2000 Election Controversy Resurfaces

Over at dKos, there is a lengthy discussion thread about a book by and interview with Professor Lance deHaven-Smith is a professor in the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University.

We're also looking at this over at FLA Politics.

The Professor wrote the dKos poster an e-mail clarifying a few points, making clear the following:

A number of studies have been conducted of the "spoiled ballots" in Florida. The most thorough was by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. It examined all of the 175,010 spoiled ballots that were excluded from the vote tabulations in Florida in 2000. Ballots were examined by multiple coders to assure reliability, and a dataset (available on NORC's website) was constructed that included each coder's judgment on each ballot. NORC also provided a program for applying different criteria and calculating the results. If the most restrictive criteria are used, Gore's margin of victory is 158 votes. By "most restrictive," I mean ballots are counted only if the voter's intention is totally unambiguous (no partially punched chads, no unclear write-ins, etc.).

Please note that this estimate of Gore's margin is very conservative. It only counts ballots that are totally unambiguous. Also, it deals only with votes as they were actually cast - it does not address the votes lost by Gore because of the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County or the faulty ballot instructions in Duval and Gadsden Counties. Nor does it take into account the effects of Florida's flawed program of felon disenfranchisement, which excluded many eligible voters from casting ballots and also created delays and confusion at polling places. During the election controversy, most observers acknowledged that more voters had gone to the polls to vote for Gore than for Bush, but it was unclear whether Gore had actually received more legally valid votes. We now know that he did.

Today, this would be widely recognized if NORC had published a report on its findings, but instead it chose simply to release the data and let everyone make sense of it on their own. My assumption is that NORC and the research sponsors did not issue a report because they did not want to embarrass President Bush. The study was concluded just after 9-11-01.

(via dKos).

Note from Florida Politics: Republicans and their allies in the media like to muddy the water by saying that these NORC numbers are well and good but are nevertheless irrelevant because Gore did not request a statewide recount.  However this claim - which the docile media has accepted - is entirely irrelevant because these "spoiled ballots" (including overvotes) were required by law to be reviewed and counted in the first place (if the intent of the voter was discernible); instead these ballots were never officially counted, and in the vast majority of counties were never looked at in the official process (because they were not counted by the machines)


Moreover, the official counting of these ballots during the recount was truncated by the SCOTUS stay order.


Bottom line: these "spoiled ballots" which for the most part clearly showed what the voter intended (e.g., Gore's name on the ballot might have been circled on a optical scan ballot instead of the small circle being filled in, or the ballot might have double marked, or overvoted (e.g., one mark properly placed next to Gore's name and the "write in" also marked with Gore's name, etc.) were never included in the vote totals because they did not register on the vote tabulating equipment in the initial count and the requisite hand review of these so-called spoiled ballots" was never undertaken (except in a handful of Florida counties).