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Data Back Gore Claim on Ballots

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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Attorneys for Vice President Al Gore have long argued Palm Beach County officials used more restrictive standards when recounting disputed ballots. But on Thursday, the attorneys offered mathematical calculations to back up those claims.

Trying to strengthen their case for a reassessment of disputed ballots critical to his presidential hopes, Gore’s attorneys released figures showing stark differences between the counting practices in Palm Beach and those in Miami-Dade and Broward. At issue is how the three counties assessed “undervotes,” ballots for which the counting machine did not register a vote for any presidential candidate.

According to the figures, the Broward County canvassing board’s manual recount found evidence of a vote for either Gore, George W. Bush or another candidate on exactly one of every four undervote ballots.

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The partially completed Miami-Dade recount was running at a similar pace, with the canvassing board finding evidence of “voter intent” to support one of the candidates on 24% of the ballots unread by the machines.

But in Palm Beach County, the Gore figures show, the canvassing board converted only 8% of the ballots unread by the machines into votes for any of the candidates. Put another way, Palm Beach recovered only one-third as many ballots initially unread by the machines as Broward or Miami-Dade.

Bush Aides Scoff at Democrats’ Numbers

Gore advisors say that stark disparity underscores their case that Palm Beach applied a far more restrictive standard to measuring voter intent than the law allows.

“Broward and Miami-Dade were using the standard the court identified--and Palm Beach didn’t,” Gore attorney David Boies charged Thursday.

To Bush aides, though, these sharply contrasting numbers are only proof that the manual vote-counting process lacks clear standards and is subject to arbitrary judgments by local officials.

At a Tallahassee news conference Thursday afternoon, Bush attorneys scoffed at Boies’ numbers. GOP attorney Barry Richard said that increasingly, “some people choose” not to vote for a presidential candidate, even though they may cast a ballot in other races.

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The argument over these numbers could prove critical to Gore’s formal contest against the election results here in two distinct respects.

First, Gore attorneys hope the analysis will strengthen their case that the state courts should reassess 3,300 disputed ballots rejected by the Palm Beach canvassing board as lacking proof of intent to support any candidate.

Second, they argue that the pace at which Miami-Dade was finding evidence of voter intent in its aborted manual recount means that more than 2,000 votes still may be recovered from the roughly 9,000 undervote ballots that have yet to be examined by hand.

Those two pots of potential votes represent Gore’s best, and perhaps last, hope of overcoming his Republican rival’s lead in Florida and the hold on the White House it provides him.

Different Systems Produce Disparity

The Democrat’s team is marshaling two sets of statistics to support its push for a further recount of votes in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

First, they have calculated that counties using the punch card system recorded far more undervotes than counties using more advanced optical voting technology. That difference, they maintain, justifies a manual recount in the punch card counties to assess the ballots of voters whose preferences would probably have been captured if they lived in a county that used the more advanced machinery.

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According to figures Gore attorneys released Thursday, about one in every 250 ballots in Florida counties using optical voting technology failed to register a vote for president. But in counties using the punch card system, the automatic tabulating machines found no presidential vote on one in every 66 ballots--a rate almost four times greater.

The counties using the more advanced optical scanning voting systems tend to be more affluent and lean toward the GOP; the largest counties relying on punch card technology are the Democratic strongholds in Southeast Florida.

In a paper released earlier this week, the Bush campaign contended that the share of the votes that did not register a presidential preference in Florida’s punch card counties was not unusually high. The Bush camp noted that the share of ballots with no presidential choice was higher in Idaho, Illinois and Wyoming than it was in the Florida counties using the punch card system.

But Gore’s attorneys contend that the significant gap in the share of ballots lacking a presidential preference between the Florida counties using the optical systems and those using the punch cards undercuts that argument.

Indeed, Nicolas Hengartner, a Yale University statistician, contended in an affidavit for Gore that there was virtually no chance that so many more voters in the punch card counties than in the optical technology counties genuinely intended to cast no vote for president. “The odds of this happening is less than one person being hit by lightning five times,” he testified.

The second set of statistics Gore has assembled relate to how the three big Southeast Florida counties reassessed ballots unread by the machine during their hand counts.

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In Broward, the machines failed to register a presidential choice in about 1.1% of the ballots cast. Through the manual recount, that was reduced to about 0.8% of all ballots. In that process, Gore gained 567 more votes than Bush.

But in Palm Beach, the canvassing board’s review left the share of the county’s votes recorded as undervotes virtually unchanged: The machines failed to register a presidential preference on 2.2% of the county’s votes, and the hand recount reduced that percentage only to 2.1%.

Since Miami-Dade did not finish its recount, comparable figures on the reduction in the undervote are not available.

In a filing to the state Supreme Court on Thursday, Gore maintained that the much smaller share of votes recovered in Palm Beach showed the canvassing board had violated Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga’s order to consider all evidence of voter intent.

But Denise Dytrych, the Palm Beach county attorney, said the fact that Broward and Miami-Dade recovered significantly more ballots did not mean that Palm Beach had taken the wrong approach. “Perhaps the others were too lenient,” she said.

David Cardwell, the former state election commissioner, says that the disparity between Palm Beach and the others was not likely by itself to be legally decisive but represents a strong argument for Gore to demand another recount in Palm Beach.

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“It doesn’t prove the case, but it’s part of an overall case that there’s an anomaly here,” he said.

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