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Miami-Dade ballot recount
By Clay Lambert and Bill Douthat, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 14, 2001
MIAMI -- George W. Bush would have gained six votes more than Al Gore if all
the dimples and hanging chads on 10,600 previously uncounted ballots in
Miami-Dade County had been included in the totals, according to a review by
The Palm Beach Post.
That result would have been a hard blow to Al Gore's hopes of claiming the
presidency in a recount. Before the vice president conceded last month, the
Gore camp had expected to pick up as many as 600 votes from a Miami-Dade
recount -- barely enough to overtake Bush's razor-thin Florida lead.
Instead, The Post's review indicates Gore would have lost ground.
If everything were counted -- from the faintest dimple to chads barely
hanging on ballots -- 251 additional votes would have gone to Bush and 245
more would have gone to Gore, The Post review showed.
The review, concluded last week, also showed that the vast majority of
ballots rejected as under-votes (meaning there was no clear punch for any
candidate) when counted by machine appeared, in fact, to cast no vote for
president. About 7,600 under-votes had no mark at all on the presidential
column, or in rare cases included multiple votes that defied judgment. Most
of the voters who did not indicate a vote for president did punch choices in
other races.
But at least 2,257 voters apparently poked at their ballot cards without
properly inserting them into the voting machines. Miami-Dade County
Elections Supervisor David Leahy said that's because the voters failed to
follow directions.
Of these miscast votes, 302 more would have gone for Gore than Bush, under
Leahy's theory.
Even if those votes had been cast correctly, however, it would not have
changed the outcome of a presidential election that turned on 537 votes for
Bush in Florida.
"In other words, Dade was a wash," said Ivy Korman, director of special
projects for the Miami-Dade County supervisor of elections. "And, knowing
our county the way that we do, that is why we didn't feel the need to do a
manual recount."
Gore easily carried the county by more than 39,000 votes on Nov. 7. The
certified results in Miami-Dade were 328,808 for Gore and 289,533 for Bush,
according to the Florida secretary of state's office.
Counts' results will vary
The Miami-Dade canvassing board abandoned its manual recount Nov. 22 after
counting 140 of the county's 616 precincts. And four teams of judges in Leon
County were about halfway through Miami-Dade's disputed ballots Dec. 9 when
the U.S. Supreme Court stopped all recounts in Florida. No results were
released from the judges' partial recount.
The Post's review of all the under-votes is the first of several planned or
under way. Later this month, a consortium that includes The Post, The Wall
Street Journal and The New York Times plans to begin looking at the
under-votes in each of Florida's 67 counties. The Miami Herald and USA Today
are doing a similar review. The Herald/USA Today review, using accountants,
is expected to be finished in Miami-Dade this week.
Because of varying judgments by reviewers on how each ballot is marked and
the inevitable human error that occurs when thousands of ballots are
examined by hand, results of the reviews by newspapers are almost certain to
differ.
Furthermore, experts say no count -- whether done by hand or by machine --
will ever be exact. Computer industry consultants estimate the error rate
for counting punch cards could run as high as 1 percent and varies with the
number of times the cards are handled.
(For example, results changed in 313 of Palm Beach County's 531 precincts
when the ballots were counted by hand.)
In the 37-day contest of Florida election results, Gore had hoped to find a
mother lode of votes in heavily Democratic South Florida to overtake Bush. A
manual recount in Broward County added 567 votes for Gore. Although it did
not meet the deadline, the manual recount in Palm Beach County would have
added 174 votes.
The Bush campaign contended the recounts were unnecessary because Bush won
on Nov. 7 and in the mandated machine recount conducted Nov. 8.
Pattern in mis-punches?
In the Miami-Dade under-vote, the largest group of marked ballots was the
2,257 cleanly but inaccurately punched cards. During the media review,
Leahy, the elections supervisor, demonstrated how many voters might have
punched odd-numbered chads, which didn't correspond to any of the 10
candidates for president named on the ballot.
Miami-Dade elections officials assigned only even numbers to the
presidential candidates -- No. 4 for Bush, No. 6 for Gore, No. 8 for
Libertarian Harry Browne and so on.
Leahy showed that when punch cards were laid over the ballot booklets
instead of inserted into the machine the arrow corresponding to Bush
appeared to point to the No. 5 chad rather than the proper No. 4 chad.
Likewise, the arrow for Gore appeared next to the No. 7 rather than the
correct No. 6.
The Post found 1,023 cleanly punched holes at No. 7; Leahy speculates these
may have been attempts to vote for Gore. There were 721 clean punches at No.
5; these could have been attempts to vote for Bush. The Post also found 129
more odd-numbered marks that were not clean punches, such as dimpled or
partly detached chads.
Miami-Dade elections officials have been aware since November that a small
percentage of voters wrongly punched odd-numbered chads. The Post's tally of
2,257 clean punches in the presidential column is about one-third of 1
percent of the 653,963 ballots cast in the county.
Korman said the instructions were clear and appeared in both English and
Spanish on ballot cards and machines.
"You can lead some people to water, but you can't make them drink," she
said.
Larry Klayman is chairman of Judicial Watch Inc., a governmental watchdog
group conducting its own review of under-votes in eight Florida counties.
"These are interesting findings and point to the need for a new system,"
Klayman said. "The system we have is broken."
Klayman said his organization would intervene on behalf of a lawsuit filed
Thursday by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming that irregularities in
Florida's vote amount to a denial of the equal protection guaranteed by the
U.S. Constitution.
Question of equal protection?
Judicial Watch supports the claim that the NAACP and ACLU make regarding
equal protection, but it does not support their claim that there is also
evidence of racial discrimination in the outcome of the presidential
election.
The Post review, however, found that the rate of voting mishaps was greater
in black-majority precincts than elsewhere. While 1.6 percent of all votes
cast countywide for president were not counted because they were considered
under-votes, that rate was 2.7 percent in the 112 precincts with a black
majority.
In the 24 precincts where a majority of voters were 65 or older, 2.1 percent
of the voters cast under-votes, while 1.4 percent of the voters in the 217
Hispanic-majority precincts delivered under-votes.
For example, in Precinct 513 in northwest Miami-Dade, where blacks make up
96.3 percent of the registered voters, 7 percent (28 voters) miscast
ballots.
Thomasina Williams, an attorney representing the NAACP and other civil
rights groups suing the state and seven counties over the election, said
black precincts in Miami-Dade could have had more problems because they may
have been using older, less reliable voting machines and were assigned poll
workers with less training.
"Predominantly black areas fall prey to that because they don't get the same
service," said Williams, who filed suit in federal court in Miami Wednesday
asking that the punch-card system be eliminated.
Miami-Dade elections officials were not available Friday to comment on
Williams' claims.
The Post also found some voters used pens or pencils to shade or circle
their choice for president. The outcome in such cases was a tie: 23 votes
each for Bush and Gore.
Also among the ballots were 24 cleanly punched votes for Bush and 35 for
Gore that had not been counted by the machines. One theory: The chads had
been dislodged sometime after the initial machine count and during the seven
occasions Leahy estimates in which the ballots were handled since the
election.
Media review called waste
Republicans are conducting their own review of disputed ballots in Florida.
Mark Wallace, a Miami attorney representing the state's Republican Party,
said the media's review is a waste of time.
"It doesn't matter what the outcome is," he said. "The fact that we gained
votes is fine and dandy, but the things you (The Post) counted didn't
correspond with the law."
Calls to the Democratic Party were referred to the Democratic National
Committee, which did not immediately return calls.
Staff writer Brian Crecente, database editor Christine Stapleton and clerk
Janis Fontaine contributed to this story.
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