Re: OT: Zogy poll the whole story


<MrSoul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:...
Look it up on the internet or aren't you capable?


Newspapers' recount shows Bush prevailed
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY

George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's disputed ballots if
the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the
ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes - more than triple his
official 537-vote margin - if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the
ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder
study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review of the 61,195
"undervote" ballots that were at the center of Florida's disputed
presidential election.

The Florida Supreme Court ordered Dec. 8 that each of these ballots, which
registered no presidential vote when run through counting machines, be
examined by hand to determine whether a voter's intent could be discerned.
On Dec. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the hand count before it was
completed. That gave Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes, one more than he
needed to win the presidency.

USA TODAY, The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder newspapers hired the national
accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine undervote ballots in Florida's 67
counties. The accountants provided a report on what they found on each of
the ballots.

The newspapers then applied the accounting firm's findings to four standards
used in Florida and elsewhere to determine when an undervote ballot becomes
a legal vote. By three of the standards, Bush holds the lead. The fourth
standard gives Gore a razor-thin win.

The results reveal a stunning irony. The way Gore wanted the ballots
recounted helped Bush, and the standard that Gore felt offered him the least
hope may have given him an extremely narrow victory. The vote totals vary
depending on the standard used:

a.. Lenient standard. This standard, which was advocated by Gore, would
count any alteration in a chad - the small perforated box that is punched to
cast a vote - as evidence of a voter's intent. The alteration can range from
a mere dimple, or indentation, in a chad to its removal. Contrary to Gore's
hopes, the USA TODAY study reveals that this standard favors Bush and gives
the Republican his biggest margin: 1,665 votes.


b.. Palm Beach standard. Palm Beach County election officials considered
dimples as votes only if dimples also were found in other races on the same
ballot. They reasoned that a voter would demonstrate similar voting patterns
on the ballot. This standard - attacked by Republicans as arbitrary - also
gives Bush a win, by 884 votes, according to the USA TODAY review.


c.. Two-corner standard. Most states with well-defined rules say that a
chad with two or more corners removed is a legal vote. Under this standard,
Bush wins by 363.


d.. Strict standard. This "clean punch" standard would only count fully
removed chads as legal votes. The USA TODAY study shows that Gore would have
won Florida by 3 votes if this standard were applied to undervotes.
Because of the possibility of mistakes in the study, a three-vote margin is
too small to conclude that Gore might have prevailed in an official count
using this standard. But the overall results show that both campaigns had a
misperception of what the ballots would show. The prevailing view of both
was that minority or less-educated Democratic voters were more likely to
undervote because of confusion.

Gore's main strategy throughout the post-election dispute was to secure a
recount of any kind in the hope of reversing the certified result. Bush's
strategy was to stop the recount while he was ahead. But his views on how
recounts should be done, in the counties where they were underway, would
have been potentially disastrous for him if used statewide.

Bush and Gore were informed Tuesday of the new study's results. Both
declined comment. But White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The
President believes, just as the American people do, that this election was
settled months ago. The voters spoke, and George W. Bush won."

The newspapers' study took three months to complete and cost more than
$500,000. It involved 27 accountants who examined and categorized ballots as
they were held up by county election officials.

The study has limitations. There is variability in what different observers
see on ballots. Election officials, who sorted the undervotes for
examination and then handled them for the accountants' inspection, often did
not provide exactly the same number of undervotes recorded on election
night.

Even so, the outcome shows a consistent and decisive pattern: the more
lenient the standard, the better Bush does. Because Gore fought for the
lenient standard, it may be more difficult now for Democrats to argue that
the election was lost in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court rather than
the voting booths of Florida.

The study helps answer the question: What would have happened if the U.S.
Supreme Court had not stopped the hand count of undervotes?

However, it does not answer all the questions surrounding another set of
Florida ballots: the 110,000 "overvotes," which machines recorded as having
more than one presidential vote. These ballots were rejected by the machines
and were considered invalid. Some Democrats say if all of Florida's overvote
ballots were examined by hand to learn voters' intent, their candidate would
have prevailed.

USA TODAY, The Miami Herald and Gannett and Knight Ridder newspapers also
are examining Florida's overvotes for a study to be published later this
spring. Overvotes contain some valid votes, mostly instances when a voter
marked the oval next to a candidate's name and then wrote in the name of the
same candidate.

No candidate requested a hand count of overvotes, and no court - federal or
state - ordered one. The U.S. Supreme Court cited the state court's failure
to include the overvotes in its recount order as an example of
arbitrariness.

Immediately after Gore conceded the election to Bush, The Miami Herald began
to evaluate what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not
stopped the recount of undervotes.

Florida is one of the few states that permit members of the public to
examine ballots after they've been cast. The Miami Herald and the BDO
Seidman accounting firm began examining ballots on Dec. 18. USA TODAY joined
the project in January. The last undervote ballot was examined March 13.

Florida law requires that political parties be notified of ballot
inspections. The Republican and Democratic parties took different approaches
to the three months of ballot inspections.

The Democrats took a hands-off approach. They rarely showed up at election
offices during the evaluation. "We want to see what you find. It's not our
role to be at the table with you," Tony Welch, spokesman for the Florida
Democratic Party, said during the newspapers' study. "If we're spinning and
the Republicans are spinning, people won't believe the result."

He said at the time that the party expected the outcome would show that Gore
received more votes than Bush.

By contrast, the Republicans attended every ballot inspection. They devoted
hundreds of days of staff and volunteer time. The party delayed cutting its
post-election staff of field directors from 12 to 6 so it could staff the
ballot inspections. Some Republicans took meticulous notes on the contents
of the ballots. Others just watched. The Republican Party of Florida
published a daily internal memo called "Reality Check," which critiqued the
media efforts to examine ballots.

In an interview before the results were released, Mark Wallace, a Republican
lawyer assigned to critique the media inspections, said, "The media appear
ready to offer unprecedented liberal standards for judging what is a vote.
The appropriate legal standard is what was in place on Election Day: cleanly
punched cards only."

Before this election, almost nothing was known by the public and by
political parties about what types of marks appear on undervotes and
overvotes, which make up about 2% of ballots cast nationally. The
newspapers' study shows how both parties predicted incorrectly which of
these ballots would help them.

Democrats and Republicans noted that voter errors on punch-card voting
machines were most frequent in low-income and predominantly minority
precincts. Because these voters tend to vote Democratic, the disputed votes
were assumed to be a rich trove of support for Gore.

Likewise, both parties noted that the 41 Florida counties that used
optical-scan ballots, a system similar to standardized school tests, tended
to vote Republican.

Bush supporters attacked Gore for asking for hand counts in three
Democratic-leaning counties. If any hand count occurred, it should include
the Republican-leaning optical-scan counties, too, the Bush supporters said.

The USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study shows that the Democratic and
Republican assumptions were largely wrong. The undervote ballots actually
break down into two distinct categories:

a.. Undervotes in punch-card counties. In the 22 punch-card counties in
which BDO Seidman examined undervotes, 56% of the 35,761 ballots had some
kind of mark on them.
The study found that punch-card undervotes correlated less to race or party
affiliation than to machine maintenance and election management. Counties
that maintain machines poorly - not cleaning out chads frequently, for
example - have plentiful undervotes. The study shows that when undervotes
are hand counted, they produce new votes for the candidates in proportions
similar to the county's official vote.

For example, in Duval County, where Jacksonville is the county seat, Bush
defeated Gore 58%-41%. Among the undervotes, Bush defeated Gore 60%-32%
under the lenient standard and by similarly comfortable numbers under all
standards. Bush picked up a net of 930 votes, including 602 dimples.

Likewise, in Miami-Dade, where Gore hoped to score big gains, he received
51% of the marked undervotes, about the same as the 52% that he got in the
official count.

a.. Undervotes in optical-scan counties. In the 37 optical-scan counties
in which BDO Seidman examined undervotes, one third of 5,623 ballots had
discernible votes.
The most common was when a voter made an X or check mark, rather than
filling in the oval properly. Other common errors included circling the
candidate's name or using a personal pencil or pen that couldn't be read by
the machine. Black ink that contains even a trace of red will not register
on many vote-counting machines, even when the mark appears pure black to the
human eye.

The study shows that these errors were disproportionately common among
Democratic voters. For example, in Orange County, home of Orlando, Gore
edged Bush 50%-48% in the election. But Gore won the undervotes by 64%-33%,
giving him a net gain of 137 votes. That accounted for half of the 261 votes
Gore gained in optical-scan counties, which Bush won overall by 53%-44%.

The study found that optical-scan counties are the only places where Gore
actually picked up more votes than Bush: 1,036 to 775 for Bush.

In the punch-card counties, where Gore had placed his hopes, his chances of
winning a hand count were washed away. On dimples alone, Bush gained 1,188
votes. When all the possibilities are combined - dimples, hanging chads,
clean punches - Bush outdid Gore by 8,302 to 6,559.

USA TODAY's analysis is based on accepting Bush's official 537-vote margin.
This figure includes hand counts completed in Broward and Volusia counties
before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened.

The newspaper also accepted hand counts completed in Palm Beach, Manatee,
Escambia, Hamilton and Madison counties, plus 139 precincts in Miami-Dade.

These hand counts, which were never certified, reduced Bush's lead to 188 -
the starting point for USA TODAY's analysis.

The newspaper excluded these counties from its analysis. However, BDO
Seidman collected data in these counties, and they are available on
USATODAY.com.

In the end, Florida's presidential election remains remarkably close by any
standard: 2,912,790 to 2,912,253 in the official count.

In an election this close, the winner often depends on the rules and how
they are enforced.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-04-03-floridamain.htm


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