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Election 2000: Recount
With Dan Keating
Washington Post Analyst
Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2001; 11 a.m. EST
Following the Supreme Court decision that settled the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, a group of media organizations began a review of the roughly 180,000 ballots that were rejected by counting machines on Election Day.
The Washington Post's Dan Keating was online to take questions and comments on the ballot review.
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests
and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Arlington, Va.:
While not an issue raised by Gore or the Democrats in, or out of, Court during the Florida election recount, the left seems to focus on the "overvote." Can you tell me how many elections (Federal, State or Local) have ever counted "overvotes?" My impression is that there has never been an election in United States (Federal, State or Local) that has counted "overvotes."
Assuming this to be true, discussing "overvotes" seems even more irrelevant than speculating whether the early forcast by the networks declaring Gore had won Florida before the polls had closed caused Republicans not to vote in the panhandle.
Dan Keating: Overvotes -- ballots on which the machine found marks for more than one candidate -- can be discussed in contexts.
It's important to examine overvotes in the context of spoiled votes. Did the voter intentionally cast a protest? Or does the voter not realize that vote-splitting is not allowed? The instruction "vote for group" in the presidential race might contribute to more overvoting in that contest than in others. (The instruction is because it lists a president-vice president pair.) In places that have technology to catch overvotes when they're cast and tell the voter that his/her vote would be tossed out, the rate of overvotes plummets. That indicates that overvoting is not intentional. So overvoting is important to look at from the point of view that about 115,000 voters in Florida lost their votes that way.
The other issue is whether overvotes matter in a recount. For the most part, a punchcard ballot with two punches is not going to be turned into a vote in a recount because there's no voter intent. But on the paper optical ballots, overovtes can happen if someone filled an oval and erased it but the machine still read a mark. Or if someone filled in an oval and then crossed it out or wrote "No" next to it. In cases like that, it may be possible to discern clear voter intent in a recount. There were also a special group of overvotes caused by filling in a candidate's oval and then filling in the "write-in" oval and writing the same candidate's name. Many counties canvass write-ins on election night, catch those notorious "double-bubble" overvotes for the same person and count them as votes. But not all counties do that. It's another thing that's done inconsistently around the state. There are also three punchcard counties in which people could punch for a candidate and the write-in chad -- so there is a small portion of punchcard overvotes that can have voter intent, as well.
St. Augustine, Fla.:
What types of corruption did you encounter when you went through he ballots? I.e., where there any problems from local or federal government?
Dan Keating: I define corruption as breaking the law for personal gain. I would not say that we say that. Various reporting on the election has shown many cases where laws were not closely followed, sometimes because they were not clear. But when I think of corruption I think about payoffs or kickbacks or things like that, and we didn't see evidence of that.
I think an excellent story done June 1 in The Post by John Mintz and Peter Slevin, which I was glad to help with, outlined the many ways in which the law was applied very unevenly around the state. I think we can get a link to that story online.
Ithaca, N.Y.:
Thank you for publishing the results. I am stunned at the comment by Ari Fleischer who almost mocked your efforts saying "people aren't interested." The core of our identity as Americans is our democratic institutions. The fact that the presidency was so influenced by an inefficient and flawed electoral system and that Gore would be president in a more perfect system is definitely news to me.
Dan Keating: I take Mr. Fleischer's comment to indicate that the vast majority of Americans are settled on the question of who is president. The election is long over. There is no longer any question about the final outcome.
Certainly we believe there is interest in what was on the ballots, and the news organizations don't rely on someone in Mr. Fleischer's position to determine whether something is news.
Washington, D.C.:
The New York Times indicated that there was a large and statistically significant racial component to the invalidated ballots. There is no identified link identifying whether this is "intentional." Was there any analysis by the Post on the racial disparities? I would like to know if the racial disparities are similar between counties that went to Bush vs. those that went to Gore. This might go toward proving "intent."
Is any follow-up going to be done or is the election now "over" and "old news"?
Dan Keating: There was a story today in The Post about racial disparities in the votes. Let me touch on a couple highlights:
-- Many more black ballots did not have a vote counted for president.
-- Black ballots had a much higher rate of overvoting. In counties that have technology designed to prevent overvoting, the disparity between whites and blacks goes down by more than half.
-- Although blacks had more ballots not counted, it was actually whites who were more likely to make the infamous dimples and other incomplete marks on punchcard ballots. That's why Bush did better than Gore in tests that allowed every dimple to count as a vote.
-- In contrast to the punchcard ballots, on paper ballots blacks were more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that might be turned into a vote in a recount.
If people had understood those kinds of issues -- white and Republican voters make errors that can be recouped on punchcard ballots; black and Democratic voters make more errors that can be reclaimed on paper ballots -- the candidates probably would have adopted very different stances during the recount.
That's a great part about our project. All of our data -- the markings on every single space on every single ballots -- collected by field research professionals is online for anyone to download and analyze by themselves.
Coal City, Ill.:
If the four county strategy used by Gore measuring the undervotes using the Palm Beach County stand, how would the outcome be affected?
Dan Keating: I personally consider the term "Palm Beach Standard" to be an oxymoron. Palm Beach was all over the place.
For our analysis of Gore's request, we used the actual recounts as completed and included in the certified results in Volusia and Broward counties. Then we used the tally as done by Palm Beach but not certified because it mised the deadline. Then we used our review of the ballots that had not been counted or hand-recounted in Miami-Dade. So we were only reviewing ballots in one county. We decided to use the standard in Miami-Dade that they said they were using, which was one-corner detached chad.
Washington, D.C.:
What a misleading headline! How about Al Gore received the most votes in Florida? Not Bush would have won recount and in small print Gore would have won statewide recount. Incredibly misleading (seemingly purposeful) to the public at large. Shocking, actually not.
Dan Keating: What can I say?
Believe it or not, Democrats seem to think we should have emphasized the result that comes from something theoretical that we never happening (full statewide recount of all ballots).
Republicans think we should stick to saying what would have happened with the recounts that were underway.
Could it be because the recounts underway end up helping Bush, and the full statewide review favors Gore?
We have to report it both ways. I think the emphasis we used is fine. No one who read the headline or the story (even just the top of the story) would come away not knowing exactly what we found.
Deltona, Fla.:
In 1996, the race for Sheriff of Volusia County was decided on the basis of the absentee ballot count, 9,000 of which had been tampered with by the Volusia County supervisor of elections.
The losing candidate challenged this procedure in court, lost there, and appealed the decision.
In one of the worst decisions I have read, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the tampered ballots would stand and the election results were therefore unchanged.
In your opinion, did this case (Beckstrom v. Volusia County Canvassing Board) lend a negative background to the Florida Supreme Court, thus making it easier for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the FSC's decisions in the 2000 presidential race was invalid?
Dan Keating: I found the 1997 mayoral election in Miami even worse. The Miami Herald proved that there were at least 300 bad ballots cast in a race decided by 55 votes, including ballots with paid voters, pressuring people, taking people's ballots away from them, faking addresses and more. The courts ruled that all the absentees could be thrown out and the race given to the candidate who won the election at the polls (not the campaign tied to the cheating). To me, that disenfranchised all absentee voters because some were stolen. Didn't make sense to me, except that it punished the cheater.
Judges have a lot of leeway in trying to settle elections fairly. Very little is specified in law except that they can do what they think they need to do.
Pennington, N.J.:
Have the military ballots been counted?
Does this study include the military ballots?
This refers specifically to those military ballots that were rejected in November 2000 as either being late or not postmarked.
Dan Keating: We looked at ballots that were undervotes or overvotes after the election. Any military or other absentee ballot that was not found to have a vote was considered.
Some absentee ballots are not opened because they lack proper witness signatures or other documentation. We had no way to look at ballots that were never removed from their envelopes.
Some of the late-deadline military ballots fell into that category. In fact, however, many counties accepted many, many ballots without postmarks, with domestic rather than overseas postmarks, with postmarks even after Nov. 7, from voters who had not requested an absentee ballot and in other ways that didn't meet the law. Previous reporting in both the Washington Post and NY Times has shown that concerns about depriving armed forces of votes led to very liberal application of the rules on those ballots. It's very sad that the state didn't figure out a standard way of handling things so everyone would be treated equally. Errors like that by the state leave everyone -- Republicans and Democrats -- feeling abused and robbed of a "clean" outcome.
Santa Clara, Calif.:
The nature of one of the controversies surrounding the election suggests that votes could be changed -- intentionally or otherwise -- by simply handling the ballots. For instance, a chad hanging by one corner could become detached as it is picked up and no one could say whether it had been attached at one corner or two, or if it had come from a particular ballot at all. Did election officials voice any concerns about allowing the news organizations to study the votes? Could such alterations have occurred when the ballots were originally counted?
Dan Keating: Chads can keep falling off -- and in -- during the process. We saw chads that had been totally detached and then got wedged back into the hole as the cards got squeezed together.
By the way, ballots are public record but we couldn't touch them. Election officials wearing gloves very gingerly handled the ballots, holding them up for our review. As far as I'm concerned, if a chad is hanging by one or two corners, it's a pretty clear attempted vote, and if the chad falls off it's still a pretty clear attempted vote, so I don't think that would affect our study.
Washington, D.C.:
Are the obviously liberal news organizations that undertook this study for "historical record" purposes disappointed in the outcome? Although the study was to conclude in spring, it continued into the fall. It seems quite clear that these organizations were not satisfied with the preliminary results. I applaud you for pubishing the true results of the study; sorry it didn't work out for you.
Dan Keating: Your mock sympathy is mock appreciated.
I just want to note a couple things that most people don't know. We never had any "preliminary" results. We set up the study so that the National Opinion Research Center collected and held the data until the study was completed. So we never, ever had any data whatsoever until a week ago yesterday. That was one thing that slowed down our study. since we didn't have any data, any issue that came up had to be decided without knowing whether it was relevant to our findings. Therefore, we always took the conservative approach and decided to check out everything even if that delayed the project.
Finally, casting all of the media under one brush indicates a lack of in-depth understanding about what the media is. The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray, one of the founders of the project, is one of least liberal guys I know.
Arlington, Va.:
While I found the Post article interesting, I thought you shouldn't have downplayed the butterfly ballots. A few hundred undervotes pale in comparison with several thousand overvotes. Isn't that the really story here?
Dan Keating: No question the vast number of overvotes, 110,000, outweigh the number of ballots that can be reclaimed in a recount. We found that Gore was named on about 80,000 overvotes, twice as many as Bush, and that overvotes tended to be from people who voted Democratic in other races. Therefore, it certainly looks like overvotes had a bigger impact on the election than dimples.
We didn't emphasize that as much in these stories because I wrote about that dimpling pattern based on having examined ballot-by-ballot overvote patterns back in January (I think we can get a link to tha story, "Fla. 'Overvotes'Hit DemocratsThe Hardest; Gore 3 Times as Likely as BushTo Be Listed on Tossed Ballots," from Jan. 27, 2001, on our current ballot site.
The current story emphasized ballots that could have been revived in a recount, though we did mention the overvoting pattern in stories both yesterday and today.
Washington, D.C.:
The Supreme Court, in its decision, said that partial recounts would treat voters unequally. We have known already for some time that votes were treated unequally in Florida in the count which gave Bush the presidency. Now, your study shows that using the same standards in the whole state would have given Gore the electoral votes. To me, this is yet another indication of the partisan nature of the Court, which is willing to do anything for their their cause. Do you think this will make waves among those following the Supreme Court?
Dan Keating: Other people interpret our results as "taking the US Supreme Court off the hook" because we showed that if they let the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court go forward, it probably would have kept Bush ahead.
On the other hand, saying what would have happened in that recount is tricky because the Florida Supreme Court order was so defective. It seized on Miami-Dade's innovate approach to solving the time crunch. Dade's Dave Leahy commissioned software to segregate undervotes and said he'd have time to count just those. Very smart and quick thinking.
But when the FL Sup Ct seized on that without taking any testimony about it statewide, they didn't realize that no other county had that segregating software, and that many technologies in use around the state were not well-suited for ballot segregation. Also, undervotes were the key in Dade because multi-punched overvotes were never going to be votes. But overvotes on paper ballots, as I've discussed already, were a ripe source of potential votes in a recount.
So some counties were not segregating ballots. Some were using unders and overs. It was, once again, a situation that varied hugely from county to county. It's hard to know what Judge Lewis would have ended up doing. It may have been a full statewide count. But time was short.
Can't speculate too much.
Iowa City, Iowa:
Did the results of the 2000 presidential election reflect the will of the people? Yes or No?
Why is that not the primary focus and clear context of the analysis of the NORC database?
The Florida legal standard is the "intent of the voter." Even after you throw out over 40,000 so-called botched Gore ballots the NORC database STILL shows Gore with more legal votes. Why is that not reflected in the headlines and the leads?
Dan Keating: There are many arguments that the "will of the voter" can be determined from all kinds of ballots, including many overvotes and other ballots that could not be claimed in a recount. We've talked earlier about the vast number of overvotes, and how much that impacted Gore v Bush.
Some even say you can tell the will of a voter on a Palm Beach butterfly ballot in which someone voted for Pat Buchanan but voted Democratic the rest of the ticket. They say Buchanan obviously got 2,000-3,000 of Gore's votes there. Perhaps.
We were glad to put the data out there. People are encouraged to draw all kinds of conclusions from it. At some point, though, there has to be a determination of what a machine counted and what other ballots had clear voter intent. Those are what can possibly be counted. The other defective ballots might be telling a story -- and we've looked at that -- but it's a stretch to say they should count as votes.
Fact is, Gore won the nationwide popular vote. So, regardless of Florida, Gore supporters have a claim to say the nation picked him. But that's not how the system works.
We did write about and show what happens if all the reapable votes are included.
Washington, D.C.:
Congratulations on completing a study that should put the issue of who won Florida to rest forever. However, my frustration with the recount in Florida was that Florida was not the only jurisdiction with voting irregularities! If we expect to have a historical record of who would have won a perfectly executed election in 2000, don't we have to go back to Wisconsin and Missouri and find out what hijinks occurred there (like giving homeless people cigarettes in exchange for Gore votes, or closing the polls three hours before election day was over)?
Dan Keating: Well, after a full year of reviewing the Florida vote, I'm a little tired. Are you volunteering?
Oakton, Va.:
Why is everyone so surprised that Bush took Florida (even given the closeness of the vote)? Janet Reno virtually guaranteed this when she made the idiotic decision to go in and kidnap Elian Gonzales. This turned huge numbers of South Floridians (especially the Cuban-Americans) against her party
(Democratic). Al Gore, who did not suppoprt her decision (at least publically) ended up paying the price.
Dan Keating: If you're looking to see why Cubans vote Republican, you might have to go past Reno back to Jack Kennedy and air support for Bay of Pigs.
Elian may have influenced the election, but so did Nader. We haven't sent Nader back to Cuba yet.
Colchester, Vt.:
I was surprised by the magnitude of the disparity statewide among overvotes that contained either a Gore or a Bush vote even given the anticipated disparity in overvotes in Palm Beach County as a result of the butterfly ballot. I understand that among 113,000 overvoted ballots with two choices marked, 75,000 included Gore and 29,000 included Bush as one of their choices, a 46,000 ballot disparity.
This suggests that the exit polls were largely right at least as a measure of voter intention -- if you had asked every Florida voter who they had voted for, it looks like 46,000 more voters would have said they voted for Gore than Bush. Do you think this is a reasonably fair conclusion from the data?
Dan Keating: While the disparity, by my analysis about 80,000 Gore and 40,000 Bush in overvotes (very, very few overvotes didn't include at least one of them), is a lot of votes, remember that many overvotes listed three or four or five candidates. Some are clearly protests. Some are from people who apparently have no understanding of how votes are tallied. So trying to credit them all as a group is a bad idea.
No question they influenced the election.
New York, N.Y.:
There has been questions about the timing of the release. Some have alleged that the media sat on the story for some time so as not to interfere with the Bush administration. When was the study finished and is there any truth to the rumor that the story was put on the shelf?
Dan Keating: The story was indeed put on the shelf by the Sept. 11 attack, because the newspaper and the nation's attention was elsewhere. We were busy working on stories about the attack, and our prominent news space was dedicated to that.
It wasn't an issue of interfering with the Bush administration -- Bush doesn't seem to have been stopped in his tracks yesterday.
Arlington, Va.:
Many Republicans have complained that calling the state for Gore before the polls closed in the Panhandle caused some people not to vote in that heavily Republican region. Is there any evidence to back up this claim?
Dan Keating: I do not know of any evidence that turnout in that part of the state was unusually low. It makes sense, though, that some people might not have bothered to go to the polls if they thought the issue was already decided.
Maryland:
Even if the result of the study favored Gore, it would be too late to do anything about it. But it isn't too late to change for the next presidental election. I suppose it is impossible to make a mistake-proof ballot. What kinds of ballots had the least amount of mistakes? Would more available help (for those who were confused at the voting booth) reduce the number of errors?
Dan Keating: Ballots that spread the presidents' names across two columns or across two pages had a huge impact on increasing voter error. Florida had 10 candidates on the ballot, more than just a handful of states. Ballot designers had to list the president and vice president, and that caused bad designs like Palm Beach's butterfly, Duval's two-page and many optical counties that had "caterpillar" designs that listed the presidents down one column and then started the rest of them on the second column with no clear header -- very hard to understand.
A lot more attention is being paid to those issues and technology that checks ballots for overvotes when they're cast. We had a story about that in today's paper.
Gig Harbor, Wash.:
Dear Mr. Keating:
I read your election results article on MSN. The editorial parting shot wherein you leave the readers with a Gore wins scenario left me discounting the objectivity of the whole article. Gore did not win no matter how any of us might have wished it different. We all lose when identifiable bias enters the press. Like many Americans I have no allegiance to one political party. I do not like the attempt of manipulation by journalists. It is counterproductive.
Dan Keating: A previous question asked how we dare not have a headline blaring "Gore Wins!"
It's no surprise that people with different points of view find something to criticize in our coverage. Does that mean we did a good job of playing it down the center? when the evidence you need to hammer us is right up front, you know we're not hiding anything.
Laurel, Md.:
From what I recall from your comprehensive article, the effect of a statewide recount would have resulted in Gore winning by something like 60 to 170 votes depending on counting method.
How can the difference be only some 110 votes apart out of 6 million cast? I suspect the methods considered did not vary much.
Dan Keating: The first story I did on, I think, Nov. 8 or 9 quoted several Florida election supervisors saying that they had never, ever seen a recount change the outcome of a race, even when they started with contests separated by one vote.
In a close race, it stands to reason that unclaimed votes found in a recount will fall evenly to the two evenly-matched candidates. That's why the uneven distribution of uncounted votes, for instance in the heavily Democratic African American community, was an important consideration in whether a recount would help one candidate more than another.
But the fact is that most standards found comparable votes for the two candidates. The biggest exceptions were more fully punched chads for Gore and more dimples for Bush -- the exact opposite of what they fought for during the recount; and more overvotes that had Gore's name twice and could have won him several hundred votes.
Harrisburg, Pa.:
What the study does show is that our electoral system is incapable gauging the will of the people. I am amazed at the nonchalant tone of the Post's coverage of the issue.
Dan Keating: We don't perceive a $900,000 study that took almost a year and on which I've worked full-time, and then was displayed across the entire top of the front page and two full pages inside, and had two more stories and graphics today (and, most important of all, an online chat!) as "non-chalent."
You just can't make some people happy.
Somewhere, USA:
So, what is the new margin of error? The two candidates results only differed by a magnitude of hundreds of votes, out of hundreds of thousands. That's a fraction of a percent. My guess is that we'll never know for sure.
The article "Florida Recounts Would have Favored Bush" notes near the end, "Gore won under this scenario when two of the reviewers agree on the markings. Under a standard in which all three were required to agree, Bush won by 219 votes."
After a re-count, the results are still inconclusive.
Dan Keating: In fact, I wrote an entire separate story yesterday, with the headline "Resolving the Dispute Over Dimples" in which I say the new data answers two important questions:
-- dimples should count as votes, since they do not fall out in a random pattern, but instead match the same party voting pattern in president-senate races as normal votes. The same goes for other partial punches and mismarked paper ballots.
-- looking at punchcard ballots is a very subjective process. I found that the three ballot viewers agreed on 24,000 ballots that would count as a vote for Bush or Gore. But on another 8,000 votes, at least one of the viewers saw a potential vote for one of them and at least one other didn't. So the disputed group is 50% of the size of the agreed group. That indicates to me that viewing punchcard ballots is very subjective, a finding matched by NORC's analysis (which didn't look at how many votes would be affected, just the percent of times viewers agreed).
Washington, D.C.:
Jeffrey Toobin's book lays to waste the notion that the ballots were counted and recounted and counted again as Bush's team argued. He claims that many of the county's never ran the ballots through the machines a second time, choosing instead to "recount" their math in adding up the original totals. Is this true and if so, why was this fallacy allowed to persist? washingtonpost.com:
Jeffrey Toobin discussion transcript
Dan Keating: Yes, as The Post and other news organizations reported last fall and The Post examined in more depth in the story of June 1 (Mintz and Slevin), dozens of counties did not put their ballots back through the machines, and the state did not tell them they had to, even though it had done so in previous cases.
so many ballots were not "counted and counted and counted" as some have asserted.
Philadelphia, Pa.:
On the dimple issue....
According to Tim Nickens (St. Petersburg Times) the total number of dimpled ballots from the NORC data is consistent with the results from the Herald study data (both say about 20,000+ dimpled Bush or Gore ballots). The Herald data showed that Gore recieved more dimpled ballots statewide than Bush. Yet, you are telling us that Bush got more dimpled ballots than Gore.
What are the actual totals of dimpled ballots statewide for each candidate?
Dan Keating: I believe the difference in dimples may be one reason why our study found more likely scenarios in which Gore wins. We used a two-out-of-three standard for whether there was a discernable (sp?) dimple there. I don't have time right now to list them, but we had that in a graphic that is linked on the page -- the number of dimple or other partial punched undervotes in Votomatic counties that would go to the candidates.
Washington, D.C.:
RE: "Many more black ballots did not have a vote counted for president"
How did you determine the racial identity of the ballots which were examined?
Dan Keating: Good question.
As you know, the ballot does not indicate the identity of the voter, and certainly not the voter's ethnicity.
I did my analysis using precincts where the registered voters were either at least 80% black or at least 80% white, as we said in today's paper. That's not perfect, but it's as good a way as I know of studying the patterns.
Lincoln, Neb.:
Point of order:
It is the height of arrogance for Gore supporters to assume that my Nader vote would have went to him, had Nader not run. Poppycock. I'd have stayed home, and I'm not alone. Don't forget they blackballed him at the debates.
Dan Keating: Nader who?
Bethesda, Md.:
I was surprised this morning to notice that the headline on your article gave a very different impression than the one on the New York Times article about the same store. I have read both, as well as the Wall Street Journal article, which seemed most fair, and am sorry to say that yours seems very biased.
If the head of the group doing the survey says that results with margins of fewer than 200 votes should be considered too close to call, how did your story end up with a headline calling it for Bush?
Dan Keating: We quoted him saying that as well.
Let me be very clear about my opinion of what the study showed: We showed what we think the ballots had on them. But I would never try to predict what an actual recount would have done. For our study, we took the descriptions of the ballots and then applied a standard that either counted a mark or didn't -- so every single dimple either counted or didn't. In the real world, different counties would have different procedures and different standards.
NORC's analysis also showed that Republicans and Democrats see slightly different things when they look at punchcard ballots, particularly dimples. So there's no way to know exactly what a recount would have done, but I feel very comfortable asserting that we know quite well what was on the ballots.
Alexandria, Va.:
I once saw a shopper try to return a portable radio because it only worked in battery (DC) mode, not 110 volt AC. The store clerk took the radio, plugged it in, then flicked an AC/DC switch in the back to the AC position, and lo and behold, it worked.
He asked her if she'd read the directions.
"I don't read directions; I don't have time for that (very bad word)."
So do you think there's such a thing as an idiot-proof ballot?
Or will people who can't read simple instructions or can't be bothered to read them always be one step ahead of the ballot designers?
Dan Keating: How often do bank ATM machines accidentally spit out money to people who aren't entitled to it? when it happens, does the bank figure that a few are OK, or does it fix the problem?
New York, N.Y.:
Any more recounts scheduled for the future by any other organizations?
Dan Keating: Thankfully, no.
Winston-Salem, N.C.:
My question is this. If Gore himself has urged the nation to move on, why is the media dwelling on this issue? Part two, would the media had reacted the same if George Bush had lost?
Dan Keating: I think we said in our story that there is a way to interpret the results in Bush's favor and a way to interpret in Gore's favor, so I don't think we would have handled things differently "if Bush lost."
I keep thinking of the many references during the recount battle to the contested election of 1872 (probably have the year wrong, sorry). Still today that 100-year-old election had importance for us. I think the Florida election will be important for a long time, and I'm glad that we were able to contribute the definitive historical archive of what was on the ballots for anyone to use. It can help election reform and decisions about recounts and ballot design and other issues.
Reston, Va.:
The bottom line, in my view, of this entire debacle is that there are so many objective holes in our election process that the past presidential election and all subsequent studies done on it reveal an unacceptable subjective and interpretive element on our election process. This is what needs to get fixed. Elections should be based on objectivity bolstered by consistent standards, rules, and resources -- not on subjective interpretations of voter intent which in effect, take the election results out of the hands of the voters and puts it into the hands of those very few folks assigned to interpretation -- which is incredibly dangerous to any notion of a democracy and the will of the people.
Dan Keating: Your mother told you to wear clean underwear because you never know when you'll be hit by a bus.
Florida was running sloppy, unbalanced elections with rules not followed and great discrepancies county by county. And it got hit by a bus.
Bush supporters are robbed of being able to quiet questions. Much better for him if it were reliable and certain. Gore supporters just think they were robbed.
Washington, D.C.:
RE: "I did my analysis using precincts where the registered voters were either at least 80% black or at least 80% white"
Thanks for the response, but is race identified when registering to vote in Florida? In other States I know it is not necessary.
Dan Keating: Yes, it is identified in Florida.
Other analysis has used not only race but also age of voters. and some have done anlaysis combining updated 1990 Census data with election data to study other demographic patterns in voter error.
Washington, D.C.:
While the war clearly takes precedence in public attention, why has there been no effort toward electoral reform. Forget Florida -- there were more than one million ballots nationwide that were discarded because machines couldn't read them. How can we tolerate this?
Dan Keating:
Ed Walsh and Dan Balz have a story about that in today's Post, and it is mentioned in the story by Mintz and myself, as well.
David Broder and Balz talk about it in online videos, too.
Rushing reform might not help. Good to be thoughtful about it. And it can be expensive.
Washington, D.C.:
It seems you got both parties swiping at you over the recount issue. That is as close to nonpartisan as you get on this issue. A good job was done by all. Thank you.
Dan Keating: And thank you.
I'm done.
washingtonpost.com:
That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the
discussion.
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