In case you were wondering who the President of the US really is: >The Wall Street Journal [http://www.wsj.com/] 's world-wide newsbox and >Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/] lead with a study of the >Florida recount they jointly undertook (along with the NYT, LAT, and >various other papers) that found that if the U.S. Supreme Court had not >intervened, and the vote count had continued under the rules devised by >the Florida Supreme Court, President Bush would have likely still won the >election. On the other hand, the study, which examined 175,010 >disqualified Florida ballots, also concluded that more people probably >meant to vote for former Vice President Al Gore than Bush. > >The study concluded that Bush would have won any count that included >undervotes (reminder: undervotes are ballots that contain a single invalid >or unclear mark). But Gore would have won a vote that included overvotes >(ballots that included marks for more than one presidential candidate). >The catch: Gore's lawyers never pushed for overvotes to be counted. (For >those who have--happily--tossed these terms from their minds, the LAT >includes a glossary >[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-111201recount.story]) >The report was originally going to be released September 16, but was >delayed after the World Trade Center attacks. > >The LAT maps out eight different counting scenarios, from least to most >restrictive. Bush and Gore each would have won under four of them. In a >fun little twist, it turns out Gore would have won under Bush's fallback >position (that optical scanners read hand markings and some ballots with >hanging chads), while Bush would have won under Gore's proposed recounting >method (a hand count of undervotes). > >So, case closed? Well, no. The LAT reports in the 50th graph (a.k.a. the >4th to the last) that although the study "doesn't have a margin of error," >it's "not entirely precise" either. That's because some counties in >Florida didn't keep good records and don't know if some ballots were >included in the original certified vote. > >The WP tells readers who want to see the raw data to visit the web site of >the National Organization for Research [http://norc.uchicago.edu/], the >group that actually crunched the numbers. As of Today's Papers press time, >the site didn't contain any such data.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
