Status Report on Florida Recount Efforts

W A S H I N G T O N, March 12, 2001 -- To everything there is a season ... and for nearly every newspaper there is a recount.

President Bush's trip to Florida today comes amid a variety of recounting that is going on to determine "what really happened" on Election Day in the state.

The common denominator to all these efforts is that they are going back over ballots with the legally mandated assistance of county employees — but some are just looking at the undervotes (ballots that did not record a vote), others at just the overvotes (ballots that recorded more than one vote), and some at both kinds of votes.

Some of the efforts attempt to make definitive statements about what might have been. Others don't, choosing instead to simply categorize the different kinds of ballots.

The biggest recount effort is by a consortium of the leading national papers and some Florida outlets. The results of this effort are not expected for another month, at least.

What has caused some confusion is that some of the other efforts have released partial results — recount totals and analyses for certain counties, or groups of counties, or for only certain kinds of ballots (such as undervotes).

No one yet has announced full, statewide recount tallies, but those partial results announced so far have created small firestorms of "Bush would still have won" or "Gore would have won" news coverage reports.

For the real lowdown on where each recount effort stands, read on:

Palm Beach Post

The Post this weekend released the extent of its ongoing tabulations thus far, which found that Palm Beach County's overvotes (on its now-infamous "butterfly" ballots) "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." The Post also found Gore would have gained 784 votes in Palm Beach County had officials counted every punch-card ballot that had a hanging, pinholed or dimpled chad (the so-called "undervotes").

Back in January, the Post reported that if all the disputed ballots in Palm Beach County had been counted as votes, Gore would have picked up 682 votes, more than Bush's 537-vote statewide margin of victory.

The best news the paper has offered the Bush team so far: Its assessment of Miami-Dade County's 10,600 uncounted ballots would have led to a gain of only six votes for Gore.

Orlando Sentinel

The Sentinel found more than 200 potential ballots for Gore were thrown out in Osceola County on Election Day because voters might have confused the last name of Gore running mate Joe Lieberman with the "Libertarian" party label for the next candidate listed.

The Sentinel also reported an examination of rejected ballots in Orange County found clear presidential votes on 799 ballots the vote-counting machines rejected as either having no votes marked or multiple candidates marked. According to the paper, Gore would have gained more than 200 votes net if Orange County had conducted a hand recount of all the ballots its machines could not read after Election Day.

Finally, a Sentinel-led review of all 15,596 ballots rejected in the 15 counties that used optical scanner machines found that thousands of potentially valid votes were lost because ballot designs were confusing, counting methods were inconsistent, and because, in some cases, election officials never looked at the ballots that were rejected by machines. Optical scanners were found to have produced the highest rates of voting errors in Florida.

Most remarkably, at least in Democrats' eyes, is the fact that this review found Gore would have gained 366 votes from the combined 15 counties if all the previously uncounted ballots were tallied. This review was performed in the mostly North Florida counties of Bradford, Charlotte, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Hamilton, Hendry, Jackson, Lafayette, Lake, Levy, Liberty, Okeechobee, Suwannee and Taylor.

The Sentinel also reported that its inspection of more than 6,000 discarded ballots in Lake County showed Gore losing a net 130 votes that were clearly his, even in a conservative GOP bastion that Bush dominated as a whole. Democrats believe the statewide recounts will show Gore would have netted votes in Democratic precincts, even in otherwise Republican-dominated counties.

Miami Herald/Knight-Ridder/USA Today

The consortium reported late last month that, based on its examination of 10,644 ballots that did not register on the tabulating machines, Gore would have netted at most an additional 49 votes from the state's most populous county, Miami-Dade. Even when combined with Gore gains from the three other counties that conducted manual recounts — Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia — the papers found that among the undervotes, Gore ultimately would have trailed Bush by 140 votes and would have lost the state.

This count also suggests — if the numbers are right — that Gore would have lost even if he had gotten the full hand counts he had asked for in those four counties. Partly because of this, Democrats have switched their emphasis to the results of statewide surveys, as ordered ultimately by the Florida Supreme Court, but stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Herald reported that, according to a statewide, precinct-by-precinct examination it conducted, ballots in majority-black precincts were discarded at a rate three times higher than those in non-black precincts. Nearly one in every 10 ballots in majority-black precincts went unrecorded. In majority-white precincts, the discard rate was less than one ballot in 38.

The Herald also found more than 2,000 illegal ballots were cast in 25 Florida counties by unregistered voters, ineligible felons, and a handful of senior citizens who voted absentee first, then voted again at their local precinct after swearing they hadn't voted yet. It's not clear, of course, how these people voted, but analysts from both parties believe they are more likely to be Gore voters than Bush voters.

Tribune Publishing, Associated Press, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal

This mega-consortium is examining the estimated 180,000 undercounted ballots that didn't register a vote for president during machine counts. The effort is being run by the National Opinion Research Center, a nonprofit firm affiliated with the University of Chicago. Results are not expected until April, at least, and possibly later.

Non-Media Recounts

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch (a perennial thorn in former President Clinton's side) is conducting its own recount, as is the Florida Republican Party. It's unclear when these efforts will be done, or what their scope is.