[CTRL] Newspaper studies confirm Democrat Gore won Florida vote

[William Shannon]

http://wsws.org/articles/2001/feb2001/flor-f05.shtml

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.