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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Politics
Newspaper studies confirm Democrat Gore won Florida vote
By Patrick Martin
5 February 2001
Two newly published studies of the ballots cast in the US presidential
election confirm that Democrat Al Gore
was the choice of more Florida voters than Republican George W. Bush, who was
installed as president after
an unprecedented and anti-democratic intervention by the US Supreme Court.
One study was conducted by the Washington Post, the other by Tribune Co.,
which owns the Chicago Tribune,
the Orlando Sentinel, and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. The Post endorsed
Gore editorially in the
November election, while the Tribune endorsed Bush.
The Post reviewed computerized records of 2.7 million votes in eight of
Florida's largest counties to examine
the pattern of the so-called overvotes, those ballots on which computer
scanners or other vote-counting
machines detected votes for more than one presidential candidate and
discarded the ballots as invalid. The
newspaper did not recount individual ballots, but relied on reports from
county officials based on machine
tabulation of the invalid ballots.
The analysis found that of the more than 60,000 ballots in the eight counties
showing overvotes—the bulk of the
statewide total—Gore's name was marked on 46,000, while Bush was marked on
only 17,000. This includes
several thousand ballots in which both Gore and Bush were marked.
The 3-1 Democratic to Republican ratio among the overvotes was confirmed in
the analysis of other votes cast
by those voters further down the ballot. Three quarters of those who
improperly cast a presidential overvote
marked their ballots correctly for US senator. Of these, 70 percent voted for
Democrat Bill Nelson, only 24
percent for Republican Bill McCollum, while 6 percent voted for third-party
candidates.
The nearly 30,000-vote margin for Gore among the overvotes dwarfs the 537
votes which was Bush's official
margin of victory in Florida. On the basis of that minuscule and highly
dubious number, the
Republican-controlled state government, headed by his brother, Governor Jeb
Bush, awarded him the state's
25 electoral votes and a four-vote margin in the Electoral College nationally.
The eight counties examined by the Post included Miami-Dade, Palm Beach,
Broward (Fort Lauderdale),
Pinellas (St. Petersburg), Hillsborough (Tampa), Marion (Ocala), Highlands
and Pasco. Four of these counties
went for Gore and four for Bush. The pattern of more overvotes for Gore
prevailed in all the counties, however,
regardless of who won the county overall.
The notorious “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County accounted for 8,000 of
the Gore overvotes, most of them
double votes for Gore and far-right Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan,
who was listed across from Gore
on the ballot, with his punch-hole close to the names of Gore and Lieberman.
Gore-Buchanan voters in Palm
Beach County voted 10-1 Democratic in the US Senate race.
In the other seven counties, the largest group of overvotes were for Gore and
the candidate who followed
immediately after him on the ballot, Libertarian Harry Browne. Such a
combination is incomprehensible as a
protest vote, especially one supposedly chosen by 6,800 voters. It more
likely reflects confusion among voters
who thought they had to cast votes for president and vice-president.
Confirming the notion that the overvotes were largely intended for Gore is
the fact that most of the third-party
candidates on the ballot for president received more votes paired with Gore
as overvotes than they did in their
own right. In the eight counties, Socialist Workers Party candidate James
Harris received a total of 300 votes,
but his name was punched 12,600 times on ballots with Gore, Bush or another
presidential candidate—42
inadvertent votes for each intentional vote.
The Republican head of the Florida Division of Elections, Clay Roberts,
dismissed the Post analysis with an
argument of stupefying cynicism, claiming that overvotes were intentional
political choices. “People who are
engaged in politics can't understand why people would overvote,” he said.
“But there are valid reasons for
undervotes and overvotes. For some voters, that undervote or overvote is
their decision.”
The Post also found more than 15,000 voters in the eight counties who cast no
recorded votes for any office or
referendum. This suggests widespread difficulty with voting equipment, or
major errors in the computerized
count, or both, since it is impossible to believe that so many people turned
out at the polls, many of them waiting
hours in line, only to cast a blank ballot.
The Tribune Co. study examined ballots in 15 smaller counties—not including
any of the eight in the Post
study—that used paper ballots that were marked in pencil and then read by
optical scanners.
While much public attention has been given to the punch card ballots that
proved so defective in major urban
counties, the rate of invalid votes was actually higher in these 15 counties,
ten of which are predominately white
and rural areas in north Florida. The reason is that these counties lacked
the financial resources to have an
optical reader in each precinct.
In the 26 counties that did have scanners available in each precinct, voters
were instructed to put the ballot in
the scanner themselves. In the event of an improper vote, the scanner rejects
the ballot and the voter corrects
the mistake and resubmits it. In the poorer counties, the ballots from each
precinct are delivered to a central
counting location. Voters who mark their ballots improperly have no chance to
correct an error, since the
mistakes are not detected until the ballots are fed into the scanner at the
county seat. Their votes are simply
discarded.
Counties with optical scanners in each precinct had a vote error rate of less
than 1 percent. By comparison,
punch-card counties had an error rate of 3.9 percent, and counties with
optical scanners only in a central
location had an error rate of 5.7 percent. In Gadsden County, the only black
majority county in Florida, which
used optical scanners at a central location, the error rate was 12.4 percent,
and in some precincts as many as
one vote in four was ruled invalid.
The poorest and least educated voters were obviously those most likely to
make a mistake in casting their
ballots. These voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. As a result,
the Tribune Co.'s recount of the
15,596 invalid ballots showed a gain for Gore of 366 votes, even though Bush
carried 14 of the 15 counties.
A key factor in overvoting errors was the design of the ballot, almost as
confusing as Palm Beach's butterfly
ballot. In 13 of the 15 counties, the candidates for president were divided
into two pages. Eight were listed on
the first page and two, Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party and
Howard Phillips of the Constitutional
Party, on the second.
Some 4,252 voters cast ballots for Gore or Bush on the first page, and then
for Moorehead or Phillips on the
second page. If those votes had been counted for Gore and Bush, Gore would
have gained 564 votes, more
than Bush's statewide margin.
It is a curious fact that the designer of the two-page ballot, Hart
InterCivic, is a consulting firm based in Austin,
Texas, headquarters of the Bush presidential campaign. The company said it
followed a format sent out by the
Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, Florida co-chairman of the Bush
campaign and a member of the
cabinet of Governor Jeb Bush.
There were other anomalies. Officials in Lake County, who are Republican
loyalists, ruled that a presidential
ballot with two marks on it—one by the name, the other a write-in for the
same candidate—was invalid, although
state law allows them to be counted. The result was that 628 legal votes were
discarded, votes which went
disproportionately to Gore. Including these votes would have cut Bush's lead
by 122 votes. Gore would have
gained another 72 votes from similar double votes discarded in several
smaller counties.
Lake County also printed the name of Joe Lieberman in small type directly
above the word Libertarian in the
party label on the line below. As a result, nearly 300 voters in Lake County
cast ballots for Gore and Libertarian
Harry Browne, which were ruled invalid.
The Post and Tribune studies have gone virtually unmentioned in the America
media, except for the
newspapers that commissioned them. Not a single prominent Democratic Party
politician has taken note of
their findings.
Speaking on a television interview program January 28, House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt repeated
what has become the standard Democratic refrain. He said that in his opinion,
Gore had won the most votes
nationally and the most votes in Florida. But, he added, his opinion no
longer mattered, and he accepted the
legitimacy of Bush as president, following the Supreme Court decision of last
December 12.
Such comments, and the ongoing silence over the evidence trickling in from
Florida, demonstrates how far the
Democratic Party is from any principled defense of democratic rights.
Prostrate before the right wing, this big
business party is incapable of defending its own immediate electoral
interests, let alone the social and political
interests of working people.
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World Socialist Web Site
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