Never saw much about the ultimate conclusion of those re-counts sponsored by the Florida newspapers and other media after the 2000 Presidential race was over. Did they confirm or deny a Bush victory?
Depends on how you want to spin it:
“On November 12, 2001, the results from a recount of Florida ballots sponsored by a consortium including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, among others, were released. The actual results of the extremely comprehensive study were mixed. The consortium released data showing 11 different scenarios. Within each, results for 4 standards of agreement between the coders who examined the ballots were also reported. Therefore, there were a total of 44 separate scenarios. As befitted the election of 2000, Bush was ahead under 22 of those scenarios, and Gore was ahead under 22. In general, however, Bush would have likely emerged the victor if only undervotes were counted, while Gore would likely have won had all the ballots, both overvotes and undervotes, been counted.”
There’s a good analysis of the report, and the media’s subsequent spin, here.
Oh, here is a chart from the New York Times showing the results under the different recount scenarios.
Florida Recount Study: Bush Still Wins
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html
source: University of Chicago and CNN
PS 44 scenarios with 22 for each? Sounds like data-mining.
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- WTF is an “undercount” or an “overcount”? I thought the whole argument was over “ballots cast by real, actual people”? You can sit and wonder all day about what effect “poor ballot design” had on it. We might well suppose that had Bush not been listed at all, Gore would have won…
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- WTF is an “undercount” or an “overcount”? I thought the whole argument was over “ballots cast by real, actual people”? You can sit and wonder all day about what effect “poor ballot design” had on it. We might well suppose that had Bush not been listed at all, Gore would have won…
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You mean “undervote” and “overvote”, right? In this case, an undervote ballot does not contain a machine-readable vote for president, while an overvote registers more than one vote for president.
Undervote example: Someone tries to punch a ballot for Gore, but the chad doesn’t pop out completely.
Overvote example: The list of Presidential candidates is printed on two pages, in two columns, and someone punches out a chad in both columns (say, “Gore” and “Buchanan”).
The media recounts have clearly shown that either Bush or Gore won the contest in Florida, or not.
. . . which shows that the Supreme Court was right: Gore didn’t show that additional recounts would have done any good because the methodology was all screwy from the get-go.
I believe these types of overvotes are not discernable as to voter intent.
The overvotes in question were when someone would punch the “Gore” option, and then wrote “Gore” under the write-in candidate section, mistaking Write-in candidate as a command instead of a separate option.
IIRC the Gore camp assumed the write-in overvotes had voted in general for Bush, so did not ask in their cases that these be counted (they wanted every vote to count, but not really EVERY vote). If counted as the Gore team asked (and as the courts before the SCOTUS got involved had ruled), the overcounts would not be counted, and Bush would win. If overvotes (the write-in ones) had been counted, Gore would have won – but no one asked.
::examining yet another closeup of photo finish::
“Look! This hair is clearly a Horse B hair and it is 0.0125 millimeters out in front of the Horse A hair we identified last Thursday! Horse B wins!”
“It’s a printout of a freakin’ 300 dpi image. You’re looking at ink bleed on the paper. It’s a tie, Joey. I can’t help it if you had money on this race. Go to bed. It’s a freakin’ tie.”
My understanding is that the recounts only looked at the chads.
Not the Butterfly Ballots.
Not the Jewish vote for Buchanan.
Not the minorities being turned away from the polls because of clerical errors.
I believe that more Floridians went out to vote For Gore than got counted.
How about a simple answer. This isn’t Truman-Dewey. The polling and forecasting is much more sophisticated than it was 50 years ago. The networks had called this race. It then got uncalled. Because either the people leaving the polls had lied to the poller, OR someone had manipulated the votes when counting them.
Exit polls aren’t usually a single question. People predicting from exit polls are professionals.
This was a coup. A bloodless ballot box coup. Not sure it was the first. And certainly California proves it won’t be the last.
Pause a minute from taking minorities and their votes for granted and consider that the panhandle had folks (reps and dems and greens) stay at home because the media called the election too soon.
The media called the election for GORE that evening, by the way, just to jog memories.
Please obtain an elementary knowledge of statistical analysis before you decide to make such an asinine statement in the future. At least that way, we’ll know if you’re crazy, or just ignorant.
An overvote could also have consisted of a chad being punched out, and the same candidate’s name being written in below. Although those were not officially counted, despite the “clear intent of the voter” under the law, the media consortium did include them.
The exit polls seemed to indicate what happened - that a small plurality of voters really did think they had voted for Gore, even without counting the ones who weren’t allowed to vote in the first place. That was the basis for the network calls. Only when the ballots started to come in from certain bellwether precincts and showed a statistically-significant variation from the exit polls were the calls retracted. The later calls for Bush were started by Fox, whose election-night coverage was run by Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis, who was in close contact with the Bush campaign throughout the evening. The Fox call was not based on either exit polls or actual counts, as far as is known. The other nets’ calls were monkey see, monkey do.
daniel801, the total of voters in the Panhandle who came forward and admitted not voting because of the early call (early by 11 minutes, mind you) is one (1).
…then they retracted the call, then later called it for Bush, with a little nudging from George’s cousin at Fox News.
Just to jog memories. 
Cousin? Please, rjung, enlighten me. It could explain a lot.
:eek:
I’m gonna love hearing this.
Peace,
mangeorge
The aforementioned John Ellis was Fox’s chief pollster.