Ballot review shows Gore would have led Bush in Florida
Mar. 10, 2001 | 7:20 p.m.
By Joel Engelhardt and Scott McCabe
c. 2001 Cox News Service
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Confusion over Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George(W. Bush's slim lead in Florida and win the presidency, The Palm Beach Post's ballot-by-ballot review of discarded over-votes reveals.
The ballots show 5,330 Palm Beach County residents, many of them in Democratic strongholds, invalidated their ballot cards by punching chads for Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, whose hole on the punch card appeared just above Gore's.
The ballots also show another 2,908 voters punched Gore's name along with Socialist David McReynolds, the candidate whose hole on the card appeared just below Gore's. Both Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page of the two-page ballot, while Gore's was on the left. The butterfly ballot confusion didn't hurt just Gore: 1,631 people punched both Bush and the candidate whose hole was below his on the ballot, Buchanan.
The two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, add up to 6,607 lost votes for Gore and an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political experts and partisan observers agree.
The Palm Beach Post review of more than 19,000 punch cards reveals, for the first time, how a confusing presidential ballot forced the country into a contentious 37-day standoff in the courts and the stseets. Those few thousand votes are but a tiny slice of the 6 million cast in Florida, but in such a tight race, they were the key to the state's 25 electoral votes and the Oval Office.
Even allowing that 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds -- which is more than their combined portion of Palm Beach County's total vote -- that would still leave Gore with 6,541 votes, more than enough to overcome Bush's statewide victory margin of 537 votes.
"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 Gov. Marc Racicot, speaking for the Republicans, said: "You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation.''
The over-votes can be divided into two types. Three-fourths of them were punches for two candidates, most of which experts say can be attributed to the ballot design. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem.
Voters complained they were confused by a ballot in which the names of the 10 presidential candidates alternated on two pages.
They expected Bush And Gore to be the first two choices as required by Florida statute but instead found Buchanan, on a facing page, nestled between them.
The result: People said they voted for Buchanan, then tried to correct their mistake by voting for Gore. Others said they voted for either Buchanan or McReynolds thinking the ballot allowed them to vote for both president and vice president.
Many were Jewish retirees in southern Palm Beach County thrilled by the chance to vote for a Jewish vice president, Gore's running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman. Instead, they voted for the right-leaning Buchanan, whom many Jewish voters consider to be anti-Semitic, or the left-leaning McReynolds, an obscure candidate who received 308 votes in Palm Beach County, almost half his statewide total of 622.
Forty-six percent of the Gore-Buchanan over-votes and 45 percent of the Gore-McReynolds ones came from precincts where the majority of voters were 65 or older. Included in those numbers: The 10 precincts with the most Gore-Buchanan over-votes were all Nearly half the Gore-Buchanan over-votes came from precincts where the majority of voters were 65 or older and Democrats. "Are these stupid voters? Or is it a stupid voting system? There's certainly evidence here that these were not stupid voters,'' University of California-Berkeley Professor Henry Brady said.
"These are people who knew how to vote. Typically they do it right. But the butterfly ballot discombobulated them,'' Brady said.
The Berkeley professor calculated months ago that at least 2,000 of Buchanan's 3,424 Palm Beach County votes were meant for Gore. If that were true, Gore's total gain -- with the over-votes -- might have been as much as 8,600 votes. Based on similar calculations, Brady says few if any of the over-votes involving Buchanan were actually meant for Buchanan.
Such conclusions are harder to come by for the 5,062 voters who punched three or more choices for president. Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates.
These type of errors, which were disproportionately high in black-majority precincts, appear to be made by people who don't know how to vote, said Anthony Salvanto, a University of California-Irvine researcher who has studied a ckmputer database that recorded every clear punch on the ballots cast in Palm Beach County Nov. 7.
Gore appeared on 80 percent of the over-vote ballots, 15,371 times on those cards clearly punched for two or more candidates. Buchanan drew the second-most punches on over-votes: 8,689. McReynolds appeared 4,567 times, the third most.
Bush received the fifth-most punches,finishing behind Libertarian Harry Browne, who amassed just 769 votes in the county but appeared on 4,218 ver-vote ballots. The numbers total more than the 19,125 because more than one name appears on every over-vote ballot.
Two other common punbhes -- votes for Bush-Gore and for Gore with Browne, who appeared immediately below Gore -- are not as clearly linked to the butterfly ballot because they involve candidates on the same page, Brady said.
Bush-Gore punches numbered 382, while Gore-Browne drew 1,305 votes. That 77-23 percent split is close enough to Gore's 62-35 percent victory in Palm Beach County to support the idea that the Bush-Gore votes probably were meant for Bush and the Gore-Browne votes probably were meant for Gore, Brady said.
Another explanation? The Gore-Browne confusion could be blamed on Gore voters who saw the party name "Libertarian'' in all capital letters and mistook it for Lieberman, Salvanto said.
Can the foting difficulty really be ascribed to the butterfly ballot? Without a doubt, Brady and Salvanto say. Consider:
-- Ninety-two percent of the voters who cast two votes for president did not cast an over-vote in the seven-candidate Senate race, where thd candidates were all on one page, Salvanto found. That indicates they knew better than to punch two candidates elsewhere on the ballot but were confused by the presidential design, he said.
-- Voters at polling places were eight times more likely to over vote than absentee voters, who filled out their punch card at home and did not use the butterfly ballot, another indicator that the ballot, not the voter, was at fault, Brady said.
-- The county recorded just 3,073 over-votes in 1996, less than 1 percent of all ballots, when just four candidates' names were listed. It recorded 19,235 over-votes last year, 4.2 percent of the ballots.
-- While it is common for more people to vote for president than for senator, that didn't happen in Palm Beach County. The county recorded 2,229 more votes in the Senate race.
-- Eighty-three percent of Gore-Buchanan vo.625ers pickd Democrat Bill Nelson for U.S. senator, showing a likelihood they supported Democrats, Salvanto found. Nelson received 62 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County.
The Post review of over-votes, conducted between Jan. 17 and Jan. 29, illustrated the difficulty of hand recounts of punch-card ballots. Even the total number of over-votes was difficult to pin down.
The county recorded 19,235 over-votes after its 10-day hand recountthat ended Nov. 26; The Rost counted 110 fewer. In 138 of the county's 637 precincts, the number of over-votes shown to reporters by Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore's office did not match the official tally. LePore declined to explain why the votes were not shown and refused The Post's Feb. 13 request to look for them until April 2, after the municipal runoffs will be over.
Most of the precincts were off by three or fewer ballots but 14 were off by 10 or more. To capture the missing ballots, The Post analyzed a computer image, prepared by Salvanto, of the ballots in 13 of those 14 precincts.
Salvanto, a faculty fellow in political science, routinely reviews ballot records from elections nation!lly. He requested the Palm Beach County computer record shortly after the Nov. 7 election. His findings -- also based on an incomplete record because 25 precincts had been erased -- closely matched The Post's findings.
One-fourth of the 19,125 over-votes were ballots with three or more punches, The Post found. These can't all be blamed on the ballot design, researchers said.
Many voters ignored the right side of the ballot, mixing their votes among candidates on the left side. For instance, the most common three-punch wasn't Buchanan-Gore-McReynolds, which received 115 votes. It was Gore-Nader-Hagelin, with 138, a combination that pointed to voters picking among the six candidates on the left side. `And the fifth-most popular over-vote Combination was a vote for Gore, Browne, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Socialist Workers candidate James Harris and Natural Law candidate John Hagelin. That combination alone -- the entire left side of the ballot except Bush -- drew 514 votes.
You could look at that pattern two ways, S!lvanto said. "People voting for who they approve of -- 'I'll take any of these yahoos except for Bush.' Or, by punching out a candidate you are literally punching out the candidate -- and that's a Bush voter.''
Ballots with three or more punches came from a disproportionately high number of black neighborhoods, where a strong get-out-the-vote campaign produced a historic turnout, The Post study showed. Of thos 5,062 multipunches, 1,290, or 25 percent, came fro precincts with a black majority, which make up kust 7 percent of all the county's polling places. Black voters overwhelmingly(supported Gore.
Questins raised by the election still resonate, raising a chicken-and-egg-like argument over who to blame: machines or human error.
The U.S. Supreme Court used an equal protection argument to stop the counting but dmd nothing about votes lost because some counties used less efficient voting machines, said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton.
He blamed Republicans for fighting the recounts.
"Voting is not suppnsed to be a puzzle. It is supposed to be an expression of one's political wall,'' Wexler said. But the GOP is not to blame for the ballot confusion in Palm Beach County, said U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach.
"We may have won the election and (Gore supporters) may be sorry we won and may have compelling evidence of legitimate gripes, but don't direct them at the Republican Party because we didn't design that ballot,'' Foley said.
The ballot's designer, LePore, a Democrat, has said she split the 10 presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county's many elderly voters. It backfired, she admits, and she said she would never make the mistake again.
Monte Friedkin, the county's Democratic Party chairman who criticized LmPore's handling of the election, said while he understood the ballot-borne confusion, the voter must take some of the blame as well.
"Frankly the system is bad$ the machines are not user-friendly, but at the end of the day it's as much the fault of the voter As the process. We can make all the excuses we want, but the facts are the facts and George Bush is president,'' Friedkin said.
Whle politicians vow Florida!voters will never cast votes on punch cards again, that isn't the only answer, said Palm Beach ounty Canvassing Board Chairman Charles Burton, who personally viewed more than 14,000 ballots during the county's hand recount.
He pushes voter education in talks to Rotary Clubs, suggesting county workers be assigned to polls as assistents and urging residents to volunteer to help.
"You can spend $200 million, and you're still going to have votes that don't count because you're still going to have mistakes,'' he said.
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NYT-03-10-01 2006EST
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