewide reviews of these ballots. Results are not expected for several weeks. News executives say the purpose is to clear up lingering questions. So far, the only other results show Gore gained 130 unofficial votes in Lake County, according to a review by The Orlando Sentinel. Republicans, meanwhile, denounced the latest Hillsborough numbers, and Democrats exulted. ``We carried the county by 11,000 votes, so let Gore have his few votes. Who really cares?'' said Margie Kincaid, Hillsborough's GOP chairwoman. ``I think the media spent their money for nothing. It's all pretty silly and it's not going to change anything. It's just going to confuse a lot of people. It's just an exercise in futility.'' But Hillsborough Democratic Chairman Mike Scionti said the results ``make sense.'' He predicted statewide results of the media recount will show Gore won Florida by 20,000 votes.
Undervotes were at the center of a legal storm in last month's 36-day presidential election stalemate in Florida. With the White House at stake, Gore wanted undervotes counted by hand while the Bush camp was opposed, saying the statewide vote was counted twice, on election night Nov. 7 and the next day because results were too close to call. The Florida Supreme Court ordered undervotes counted by hand in a victory for Gore on Dec. 8. But the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it the next day. Three days later, justices said there was no uniform standard for deciding whether dimples, hanging chad and pinpricks were really votes. In the Hillsborough recount, journalists examined each of the 5,533 undervote ballots by hand, checking for dimples, pinpricks, hanging chad and clear punches on the data-processing cards punched by voters to register their choices for elective office. The Tribune spent 19.5 hours sorting through the ballots, finishing a count on Friday that began on Dec. 21 and continued at the county election service center on Dec. 22 and Dec. 28. The newspaper and other news organizations paid $58.12 per hour for election workers to hold up the ballots for counting. Florida law makes ballots public documents available for inspection, but they can only be handled by election officials.
Brad Smith can be reached at bsmith@tampatrib.com259-7365
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