It's close to certain that, had the tens of thousands of would-be voters disenfranchised in the Florida 2000 presidential election (mostly African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) been allowed to vote, Gore would have easily won Florida. But let's put aside this barely observed scandalous fact, along with the equally scandalous fact that the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida's mandated recount for no good reason, and ask: looking just at those ballots that were in fact cast, who would have won the recount: Bush or Gore?
Shortly after the election, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted a study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Tribune Co. (Newsday's parent company), the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CNN. Nearly a year and $900,000 were spent reexamining every ballot that was rejected by the punch-card process.
The results? According to the mainstream media, Bush would have won, even if the Supreme Court hadn't interfered. Typical was this CNN report, according to which "A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president". But in fact the study suggests the opposite.
First, this presentation of the scenario on which Bush still wins as involving a "statewide" recount is misleading and incorrect. The scenario on which Bush wins involves the recount's being done only in the four counties concerning which Gore had petitioned the Florida Supreme Court:
"Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide".
A statewide margin based on a partial state recount does not a statewide recount make. Most crucially, however, "what Gore originally wanted" is irrelevant to determining who would have won Florida had not the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. For the Florida Supreme court went beyond Gore's original request, and mandated recounts in any county where there were undervotes---ballots where no choice for a candidate is registered---that hadn't yet been manually tabulated:
"The [Florida Supreme] court further held that relief would require manual recounts in all Florida counties where so-called “undervotes” had not been subject to manual tabulation. The court ordered all manual recounts to begin at once".
And in setting out the standards for recounting, the Florida court followed that set by the Florida Legislature, according to which "ballots where "voter intent" is clear must be counted". This view, according to which simple voter error is not a sufficient condition for not counting a ballot, so long as voter intent can be established, has a long and robust history in U.S. law.
Now, if a genuine statewide recount had been done, as per the Florida court mandate, what would have been the result? Using the Palm Beach standard for determining a valid ballot had been operative in a genuine statewide recount, Gore would have won:
"Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore".
Now, the Palm Beach County standards look to be clearly sufficient for establishing voter intent; hence irrespective of how "restrictive" or "unrestrictive" they may be compared to other county standards, they should have been applied in carrying out the recount. If the study applied this standard to whatever statewide undervotes "had not yet been subject to manual tabulation", as per the Florida court decision, then the upshot is that Gore would have won. I'll do some research on this, and also on the question of what role the standards associated with individual counties did or would have played in the recount, given that the Florida Legislature standard was invoked in the decision; but in any case, there is a case to be made that ultimately, any undervotes that revealed voter intent as per the Palm Beach standard should have been counted in the final tally.
Now let us turn our attention to another relevant issue; namely, the fact that only undervotes were at issue in Gore's petition and in the Florida court decision. As Jim Naurekas of FAIR notes, Gore and the court evidently decided that there wasn't any point in recounting overvotes---votes where more than one candidate is selected, by hole punch or by marking---since it seemed there wouldn't, for such ballots, be any way of establishing voter intent.
But as it happens, the NORC study found that it often was possible to clearly determine voter intent in overvote cases, as when the same candidate's name was written next to both marks. If these ballots are counted... then guess what? Gore wins!
"In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes".
Given that, as per the Florida Legislature standard, cited by the Florida Supreme Court, that "ballots where "voter intent" is clear must be counted", then these overvotes should have been counted. Of course, since the Florida court wasn't actually concerned with overvotes, then this point wouldn't have impacted the outcome of the election, even supposing the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened. Still, to the extent that we are interested in the question of how big a victory Gore would have had, had all rejected ballots been appropriately counted, then attention to intention-revealing overvotes is important.
In any case, whether the question "Who would have won the recount?" is understood as holding fixed the fact that the Florida court mandated a statewide recount of undervotes, or is rather understood as supposing that a recount also takes into account discernible voter intentions associated with overvotes, the answer is: Gore would have. It is only by understanding the question "Who would have won the recount?" as holding fixed Gore's "original desire" to have the recount take place in only 4 counties---a desire rendered irrelevant by the Florida court's decision to conduct the recount statewide---that CNN and the other major media were able to spin the NORC results as confirming the illegal status quo. What a bunch of losers.
Recent Comments