http://www.herald.com/thispage.htm?content/archive/news/yahoo/digdocs/102850.htm

Published Sunday, December 3, 2000, in the Miami Herald

A flawless vote would have shown a winner

Analysis finds an edge for Gore

BY ANABELLE de GALE, LILA ARZUA AND CURTIS MORGAN

cmorgan@herald.com

If no one had ever heard of hanging chads, if the butterfly ballot had never flown, if no voter had bungled in the booth, who would have won Florida and the presidency of the United States?

In a race so tight, it may never be known for certain. But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537.

It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ``the will of the people.''

It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.

Reaction to the analysis, from the two camps locked in an exhausting and tense legal battle, was radically different. The Gore campaign called it ``compelling evidence,'' and the Bush campaign dismissed it as ``statistical voodoo.''

One fundamental flaw, Republicans argued, was an assumption that every voter actually intended to cast a vote in the presidential race.

A large majority of ballots in the disputed counties of Palm Beach and Duval didn't even have a dimple on them, said Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew.

``If you want to divine voters' intent when there isn't even a mark on the ballot, you'd do better to hire a palm reader than a statistical analyst,'' he said.

But Stephen Doig, a professor at Arizona State University who crunched the numbers for The Herald, defended the analysis.

For example, he said, even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that 90 percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip the race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore -- about 1,400 votes.

Doig described it as a matter of analyzing extremes.

He started his analysis with the assumption that every one of the 185,000 discarded ballots represented an intent to vote in the presidential race. The other extreme, he said, is the Bush contention that none of them should count.

``That extreme is the reality that we have, that Gov. Bush won by a razor-thin 500 votes,'' Doig said.

``I'm no psychic. I don't know what they really intended to do, but I do know that almost anywhere in that margin, Gore wins. You can argue about where in the range it should be.''

Political analysts were mixed on what the numbers mean.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies, said he considered the analysis open to questions.

``That is a reasonable assumption for the purposes of analysis,'' he said. ``For the purposes of politics, it's highly questionable. In most precincts, that may well be true, but in some precincts it may not be, and that's a critical difference.''

Still, Sabato said he found the end result ``perfectly reasonable.''

``What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' he said. ``But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''

And all statistical and anecdotal evidence he'd seen, he said, indicated that Bush probably collected more of those -- the ones that counted.

Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said there were too many variables in the analysis ``to feel comfortable.''

``Inferring what the voters' intent was, I have a real problem with people who can say they can do that,'' she said.

No one, of course, can accurately assess what 185,000 voters intended to do with their discarded ballots, but in purely statistical terms, there are consistent trends.

The Herald determined those trends by examining precinct results from each of the state's 67 counties.

Those results showed that statewide, at least 185,000 ballots were discarded, either as undervotes (ballots that for whatever reason didn't record a vote for president) or overvotes (ballots where more than one candidate was selected).

Those ballots then were assigned to a candidate in the same proportion as the candidate had received in each precinct as a whole.

Under that analysis, Bush would have received about 79,000, or 42 percent, of the uncounted votes, and Gore would have received more than 102,000, or 56 percent. The remaining 4,000 or so would have gone to the minor candidates.

That assumption of voting patterns is based on a concept long accepted by pollsters -- that the opinions of a small percentage of people can be extrapolated to project the views of a larger group. In this case, however, the projection uses a larger group, generally from 90 to 98 percent of the successful votes in precincts, to project the intent of a few.

The result: Gore ahead by 23,000 votes, a comfortable lead in comparison to the official statistical tossup, though still narrow enough to trigger the state's automatic recount, which kicks in when elections finish closer than one-half of one percent.

The analysis also confirmed that the voters in Democratic precincts had a far greater chance of having their ballots rejected. Only one of every 40 ballots was rejected in precincts Bush won, while one of every 27 ballots was rejected in precincts Gore won.

In addition, Doig, a former Herald research editor who now holds the Knight chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism specializing in computer-assisted reporting, found a number of other interesting trends:

* Voting machinery played a large role in rejections. Of the 51 precincts in which more than 20 percent of ballots were rejected, 45 of them used punch cards -- 88 percent. Of the 336 precincts in which more than 10 percent were tossed out, 277 used punch cards -- 78 percent.

The overall rejection rate for the 43 counties using optical systems was 1.4 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 24 punch-card counties was 3.9 percent. That means that voters in punch-card counties, which included urban Democratic strongholds such as Broward and Palm Beach counties, were nearly three times as likely to have their ballots rejected as those in optical counties.

* In dozens of Florida precincts, at least one out of every four ballots were discarded as having no vote or too many votes for president.

* Nearly half of Gore's margin, more than 11,000 extra votes, would come from Palm Beach County alone. The other counties that would give him more than 1,000 new votes are Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval and Pinellas. Of those, Bush carried only Duval in the official tabulation.

* Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages, had 31 percent of the uncounted ballots, but only 12 percent of the total votes cast.

* Only 11 percent of precincts statewide recorded no discarded ballots.

* Only one county would actually switch preferences for president -- tiny Madison, which officially went to Bush, but would have gone to Gore under The Herald's projections. More than 10 percent of Madison's 4,000-plus ballots were rejected. The analysis provides some evidence to bolster the Bush camp's claim that recounting some counties but not others is unfair to the Texas governor. For example, the analysis shows that if discarded ballots were to be reconsidered in Collier County, which Bush won, Bush might pick up about 1,000 net votes. Bush might also gain about 600 net votes in Lee County and about 500 net votes in Nassau County.

In all, the analysis shows Bush gaining in 43 counties. But many of those counties are rural and have relatively low numbers of votes, and the gains would be quickly eclipsed by the numbers Gore might pick up in the 23 mostly urban counties where the analysis shows he would show a net gain.

In only one county does the analysis show that neither candidate would gain on his rival. That is Volusia County, where the ballots already have undergone a controversial manual recount.

REFLECTION OF VOTE

Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for the vice president's campaign, said the results bolstered Gore's contention that the official results did not fairly and accurately reflect the vote.

``The outcome of the presidential election rests on determining the will of the voters of Florida, and this new evidence makes it extremely hard for the Bush forces to ignore the people's will,'' he said.

Eskew, the spokesman for the Texas governor, flatly rejected it as ``hocus-pocus'' and ``an utterly unfounded scientific process.''

In addition to mistakenly assuming that voters handing in undervotes intended to vote, he said, the analysis also ignores the notion that many of the double-punched ballots may have been ``protest votes,'' intentionally spoiled.

``That is a deeply flawed model that suggests statistical voodoo,'' he said.

There are, however, ways of analyzing the data that attempt to account for the possibility of protest votes and deliberate nonparticipation in the presidential balloting. Even so, Gore hypothetically still would have collected enough votes to change the election's outcome.

Historically, about 2 percent of votes in presidential races don't count -- most often because voters skipped the race or their marks weren't recorded by counting machines. Florida's rejection rate this year, however, was around 3 percent.

The analysis tested even higher percentages of nonvotes, ranging from 10 to 90 percent of the 185,000 discarded ballots. In each instance, Gore still earned more votes.

The analysis also attempted to discard all undervotes as intentional nonvotes, counting only overvotes. That analysis was hampered by the fact that 37 counties did not differentiate in their reports between ballots discarded as undervotes and those discarded as overvotes.

But based on results from the 30 counties that did, 43 percent of the uncounted votes were undervotes. If that pattern held statewide and every undervote were tossed out, ignoring the entire chad issue, Gore still would have a 13,000-vote margin.

Assuming the overvotes are protests and counting just the undervotes leads to a similar result.

STANDARDS CRUCIAL

That analysis underscores, however, the importance of the debate over the standards for judging ballots with dimpled chads, swinging door chads and other variations.

For example, if the undervotes are counted using the experience of Broward's manual recount, where approximately 20 percent of the undervote ballots yielded a vote, Gore's net statewide total rises by about 1,500 -- enough to overcome Bush's 537-vote official margin.

But if the standard used is the much stricter one that prevailed in Palm Beach County, where only 5 percent of the undervote ballots yielded votes, Gore's statewide net gain would be about 390 votes, not enough to overcome Bush's lead.

That, however, is the only scenario in which Gore would not overtake Bush. Overall, the analysis suggests generally that Gore's gains would top Bush's, a challenge to assertions by the Bush camp that the Texas governor would prevail in a statewide recount.

Republicans and some analysts didn't think the results were strong enough to stand up.

ANALYSIS REVIEWED

MacManus, the USF political scientist, echoed Eskew's concerns about protest and apathetic votes. She also said there were such wide variances in the size and the social and economic mix of precincts that it would be too difficult to extrapolate accurate results.

``In polls, you're used to a margin of error,'' she said. ``Here, there's no room for margins of error.''

Others saw more validity in the analysis.

``You can always raise criticisms. You can never know for sure,'' said Alan Agresti, a professor of statistics at the University of Florida who reviewed the methodology. ``But I think when you do it at a very fine level like this, at the precinct level, it's very interesting, a good projection of what could have happened.''

Jim Kane, an independent pollster based in Fort Lauderdale, agreed that the analysis contained many uncertainties. But he also said, ``I'm not shocked that Gore would have won.''

In fact, Kane, Agresti and Doig agreed that the formula probably was conservative, awarding Bush too large a share of the pie. The biggest problems with rejected ballots were in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods statewide -- areas that voted heavily Democratic.

That could suggest that the same group, which included a larger percentage of first-time and less educated voters, might have made similar errors in all precincts.

Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, also found the numbers persuasive.

``It's perfectly scientific, if it's presented in a sense as the most massive statewide poll in Florida,'' he said. ``Sure, it's fun and games, but it says something about what would have happened if everybody knew how to vote.''

-- (in@political.news), December 03, 2000

Answers

Here is a possible explanation:

The Democrat voters in the urban areas are, on the whole, less intelligent than their rural Republican counterparts. Because of this, they are less likely to be able to understand a simple ballot, and the inevitable result is more ballots being rejected for double punches and/or no punches.

Putting on asbestos suit... okay, flame away.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), December 03, 2000.

Yeah, hear hear! We republicans all knows them niggers is too dumb to read the signs on the walls or poke holes out of ballots. In fact, we *relies* on that stupidity, we does! We stacked the decks against all them senile Jews too, them bein' too weak to punch holes an' all. We'd have a better country if they'd all get on a boat and go back to wherever they came from!

Meanwhile, the one thing *everyone* agreed on about this analysis is that whoever controls any recount (where OR how) gets to determine the "winner". Well, doh!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 03, 2000.

Flint,

Unable to discredit my hypothesis by any other means, you resort to trying to paint me as a racist. That is both sad and inaccurate.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), December 03, 2000.

J:

Huh? That IS your hypothesis, plain and simple. You say urban Florida democrats (who just happen to be heavily black and hispanic) are "less intelligent" than the rural republicans (not counting the trailer trash, I suppose?). Not "less educated", mind you. *Less intelligent*!

Your "less intelligent" is hard to interpret in any other way than racist, given the demographics of urban Gore voters. Otherwise, just WHO WERE you talking about?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 03, 2000.

Flint,

Yes, less intelligent. How much education does it take to read the instructions and punch out a ballot? It is not, after all, brain surgery or nuclear physics.

As far as your claim that it is "hard to interpret as any other way than racist", I am surprised at you. Do you only embrace statistics and scientific processes when they benefit your points of view?

Imagine giving the raw data to a bunch of people sitting in a room, who have no additional knowledge about the demographic makeup of the electorate. If one of those people comes up with the same explanation that I did, is he a racist? LOL. Your assumption that the racial demographic of the urban Democrat electorate has biased my hypothesis, thus making me a racist, is both unfounded and untrue.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), December 03, 2000.

J:

OK, I mistakenly thought you were *aware* of the demographics of these "less intelligent" urban Florida democratic voters. I accept that their racial composition comes as a total surprise to you, and that your suggestion was innocent of intentional racial overtones.

Now that you know better, you can see that your proposal was racist *whether or not you knew it*!

I consider whether such racism is *justified* to be an entirely different question. After all, there is indeed a significant body of circumstantial evidence suggesting real racial variations in intelligence. Maybe you have noticed yet one more datum to toss into this equation.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 03, 2000.

Is saying that blacks have much darker skin a racist statement? Curly hair? Beyond those obvious physical characteristics making blanket statements gets murky.

Frankly I am not sure whether it is ignorance or intelligence that explains the numbers of miscast black votes. Which is not to say that I think that whites are as a rule smarter than blacks, but I wonder if the conditions in which many of these poor under-privledged blacks grow up in could lead to a less developed overall intellect, as opposed to being simply under-educated.

One thing I can say with certainty is that after the huge effort that the Democrats undertook to get blacks to the polls in these areas, it was DUMB as hell not to make sure that they knew how to fill out their ballot correctly.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), December 03, 2000.

I see Flint is showing his true "colors" again.

-- Racist Redneck (flint@soapbox.boonies), December 03, 2000.

J, I do not think you were being racist. People get in trouble when they infer their own predjudiced thoughts into others' writing. I'm not saying that Flint is predjudiced, but he could use better language when describing minorities.

-- Dr. Pibb (dr.pibb@zdnetonebox.com), December 03, 2000.

Well, I found J's implications mildly offensive, and decided to pull his leg a little. I don't know the full explanation for the 1% higher incidence of rejected votes in these urban counties (3% instead of the state average of 2% rejected), and I don't think J knows either.

My theory is that anyone who votes democratic isn't quite up to snuff in the brains department. (And if anyone takes *that* seriously, let me offer you a free whoopee cushion as a boobie prize).

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 03, 2000.

Flint,

You wrote, "Now that you know better, you can see that your proposal was racist *whether or not you knew it*"!

Um, Flint, would you care to share with the forum what definition of "racist" you are using?

You also wrote, "I don't know the full explanation for the 1% higher incidence of rejected votes in these urban counties (3% instead of the state average of 2% rejected), and I don't think J knows either".

I never claimed to KNOW the explanation, Flint. I wrote, "Here is a POSSIBLE explanation:" (emphasis mine). I would link to it, but it is above in this very thread, so there is no need. Evidently, because my possible explanation is not politically correct, you react in knee-jerk fashion to dismiss it, even though it may, in fact, be the correct explanation.

Do statistics and logic not apply if political correctness is breached? LOL.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), December 03, 2000.

Bush won, give it up Mr. Gore. I am very confident that ALL legal rulings will come in the favor or President Bush.

-- Mrs. Cleaver (Mrs. Cleaver@LITBBBB.xcom), December 04, 2000.

After watching the court proceedings in Leon county for the past two days, I saw both the statistician for the Gore team and the statistician for the Bush team suggest that demographics alone were NOT the sole cause of the variance of undervotes. Overvotes weren't a consideration.

It appeared to ME that the age and upkeep of the voting devices in various precincts in various counties played a larger role, but that's up to a judge to decide now. Referencing following instructions, Miami-Dade [for instance] had instructions to maintain their voting machines [clean out the chad holder, etc.] after EVERY election, and they haven't done it in eight years.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), December 04, 2000.

"From Butterfly Ballots to Butterfly Effects"

http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/WhosCounting/whoscounting.h tml

-- (Election@related.reading), December 04, 2000.

Hey, far out. It seems I'm politically correct and a racist at the same time. Neat trick. Meanwhile, the *real* reason Bush voters didn't produce dimples should be obvious -- it's because dimples in the Bush chad *weren't votes*! Only dimples in Gore chad were votes. (Hint - that's more humor, guys).

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 04, 2000.