You see ballot designs costing Democrats elections in Florida is NOT a new thing. You may remember this one:
USA TODAY found that up to 18% of the 171,908 disputed ballots could be counted as clear legal votes in a manual recount because the voter's intent could be determined. The rest were irretrievable because the intent could not be determined or the ballot marks violated Florida law. That means at least 141,000 voters, a number about the size of the voting-age population of Orlando, lost their voice in selecting the president.
The study reveals that Democratic voters made far more mistakes, especially when it came to overvotes, than Republican voters. Gore was marked on 84,197 of the 111,261 overvote ballots, compared with 37,731 for Bush.
Ballot standards
. . . USA TODAY's examination highlights an ugly reality of elections that had been largely unknown to the public before November. The American system of elections routinely fails to count hundreds of thousands of ballots because of errors by voters, confusing ballot instructions, poorly designed ballots, flawed voting and counting machines and the failure of election workers to adequately help voters.
. . . Overvote mistakes
The overvotes — ballots with too many candidates marked — tell a fascinating story of how voters err, how election officials unwittingly allow those mistakes and how the consequences were fatal for Gore's presidential hopes.
Only 3% of the 111,261 overvote ballots had markings that could convert a ballot into a legal vote. But the other 97% of the overvote ballots revealed much about the voter intentions, too.
Anthony Salvanto, a political scientist at University at California at Irvine, specializes in computer analysis of voting patterns and served as an upaid consultant to USA TODAY and its newspaper partners on the project.
Salvanto examined the voting patterns on 56,225 overvote ballots for which he had complete data on all races. He also analyzed ballot design in other counties to statisitcally measure voter intent.
Salvanto estimated that Gore would have gained at least 15,000 votes if Gore supporters had not made overvote errors. To make this estimate, he counted only ballots that included votes for Bush and Gore (but not each other) and where the voter voted for that candidate's party in the races for U.S. Senate, state Treasurer and Education Commissioner.
In a less restrictive statistical measure of voter intent, Gore would have gained 25,000 votes if a Democratic vote in the Senate race is an accurate indication of voter intent.
"You get a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Gore," says Salvanto, who helped USA TODAY build the overvote database and analyze it.
The computer data show that voters who marked Bush or Gore on overvote ballots tended to vote for the same party's candidates in other races, an indication of their intent in the presidential race:
* 83% of overvoters who marked a combination of candidates that included Gore, but not Bush, voted Democratic in the U.S. Senate race.
* 69% of overvoters whose vote combination for president included Bush, but not Gore, voted Republican in the Senate race.
* 45% of voters who marked both Bush and Gore voted Republican in the Senate race, and 42% voted Democratic — a nearly even split.
Salvanto says people who overvoted had few problems elsewhere on the ballot. Only 6% of those who overvoted in the presidential race made the same mistake on the Senate race, which was next on the ballot.
It was the presidential race, with its 10 presidential candidates and 10 vice presidential candidates, that confused people. Voters were confused by the long list of minority party presidential candidates on the ballot — the result of the state's recent easing of requirements to get on the ballot.
Salvanto says the leading causes of overvotes in Florida were ballot design, ballot wording and efforts by voters to choose a vice president as well as a president.
Salvanto's findings on why BALLOT DESIGN cost Gore the election:
# Duval County's two-page ballot. Voters were shown the first five presidential candidates on one page and another five candidates on a second page. After the first page was an instruction that read "turn page to continue voting." In addition, a sample ballot distributed by election officials contained the instruction, "vote every page." And that's what many people did.
Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had 21,188 overvotes, one-fifth of the state total. Fifty-five percent of the overvotes were for just two candidates, one from the first ballot page and one from the second. That suggests that more than half the errors could have been due to the misleading instructions.
Gore had 7,162 of these two-candidate/two-page overvotes vs. 4,555 for Bush — in other words, probably costing Gore about 2,600 votes.
"This Duval County ballot alone likely cost Gore the election," Salvanto says.
- Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot. To help elderly voters, Democratic election officials put candidates' names in large type. That forced the names of presidential candidates to appear on two facing pages. Voters were instructed to punch beside their candidate's name in a narrow strip between the two pages. That confused voters because Gore was the second candidate listed but the third hole to punch. Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, on the opposite page, was assigned the second hole.This confusion alone cost Gore the presidency, Salvanto says. Gore was punched on 80% of the 18,748 overvote ballots vs. 20% for Bush.
The most common overvote combination: 5,237 votes for Gore and Buchanan, who was listed just above Gore on the opposite page. Nearly 75% of Gore-Buchanan ballots had a Democratic vote in the Senate race.
- Trying to vote for vice president. This may be the most common cause of overvotes, Salvanto says.
Florida law required that each presidential ballot instruct voters to "Vote for Group," an ambiguous phrase intended to tell voters that when they vote for a presidential candidate they also are selecting that party's vice presidential candidate. But many voters interpreted this as an instruction to punch the ballot two times, frequently for their candidate and the one listed just below on the ballot. Excluding the Gore-Buchanan combination in Palm Beach, the most common overvote was for Gore and Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne, who appeared immediately below Gore on the ballot.
. . . "It seems reasonable that these voters were Democratic and intended to vote for Gore," Salvanto says.
So here we are after all that, after all the Diebold/BlackBox BS, and Democrats in Florida, officials in the Jennings campaign, let that flawed ballot go? That is criminally inexcusable political work.
What I see is not an ounce of evidence of computer problems. What I see is ballot design problems that are overwhelmingly clear - and that could and should have been prevented by Democrats and the Jennings campaign BEFORE the election.
I think Krugman's piece is not very responsible as I read it and I think it simply missttates what the Sentinel reporting is showing.
By all means let the contest of the election explore what happened here. Let it be a battle cry for paper ballots and paper trails. Let ESS fight for it now. Because I think they are being scapegoated. I assume they'll want to avoid that in the future.
Some Democratic incompetence is being given a free pass here. I hope it is revealed in the contest of this election and some people get the ax for this inexcusable neglect.
