|
By Joel Engelhardt and Scott McCabe WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Confusion over Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot may have cost Al Gore about 6,600 votes -- more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida and win the presidency, a ballot review of discarded overvotes by The Palm Beach Post has found. The review of more than 19,000 punch cards reveals how a confusing presidential ballot forced the country into a contentious 37-day standoff in the courts and in the streets. Those few thousand votes examined are but a tiny slice of the 6 million cast in Florida, but in such a tight race, they were the key to the state's 25 electoral votes being awarded to Bush, giving him enough to win the presidency. The ballots show that 5,330 Palm Beach County residents, many of them in Democratic strongholds, invalidated their ballot cards by punching chads for both Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, whose hole on the punch card appeared just above Gore's. The ballots also show that another 2,908 voters punched Gore's name along with that of Socialist David McReynolds, the candidate whose hole on the card appeared just below Gore's. Both Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page of the two-page ballot; Gore's was on the left. Bush also appears to have been affected by the butterfly ballot confusion. The Post review found that 1,631 people punched both Bush and Buchanan, whose hole was located directly below Bush's on the ballot. The two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, add up to 6,607 lost votes for Gore and an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political experts and partisan observers agree. Even allowing that 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds -- which is more than their combined portion of Palm Beach County's total vote -- that would still leave Gore with 6,541 votes, more than enough to overcome Bush's statewide victory margin of 537 votes. "What it shows is what we've been saying all along -- there is no question that the majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore," said Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida. Ultimately, Gore carried the county with 270,233 votes to 153,278 for Bush. Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, speaking for the Republicans, said: "You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people; you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation." Nearly half the Gore-Buchanan overvotes came from precincts where the majority of voters were 65 or older and Democrats.
The overvotes can be divided into two types. Three-fourths of them were punches for two candidates, most of which experts say can be attributed to the ballot design. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem. Voters complained that they were confused by a ballot in which the names of the 10 presidential candidates alternated on two pages. They expected Bush and Gore to be the first two choices, as required by Florida statute, but instead found Buchanan, on a facing page, nestled between them. The result: People said they voted for Buchanan, then tried to correct their mistake by voting for Gore. Others said they voted for either Buchanan or McReynolds, thinking the ballot allowed them to vote for both president and vice president. Many of the voters were Jewish retirees in southern Palm Beach County who wanted to vote for a Jewish vice president, Gore's running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman. Instead, they voted for the right-leaning Buchanan, whom many Jewish voters consider to be anti-Semitic. Others say they believe that they accidentally voted for the left-leaning McReynolds, an obscure candidate who received 308 votes in Palm Beach County, almost half his statewide total of 622. "These are people who knew how to vote. Typically, they do it right. But the butterfly ballot discombobulated them," University of California-Berkeley professor Henry Brady said. The ballot's designer, Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, a Democrat, has said that she split the 10 presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county's elderly voters. She has admitted that her design was faulty. Nevertheless, Brady said, it's a stretch to blame ballots in which there were three or more punches on the butterfly design. "It is one thing to suggest that voters were unfairly messed up by a ballot that caused them to make two punches," said Brady, who has studied voting patterns for nearly 30 years, "but I think it gets hard to make any sort of case for the ballot being the problem once you get beyond two punches." The Post found that 5,062 voters punched three or more choices for president. Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates. These types of errors, which were disproportionately high in black-majority precincts, appear to be made by people who are uncertain about how to properly cast votes, said Anthony Salvanto, a University of California-Irvine researcher who has studied a computer database that recorded every clear punch on the ballots cast in Palm Beach County on Nov. 7. Gore appeared on 80 percent of the overvote ballots, 15,371 times on those cards clearly punched for two or more candidates. Buchanan drew the second-most punches on overvotes: 8,689. McReynolds appeared 4,567 times, the third most. Bush received the fifth-most punches, finishing behind Libertarian Harry Browne, who amassed 769 votes in the county but appeared on 4,218 overvote ballots. The numbers total more than the 19,125 because more than one name appears on every overvote ballot. Two other common punches -- votes for Bush-Gore and for Gore with Browne, who appeared immediately below Gore on the ballot -- are not as clearly linked to the butterfly ballot because they involve candidates on the same page, Brady said. Bush-Gore punches numbered 382, and Gore-Browne drew 1,305 votes. That 77-23 percent split is close enough to Gore's 62-35 percent victory in Palm Beach County to support the idea that the Bush-Gore votes probably were meant for Bush and the Gore-Browne votes probably were meant for Gore, Brady said. Another explanation for the Gore-Browne confusion could be blamed on Gore voters who saw the party name "Libertarian" in all capital letters and mistook it for Lieberman, Salvanto said. Blaming the ballot Can the voting difficulty really be ascribed to the butterfly ballot? Without a doubt, Brady and Salvanto say. Consider: * Ninety-two percent of the voters who cast two votes for president did not cast an overvote in the seven-candidate Senate race, where the candidates were all on one page, Salvanto found. That indicates that they knew not to punch two candidates elsewhere on the ballot but were confused by the presidential design, he said. * Voters at polling places were eight times more likely to over-vote than absentee voters, who filled out their punch card at home and did not use the butterfly ballot, another indicator that the ballot, not the voter, was at fault, Brady said. * In 1996, with four candidates listed, the county recorded 3,073 overvotes, less than 1 percent of all ballots. Last year it recorded 19,235 overvotes, 4.2 percent of the ballots. * The county recorded 2,229 more votes in the Senate race than the presidential race. It is generally more common for people to vote for president than for senator. * Eighty-three percent of Gore-Buchanan voters picked Democrat Bill Nelson for U.S. senator, showing a likelihood that they supported Democrats, Salvanto found. Nelson received 62 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County.
The Post's review of overvotes, conducted Jan. 17 through Jan. 29, illustrated the difficulty of hand recounts of punch-card ballots. Even the total number of overvotes was difficult to pin down. The county recorded 19,235 overvotes after its 10-day hand recount that ended Nov. 26; The Post counted 110 fewer. In 138 of the county's 637 precincts, the number of overvotes shown to reporters by LePore's office did not match the official tally. LePore declined to explain why the votes were not shown and refused The Post's Feb. 13 request to look for them until April 2, after the municipal runoffs will be over. Most of the precincts were off by three or fewer ballots, but 14 were off by 10 or more. To capture the missing ballots, The Post analyzed a computer image, prepared by Salvanto, of the ballots in 13 of those 14 precincts. Salvanto, a faculty fellow in political science, routinely reviews ballot records from elections nationally. He requested the Palm Beach County computer record shortly after the Nov. 7 election. His findings, also based on an incomplete record because 25 precincts had been erased, closely matched The Post's findings. One-fourth of the 19,125 overvotes -- 5,062 votes -- were ballots with three or more punches, The Post found. These can't all be blamed on the ballot design, researchers said. Many voters ignored the right side of the ballot, mixing their votes among candidates on the left side. For instance, the most common triple punch wasn't Buchanan- Gore- McReynolds, which received 115 votes. It was Gore- Nader- Hagelin, with 138, a combination that pointed to voters picking among the six candidates on the left side. And the fifth-most popular overvote combination was a vote for Gore, Browne, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Socialist Workers candidate James Harris and Natural Law candidate John Hagelin. That combination alone -- the entire left side of the ballot except Bush -- drew 514 votes. Salvanto said this could be interpreted two ways: "People voting for who they approve of -- `I'll take any of these yahoos except for Bush.' Or, by punching out a candidate you are literally punching out the candidate -- and that's a Bush voter," he said. Ballots with three or more punches came from a disproportionately high number of black neighborhoods, where a strong get-out-the-vote campaign produced a historic turnout, The Post study showed. Of those 5,062 multipunches, 1,290, or 25 percent, came from precincts with a black majority, which make up just 7 percent of all the county's polling places. Black voters overwhelmingly supported Gore. Monte Friedkin, the county's Democratic Party chairman who criticized LePore's handling of the election, said that while he understood the ballot-borne confusion, the voter must take some of the blame as well. "Frankly the system is bad, the machines are not user-friendly, but at the end of the day it's as much the fault of the voter as the process. We can make all the excuses we want, but the facts are the facts, and George Bush is president," Friedkin said. |
