- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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