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But
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. In his, he started 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 point 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 îîperfectly
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 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 results, derived from precinct returns Herald researchers collected
from the state's 67 counties, were determined using this formula:
Statewide, at least 185,000 ballots were discarded, rejected as either
undervotes (failing for whatever reason to successfully mark a ballot
or punch out a chad) or overvotes (selecting more than one candidate for
whatever reason). That number includes rejected absentee ballots.
If those ballots had been included and those voters behaved like their
neighbors in the same precincts, Bush would have gotten about 78,000 (42
percent) of the uncounted votes and Gore would have gotten more than 103,000
(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
with the official statistical toss-up, 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 1 in every
40 ballots were rejected in precincts Bush won, while 1 of every 27 ballots
were rejected in precincts Gore won.
In addition, Doig, a former Herald research editor who now holds the
Knight chair at the Cronkite School of Journalism specializing in computer-assisted
reporting, found a number of interesting other trends:
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, 277 used punch cards -- 78
percent.
The overall rejection rate for the 43 optical counties 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.
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 non-participation
in the presidential balloting. Even so, Gore hypothetically still would
have collected enough votes to change the outcome of the election.
Historically, about 2 percent of votes in presidential races don't
count -- most often because voters either skipped the race or their
marks weren't recorded by counting machines. Florida's rejection rate
this year, however, was higher -- about 2.9 percent.
The analysis tested even higher percentages of non-votes, 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
non-votes, 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 was tossed, ignoring the entire chad issue, Gore
still would have a 13,000-vote margin.
``One thing I would note is that there were other opportunities for
protest votes, one of whom was at last widely seen as a legitimate protest
vote and in fact styled himself as that [Ralph Nader],'' Doig said.
The results also would seem to challenge Bush camp assertions that
the Texas governor would prevail in a statewide recount. But Republicans
and some analysts didn't think they were strong enough to stand up.
MacManus, the USF political scientist echoed Eskew's concerns about
protest and apathetic votes, and said there were such wide variances
in the size and 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.
Alan Agresti, a professor of statistics at the University of Florida,
reviewed the methodology and called it ``overall reasonable.''
``You can always raise criticisms. You can never know for sure,''
he said. ``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
the analysis contained many uncertainties, what statisticians call ``ecological
inference'' -- a false assumption that voting patterns would be systematic
within precincts. In reality, the small percentage of voters whose ballots
were discarded might be the most unpredictable group of all.
But he also said ``I'm not shocked that Gore would have won.''
``All of the evidence points to that, if every single ballot would
have been cast correctly, Gore would have won the state,'' he said.
``I don't think anyone with any reasonableness would dispute that.''
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.
``If you did this at the county level, you'd have too many variables,''
Hess said. ``You can't get any smaller than precincts.''
``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. The problem is that all of those people whose votes were
not counted, they were not counted in part for perfectly good reasons.
It wasn't all shenanigans. In some cases, they didn't choose to vote,
or they were too dumb, or they just didn't follow instructions.''
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