The 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Bush's win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.[1]
The controversy began on election night, November 7, 2000, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling, first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the peninsula (in the Eastern time zone) but about ten minutes before they closed in the heavily Republican counties of the panhandle (in the Central time zone). Later in the evening, the networks reversed their call, moving to "too close to call", then later giving it to Bush; then they retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call".[2] Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the Florida count was.[3]
Bush led the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. The small margin produced an automatic recount under Florida state law, which began the day after the election. That first day's results reduced the margin to just over 900 votes. Once it became clear that Florida would decide the presidential election, the nation's attention focused on the manual recount.
The Florida election was closely scrutinized after Election Day. Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount,[4] which began the day after the election. It was ostensibly completed on November 10 in the 66 Florida counties that used vote-counting machines and reduced Bush's lead to 327 votes.[5] According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that a total of 18 counties—accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida—did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed.[6]
Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. On November 9, the Bush campaign announced they had hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker and Republican political consultant Roger Stone to oversee their legal team,[7] [8] and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
Following the machine recount, the Gore campaign requested a manual recount in four counties. Florida state law at the time allowed a candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts.[9] The county canvassing board was then to decide whether to do a recount, as well as the method of the recount, in those three precincts.[10] If the board discovered an error that in its judgment could affect the outcome of the election, they were then authorized to do a full recount of the ballots.[11] This statutory process primarily accommodated recounts for local elections. The Gore campaign requested that disputed ballots in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties be counted by hand. Volusia County started its recount on November 12. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5:00 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and it soon became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline. On November 13 the Gore campaign and Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have the deadlines extended.[12]
Meanwhile, the Bush campaign worked to stop the recount. On November 11, it joined a group of Florida voters in suing in federal district court for a preemptive injunction to stop all manual recounting of votes in Florida. Bush's lawyers argued that recounting votes in just four counties violated the 14th Amendment and also that similarly punched ballots could be tabulated differently since Florida had no detailed statutory standards for hand-counting votes. On November 13, the federal court ruled against an injunction.
On November 14, the original deadline for reporting results, with the Volusia County recount complete, Bush held a 300-vote lead. The same day, a state judge upheld that deadline but ruled that further recounts could be considered later. Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican, then gave counties until 2:00 p.m. on November 15 to provide reasons for recounting their ballots. The next day, the Florida Supreme Court allowed manual recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties to continue but left it to a state judge to decide whether Harris must include those votes in the final tally. Miami-Dade County decided on November 17 to conduct a recount but suspended it on November 22. The Gore campaign sued to force Miami-Dade County to continue its recount, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to consider the request.
As the manual recounts continued, the battle to certify the results intensified. On November 17, Judge Terry Lewis of Leon County Circuit Court permitted Harris to certify the election results without the manual recounts, but on the same day the Florida Supreme Court stayed that decision until it could consider an appeal by Gore. On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that manual counts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties must be included and set 5:00 p.m. on November 26 as the earliest time for certification. After that decision, the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state court effectively rewrote state election statutes after the vote.
As the manual recounts progressed, most of Florida's counties were considering overseas absentee ballots. That part of the vote count was completed on November 18, increasing Bush's lead to 930 votes. The Palm Beach County recount and the Miami-Dade County recount (having been suspended) were still incomplete at 5:00 p.m. on November 26, when Harris certified the statewide vote count with Bush ahead by 537 votes. The next day, Gore sued under Florida's statutory construct of the "contest phase". On November 28, Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County Circuit Court rejected Gore's request to include the recount results from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Gore appealed that decision to the Florida Supreme Court. On December 8, the Florida justices, by a 4–3 vote, rejected the selective use of manual recounts in just four counties and ordered immediate manual recounts of all ballots in the state where no vote for president had been machine-recorded, also known as undervotes.
The U.S. Supreme Court convened on December 1 to consider Bush's appeal.
On December 4, Sauls rejected Gore's contest of the election result; Gore appealed. Also on December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its ruling that had extended the certification date.
On December 6, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature convened a special session to appoint a slate of electors pledged to Bush, as the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to determine how its state's electors are appointed.
On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.
On December 12, the same day as the U.S. Supreme Court Bush v. Gore ruling, the Florida House approved awarding the state's electoral votes to Bush, but the matter was moot after the Court's ruling. Some have argued (using the independent state legislature theory) that awarding the electors in this manner would be illegal.[13]
On December 13, Gore conceded the election to Bush in a nationally televised address.[14] [15]
During the recount, controversy ensued with the discovery of various irregularities that had occurred in the voting process in several counties. Among these was the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot", which resulted in an unusually high number of votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. Conservatives claimed that the same ballot had been successfully used in the 1996 election;[16] in fact, it had never been used in a Palm Beach County election among rival candidates for office, but only for referenda. Also, before the election, the Secretary of State's office ordered county election officials to expunge tens of thousands of citizens identified as felons from the Florida voting rolls, using a list that later demonstrated error levels of 15% or greater. Blacks were identified on some counties' lists at up to five times their share of the population.A December 4 article exposing flaws in the process correctly claimed that many of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law. The demographics of the list strongly suggested that, of those who were wrongly on the list and thus should have been able to vote, an overwhelming number of Blacks would have chosen the Democratic nominee.[17]
Additionally, this Florida election produced many more "overvotes" than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval County (Jacksonville), where some 21,000 ballots had multiple markings, such as two or more choices for president. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, the Duval County ballot spread choices for president over two non-facing pages.[18] At the same time that the Bush campaign was contesting hand recounts in Democratic counties, it accepted hand recounts in Republican counties that gained it 185 votes, including where Republican Party workers had been permitted to correct errors on thousands of applications for Republicans' absentee ballots.
Political commentator and author Jeff Greenfield observed that the Republican operatives in Florida talked and acted like combat platoon sergeants in what one called "switchblade time", the biggest political fight of the century. On the other hand, he said, Democrats talked like referees with a fear of pushing too hard, not wanting to be seen as sore losers.
Various flaws and improprieties in Florida's electoral processes were immediately apparent, while others were reported after later investigation. Controversies included:
Many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots because they found the ballot's layout confusing. The ballot displayed the list of presidential running-mate pairs alternately across two adjacent pages, with a column of punch spaces down the middle. Bush's name appeared at the top of the ballot, sparing most Bush voters from error. About 19,000 ballots were spoiled because of overvotes (two votes in the same race), compared to 3,000 in 1996.[21] According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida."[45]
On November 9, 2000, Buchanan said on The Today Show, "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore."[46]
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9 that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there".[47] Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, called that "nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded: "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated that Palm Beach County's Buchanan supporters numbered between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said: "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."[48]
The ballot had been redesigned earlier that year by Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, a member of the Democratic Party. She said that she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger, so that the county's elderly residents could see the names more easily.[49]
See also: Gore v. Harris (Harris II).
The case of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris (also known as Harris I) was a lawsuit about whether county canvassing boards had authority to extend manual recounts in order to inspect ballots for which the machine counter did not register a vote. The court ruled that counties had that authority, and to allow time for these efforts, extended the statutory deadline for the manual recounts. It also stayed the state certification to November 26.
There were two main issues:[50] [51] [52] [53]
Regarding the first issue, the court ruled that, while Harris was generally entitled to deference in her interpretation of state laws, in this case the interpretation "contravene[d] the plain meaning" of the phrase "error in the vote tabulation" and so must be overturned.
Regarding the second issue, the court ruled that the statutory scheme must be interpreted in light of the Florida state constitution's declaration that "all political power is inherent in the people," with any ambiguities therefore construed "liberally." Preventing the canvassing boards from continuing to conduct recounts beyond the seven-day timeframe (specified in the law, but with ambiguity as to how firm it was intended to be), would "summarily disenfranchise innocent electors [voters]" and could not be allowed unless the recounts continued for so long as to "compromise the integrity of the electoral process." The court ordered counties to submit returns by November 26, until which time the stay of certification would stand.[54]
Aside from this case, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily Democratic counties would be unfair.
Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered the recount to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore.
At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, rejected Gore's original four-county approach and ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of all undervoted ballots in all Florida counties (except Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia) and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live worldwide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 26 tally.
See main article: Bush v. Gore. The recount was in progress on December 9 when the United States Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting), granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount.About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. By a 5–4 vote the justices reversed and remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court "for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion", prior to the optional "safe harbor" deadline which the Florida court had said the state intended to meet. With only two hours remaining until the December 12 deadline, the Supreme Court's order effectively ended the recount.
The decision was extremely controversial due to its partisan split and the majority's unusual instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore said he disagreed with the Court's decision, but conceded the election.
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's certification of the election results was thus upheld, allowing Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him president-elect.
Florida Attorney General Robert Butterworth in his advisory opinion to county canvassing boards wrote:[55]
Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan in a contemporaneous article:[56]
Florida Code Section 101.5614[5] states that no vote "shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." A physical mark on a ballot, at or near a designated target, is such an indication.
| align=center colspan=4 | Pre-certification decisions that altered certified Florida 2000 presidential vote total | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| align=center rowspan=2 | Decision-makers | align=center rowspan=2 | Decisions | align=center colspan=2 | Impact on vote count |
| Gore | Bush | ||||
| Canvassing boards around the state | Decisions by some canvassing boards to count illegal overseas absentee ballots. At Thanksgiving, decisions by 14 county boards to reverse prior decisions in order to include 288 ballots that had been rejected days earlier.[57] [58] [59] [60] | 194 | 486 | ||
| Canvassing boards of Alachua, Bay, Bradford, Charlotte, Columbia, Escambia, Franklin, Gulf, Hendry, Hernando, Holmes, Lake, Manatee, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, St. Johns and Washington Counties | Election day decisions by 17 Optiscan counties not to "manually review overvotes that couldn't be properly read by machine"[61] [62] | align=center | -1278 | align=center | -826 |
| Canvassing boards of Alachua, Bay, Charlotte, Citrus, Columbia, Escambia, Franklin, Gadsden, Holmes, Jackson, Lake, Leon, Manatee, Monroe, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, St. Johns, Suwanee and Washington Counties | Election day decisions by 19 Optiscan counties not to "manually review undervotes that couldn't be read by counting machines" | align=center | -789 | align=center | -733 |
| Canvassing boards of Collier, DeSoto, Dixie, Duval, Glades, Hardee, Highlands, Hillsborough, Indian River, Jefferson, Lee, Madison, Marion, Miami-Dade, Nassau, Osceola, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota, Sumter and Wakulla Counties | Election day decisions by 21 punch-card counties not to "attempt to determine voter intent on undervotes that couldn't be read by counting machines" | align=center | -1310 | align=center | -1858 |
| The above 21 boards plus Palm Beach County Canvassing Board | Election day decisions by 22 punch-card counties not to "attempt to determine voter intent on overvotes that couldn't be properly read by machine" | align=center | -396 | align=center | -189 |
| Palm Beach County Canvassing Board | Decision not to review dimpled ballots with clear indications of intent | align=center | -2735 | align=center | -2107 |
| Nassau County Canvassing Board | Decision to change county's certified vote from the mechanical recount total back to the election night vote total[63] | 73 | 124 | ||
| Secretary of State Katherine Harris | Decision not to include Palm Beach County's vote recount results (all but 53 precincts) submitted before certification deadline[64] [65] [66] [67] [68] | align=center | -480 | align=center | -265 |
| Secretary of State Katherine Harris | Decision not to include Miami-Dade County's vote recount results (139 precincts) accomplished before certification deadline[69] [70] | align=center | -302 | align=center | -134 |
| align=right colspan=2 | Impact of all decisions on candidates' potential statewide totals | align=center | -7023 | align=center | -5502 |
| align=right colspan=2 | Potential statewide vote count in absence of all decisions | 2,919,276 | 2,918,292 | ||
| 48.85% | 48.84% | ||||
| align=center colspan=2 | 984 margin | ||||
According to factcheck.org, "Nobody can say for sure who might have won. A full, official recount of all votes statewide could have gone either way, but one was never conducted."[71] CNN and PBS reported that, had the recount continued with its existing standards, Bush would likely have still tallied more votes, but variations of those standards (and/or of which precincts were recounted) could have swung the election either way. They also concluded that had a full recount of all undervotes and overvotes taken place, Gore would have won, though his legal team never pursued such an option.[72] [73]
The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of ballots collected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.[74] NORC investigators were able to examine 175,010 ballots, 99.2% of Florida's total, but county officials were unable to deliver "as many as 2,200 problem ballots" to NORC.[75] Some counties produced their rejected ballots by rerunning all ballots through tabulation machines but were unable to deliver all problem ballots because machines accepted more ballots than previously certified and rejected fewer. The project ended up using a sample that was 1,333 votes fewer than the expected total of votes, with most of the variation in Votomatic overvotes, the ballots least likely to yield votes in a recount. The 175,010 ballots examined contained undervotes (votes with no choice made for president) and overvotes (votes made with more than one choice marked). The organization analyzed 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes. Of the overvotes, 68,476 chose Gore and a minor candidate; 23,591 chose Bush and a minor candidate. Because there was no clear indication of what the voters intended, those numbers were not included in the consortium's final tabulations.[76]
The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The review's findings were reported in the media during the week after November 12, 2001, by the organizations that funded the recount: Associated Press, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and Tribune Publishing, which included the Los Angeles Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune.[77]
Based on the NORC review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes (with, for each punch ballot, at least two of the three ballot reviewers' codes being in agreement). The standards that were chosen for the NORC study ranged from a "most restrictive" standard (accepts only so-called perfect ballots that machines somehow missed and did not count, or ballots with unambiguous expressions of voter intent) to a "most inclusive" standard (applies a uniform standard of "dimple or better" on punch marks and "all affirmative marks" on optical scan ballots).
An analysis of the NORC data by University of Pennsylvania researcher Steven F. Freeman and journalist Joel Bleifuss concluded that, no matter what standard is used, after a recount of all uncounted votes, Gore would have been the victor.[78] Such a statewide review including all uncounted votes was a tangible possibility, as Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, whom the Florida Supreme Court had assigned to oversee the statewide recount, had scheduled a hearing for December 13 (mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court's final ruling on December 12) to consider including overvotes. Subsequent statements by Lewis and internal court documents support the likelihood that overvotes would have been included in the recount. Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit". Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supported these interpretations and criticized the coverage of the study by media outlets such as The New York Times and the other media consortium members for focusing on how events might have played out rather than on the statewide vote count.
| Outcomes of potential recount scenarios in Florida presidential election 2000 (NORC, Florida Ballot Project)[79] [80] | ||||
| Recount criteria | Margin in Florida | Total new votes for Bush and Gore | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Review of all uncounted ballots statewide (never undertaken by Florida) | ||||
| • | County custom standard: what each individual county canvassing board considered a vote, in regard to both undervotes and overvotes. | Gore by 171 | 10,480 | |
| • | Most restrictive standard: requires fully punched chads and complete fills on optical scan ballots, no overvotes | Gore by 115 | 5332 | |
| • | Most inclusive standard: any dimpled chads, any affirmative mark on optical scan ballots; includes optical scan overvotes. | Gore by 107 | 24,240 | |
| • | Prevailing standard: requires at least one corner of chad detached on punch card undervotes; any affirmative mark on optical scan ballots; includes overvotes | Gore by 60 | 7811 | |
| Review of limited sets of uncounted ballots (initiated but not completed) | ||||
| • | Gore request for recounts in four counties: applies the above "prevailing standard" (but with no overvotes) to remaining uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade; accepts uncertified hand counts from Palm Beach and 139 precincts in Miami-Dade and certified counts from other 65 counties | Bush by 225 | 1434 | |
| • | Florida Supreme Court order: accepts completed recounts for Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia and Miami-Dade (139 precincts); applies the above "prevailing standard" (but with no overvotes) to remaining Miami-Dade and other 63 counties | Bush by 430 | 5383 | |
| • | Florida Supreme Court order as being implemented: accepts completed recounts in eight counties and certified counts from four counties that refused to recount; applies the above "county custom standard" to remaining Miami-Dade and other 55 counties | Bush by 493 | 7582 | |
| Unofficial recount totals | ||||
| • | Incomplete result when the Supreme Court stayed the recount (December 9, 2000) | Bush by 154 | ||
| Certified Result (official final count) | ||||
| • | Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only | Bush by 537 | ||
| style="background-color: #ffdab9;" | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voting technology | Total reclaimable ballots from Florida 2000 presidential election | Reclaimable undervote ballots from Florida 2000 | |||||||
| Overvotes | Undervotes | Characteristics | No. Bush and Gore | Other candidates | |||||
| align=center rowspan=4 | Punchcard | align=center rowspan=4 | 721 | align=center rowspan=4 | 18,610 | Fully punched proper vote | 646 | align=center rowspan=2 | 678 |
| 2- or 3-corner detached chads | 951 | ||||||||
| Dimple or 1-corner detached chads | 15,141 | 292 | |||||||
| Other (marginal) ballots | align=center colspan=2 | 902 | |||||||
| align=center rowspan=4 | Optical scan | align=center rowspan=4 | 3008 | align=center rowspan=4 | 2826 | Properly filled, not read by machine | 433 | 79 | |
| Wrong ink color/carbon content (oval/arrow filled) | 796 | align=center rowspan=3 | 116 | ||||||
| Underfilled oval/arrow | 393 | ||||||||
| Mark away from oval/arrow | 1009 | ||||||||
The NORC was expecting 176,446 uncounted ballots to be available from Florida's counties, based on county precinct reports that produced the final, state-certified vote totals.
Orange County presented fewer rejected ballots to the NORC than expected. When the county segregated all ballots by machine for the NORC review, 512 previously rejected ballots were determined to be completely valid. Orange County then performed a hand segregation and determined that these votes numbered 184 for Bush, 249 for Gore and 79 for other candidates.
The NORC adjusted its analysis for the Orange County results and a few minor differences by increasing the starting baseline vote total by 535 votes. In addition, some counties had provided an extra 432 total ballots, while others produced 1,333 fewer ballots than expected. As adjusted, 176,343 ballots were expected, compared to 175,010 ballots actually provided to the NORC for review. The county-level variance from the total number of ballots was 0.76%. Thus the project included a sample within less than 1% of the expected total of votes.
Only a fourth of the variance consisted of optical ballots. Most of the variation occurred in Votomatic overvotes, the least likely ballots to yield votes in a recount. Among the nearly 85,000 Votomatic overvotes in the sample, only 721 reclaimable votes were confirmed in the NORC study.
From the beginning of the controversy, politicians, litigants and the press focused exclusively on the undervotes, in particular incompletely punched chads. Undervotes (ballots that did not register any vote when counted by machine) were the subject of much media coverage, most of the lawsuits and the Florida Supreme Court ruling.[78] After the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations continued to focus on undervotes. Based on the review of these ballots, their results indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision), but that Gore might have won under other standards and scenarios.[80] The post-controversy recounts revealed that, "if a manual recount had been limited to undervotes, it would have produced an inaccurate picture of the electorate's position."[64]
USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today, show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore's margin was three votes.[81] Under the other standards used in the study, Bush's margin of victory increased as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:
The study notes that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore would have won under the strict standard or that a high degree of certainty obtained in the study's results. It also remarks that there were variations between examiners and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots that registered more than one vote when counted by machine.
The study also found that undervotes originating in optical-scan counties differ from those from punch card counties in a particular characteristic. Undervotes from punch card counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes, and in particular to counties that scanned ballots at a central location rather than at precinct locations. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.
Some media reports focused on undervotes (chad blocked hole, wrong ink or pencil used, partial oval mark not detected, humidity affected scanner, ballot feeder misalignment), while others also included overvotes (hole punched or oval filled plus a write-in name, other multi-marked ballots). A larger consortium of news organizations, including USA Today, The Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, The Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all machine-rejected ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. The organization analyzed 171,908 ballots (60,647 undervotes and 111,261 overvotes), 3102 less than the later NORC study. According to their results, Bush won under stricter standards and Gore won under looser standards.[82] A Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request; however, faxes between Judge Terry Lewis and the canvassing boards throughout the state indicated that Lewis, who oversaw the recount effort, intended to have overvotes counted.[83]
According to the study, 3146 (3%) of the 111,261 examined overvotes "contained clear and therefore legally valid votes not counted in any of the manual recounts during the dispute."[64] According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential ballot was split across two pages and voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this alone cost Gore the election.
Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:
The overvotes with write-in names were also noted by Florida State University public policy professor and elections observer, Lance deHaven-Smith, in his interview with Research in Review at Florida State University:[84]
...Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called "spoiled ballots." About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate's name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there's not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they're unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida's eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore's name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, [sic] while Bush's name was marked on only 17,000...
Furthermore, the Florida Administrative Code: 1S-2.0031, "Write-in Procedures Governing Electronic Voting Systems", (7) at the time specified, "An overvote shall occur when an elector casts a vote on the ballot card and also casts a write-in vote for a qualified write-in candidate for that same office. Upon such an overvote, the entire vote for that office shall be void and shall not be counted. However, an overvote shall not occur when the elector casts a vote on the ballot card but then enters a sham or unqualified name in the write-in space for that same office. In such case, only the write-in vote is void." There were two write-in candidates for president who had been qualified by the state of Florida. Under the FAC, a ballot with any other name written in (including Bush and Gore, who were not qualified as write-in candidates) was not an overvote, but rather a valid vote for the candidate whose name was marked by the voter.
| style="background-color: #ffdab9;" | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Optiscan counties' standards for valid write-in overvotes | Counties that | do not count any votes for the marked candidate (4): | Columbia, Holmes, Okaloosa, Suwannee |
| Counties that count votes for the marked candidate if the write-in is | an opposing candidate (0): | none | |
| the same name (1): | Hendry | ||
| the same name or a blank space (28): | Bay, Bradford, Brevard, Calhoun, Charlotte, Citrus, Clay, Escambia, Gadsden, Gulf, Hamilton, Hernando, Jackson, Lafayette, Lake, Levy, Liberty, Okeechobee, Orange, Polk, Putnam, Santa Rosa, Seminole, St. Johns, St. Lucie, Union, Walton, Washington | ||
| the same name, a blank space or a historical or fictional name (1): | Franklin | ||
| the same name, a blank space or an uncertified person's name (1): | Flagler | ||
| the same name, a blank space, a historical or fictional name or an uncertified person's name (7): | Alachua, Baker, Leon, Manatee, Monroe, Taylor, Volusia | ||
| Punchcard counties' standards for valid write-in overvotes | Counties that | do not count any votes for the marked candidate (9): | DeSoto, Duval, Gilchrist, Glades, Hardee, Miami-Dade, Nassau, Osceola, Sarasota |
| count votes for the punched candidate if the write-in is an uncertified person's name (12): | Broward, Collier, Dixie, Hillsborough, Jefferson, Lee, Madison, Marion, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Wakulla | ||
| n/a or no answer (4): | Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Sumter | ||
A nationwide December 14–21, 2000 Harris poll asked, "If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for—with no misleading ballots and infallible voting machines—who do you think would have won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?". The results were 49% for Gore and 40% for Bush, with 11% uncertain or not wishing to respond.[85]
The Florida recount was the subject of the 2008 television film Recount, which aired on HBO. Directed by Jay Roach, it starred Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, Bob Balaban as Benjamin Ginsberg, Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies, Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, John Hurt as Warren Christopher, Denis Leary as Michael Whouley, Bruce McGill as Mac Stipanovich, and Tom Wilkinson as James Baker. It won Outstanding Television Movie at the Primetime Emmy Awards, with Roach winning Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special, and Dern a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.