By
The Associated Press
MIAMI - George W. Bush's narrow margin of victory in Florida would have as much as tripled had the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a hand recount of the undervotes to be completed, a newspaper review of the ballots concluded.
Bush would have expanded his 537-vote victory to a 1,665 margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court had gone ahead under the most inclusive standards, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported yesterday. Those standards would have included as votes even partial punches and dimples on the punch-card ballots.
When the process was stopped, recounts using a variety of standards had already had been completed in seven counties - Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison - and in 139 Miami-Dade County precincts.
Bush's 1,665-vote margin was based on the assumption those numbers would stand, but that in all the rest of the state the most generous standards would be applied. The newspapers also gave Bush the advantage under two more restrictive standards.
But the Herald reported that the balance would have tipped to Al Gore if a recount of the undervotes had been started from scratch in all 67 Florida counties using the most inclusive standards. Under that hypothetical recount, free from the fragmented chronology of the post-election contest, Gore would have won the White House by 393 votes, the paper found.
An undervote is a ballot on which no preference for president registered; an overvote is a ballot on which more than one preference registered.
USA Today's analysis focused exclusively on what might have happened if the recount had been allowed to continue.
The results bucked the expectations of the Democratic and Republican teams during the Florida recount contest, finding that the more inclusive recount standards sought by Gore would have helped Bush. And the strictest standard sought by Republicans - that only clean ballot punches be counted - would have given Gore an extremely narrow three-vote victory. Both newspapers said that was too close to withstand the possibility of errors.
"Many Americans were asking the question 'What would the result be if the Florida Supreme Court's order to conduct hand recounts in all 67 counties were carried out?'" Martin Baron, the Herald's executive editor, said Tuesday. "We felt it was our responsibility to answer questions that so many people had."
The review of 61,195 undervotes - a joint project involving the Herald, USA Today and Knight Ridder - did not examine the approximately 110,000 overvotes cast in the election. Both papers are planning a separate analysis of the overvote next month.
A group consisting of The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Palm Beach Post, St. Petersburg Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tribune Publishing, which owns The Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is analyzing all uncounted presidential ballots cast in the Florida election, including overvotes.
That ballot review, which is being conducted by the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center, is expected to be released next month.
The Florida Supreme Court order to conduct the hand counts specified only undervotes should be counted. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decision halting the recount noted that overvotes were being excluded.
Gore supporters were quick to interpret the newspaper findings as evidence that the vice president should have won the election - and thus Florida' 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
"What this shows is that if you count the voter's intent, Gore wins. If you look for excuses not to count votes, Bush does better," said Doug Hattaway, Gore's national campaign spokesman, now working as a Democratic consultant in Boston.
But the White House said the 537-vote victory is the correct tally.
"The president has thought that the case was closed for months," spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday. "He thought the case was closed last year. The American people spoke and George W. Bush was elected the president. And he thinks that the American people have moved way beyond this. He certainly has."
While media reviews of the election are interesting, they do not answer the question of what constitutes a vote, said Philip Zelikow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, who is helping craft a federal commission on election reform.
"The problem the Supreme Court found was that there was no consistent standard and no time to devise and fully apply one. So newspapers are now answering the 'What if?' questions without having to settle any of the problems the Supreme Court confronted," he said.
The analysis found that it's virtually impossible to conduct a mistake-free election.
The Herald and USA Today said only eight Florida counties were able to produce for inspection the exact number of undercount ballots they reported on election night.
And the Herald noted that mistakes occurred both in machine and hand counts. It said Pasco County had acknowledged that multiple machine recounts produced a different number of undervotes - 1,776 on Nov. 8, 1,712 on Dec. 9 and 1,744 on Feb 5. And Duval County, which reported 4,967 undervotes on election night, ended up delivering 5,106 such ballots for inspection by the Herald after a hand recount.
The Herald and USA Today hired the national accounting firm BDO Seidman to conduct the review. At least two people - a reporter and a BDO Seidman auditor - looked at each undervote and recorded what they saw, including dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads on punch-card ballots and all discernible markings on optical scan ballots.
"We tried to get to as close to what the state would have seen as possible," said Mark Seibel, the Herald's managing editor for news.
Reporters and auditors did not discuss findings or share notes.
BDO then entered the results into a computer database and tabulated the different markings for each candidate. The Herald tabulated reporters' findings to look for statistical variations, but said it did not use those counts in its analysis.
The study cost more than $500,000 and employed 27 accountants, in addition to reporters from several newspapers.
