http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=miami+herald+gore+wonA reason to ignore the Miami Herald recount
Slate
Jacob Weisberg
April 6th, 2001
To sort out the data now coming in from the various media recounts of the presidential vote in Florida, you have to take care in framing your inquiry. The question "Who really won Florida" is much too vague.
By manipulating the data and indulging various contrary-to-fact scenarios, it's possible to get to any answer you want. But there are some more specific questions that help to hone in on the big issue, namely George W. Bush's legitimacy as president. In ascending order of importance, my questions are :
1) Who did more people in Florida attempt to vote for?
2) Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the recount?
3) Who would have won if every legally valid vote had been counted?
We've known the answer to question No. 1 for some time. More people went to the polls intending to vote for Al Gore. Stephen Doig, a specialist in computer-assisted research, demonstrated this in a Miami Herald story published in early December (and unfortunately no longer archived on the paper's Web site). Based on a precinct-by-precinct analysis of 185,000 uncounted Florida votes, Al Gore would have won the state by 23,468 votes if every voter had succeeded in voting the way he or she intended to vote.
Put another way, there is solid statistical evidence that more people in Florida left the voting booth thinking they had voted for Gore than left thinking they voted for Bush. But to my mind, that interesting conclusion has only a minor impact on Bush's legitimacy--no more than does the fact that Gore won the popular vote nationally. If a larger number of Floridians didn't cast legally valid votes for Gore, Bush still won the election under the rules of the game
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And this...
http://www.skirsch.com/politics/election2000/whowon.htmMiami Herald had the most comprehensive study of the will of the people. Scrupulously non partisan. Gore by 23,000 votes. This has not been challenged. Under every assumption Gore wins. The only assumption where Bush would win is if virtually all of the 185,000 uncounted ballots were meant to be uncounted. There is a 0% chance of that.
The actual number is probably even higher than that since thousands of blacks (not convicts) were improperly kicked off the voter registration lists.
It's also easy to see: vote tally was even so far. Statistical dead heat (within accuracy of machines). But what was the will of the people in the undervote and overvote that was never counted?
Undervote happens 5X more with punch card systems than optical systems. Makes logical sense because you vote blind. You can't see if you didn't punch or double punch. In Florida, both systems are used. Punch card systems are used in democratic counties. To compensate, we must hand count in punch card counties (usually demo) using Broward (or Texas) standard. Recover 25%. Need to recover 80% to be equal to optical machines. That's why there is a difference. So in any close election where different machinery is used, we must do a manual recount to equalize counting accuracy.
Overvote: 19,120 ballots in Palm Beach. Easy to count since 97.5% voted for either Bush or Gore. 90% for Gore; 15% punched for Bush. That means Gore is due over 10,000 net votes to Bush since virtually no votes for anyone else. Predicted the most frequent overpunches based on examining the ballot design. Shouldn't we count this clear intent? 6 to 1 for Gore?
30 independent papers show statistical certainty that only Gore voters were affected by the Palm Beach design and double punched. Supreme Court only said bias was not so bad as to throw out the election, but it was enough to adjust the results. Bad lawyering on the democratic side caused this. Gore's legal team was not involved in this case. Is that fair? Bad lawyering plus biased ballot = voters get disenfranchised.
These are not spoiled ballots. These are legally cast ballots that have not been counted even once. We can determine the voter intent in these legal ballots that voters marked. The law doesn't say "you MUST remove all the chads for your vote to count."
So you must ask yourself the following question: if the voter tried to complied with the instructions, and if a machine can't read your intent (because it was only designed to accept ballots meeting a certain technical specification) but a human can either by direct means or by 99%+ confidence statistical analysis (that gives a higher confidence than machine counts), should we count it or throw it away?
Gore offered Bush to recount the entire state. Bush refused. Why?
Gore should have also offered to Bush a statistical recount where every registered voter is enfranchised based on statistics to estimate the tally where no vote (undervote or overvote) was found. The Miami Herald commissioned a study to do exactly that. The result? Gore won by 23,000 votes.
And a very easy calculation to do yourself (see Appendix 2D in my re-allocation analysis), we can see if we "enfranchise" the confused voters in Palm Beach County alone, Gore should have received over 10,000 votes relative to Bush that he did not receive in that one county alone.
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Note: There is NO credible statistical study that has appeared in ANY newspaper in the country that reaches the opposite conclusion to this study below. Want to know why? It's because if you look at what the people would have told us if we could "enfranchise" them all (including enfranchising them to not vote for any candidate), they said they preferred Gore.
Subject: Miami Herald Shows That Under Fair, Full and Accurate Count, Gore Won FL by 23,000 Votes
MIAMI HERALD ANALYSIS SHOWS THAT UNDER A FAIR, FULL & ACCURATE COUNT GORE WON FLORIDA BY 23,000
Today's Miami Herald reports that an analysis of "voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore" - by a comfortable lead of 23,000 votes - "rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537."
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