Gore Was Hurt More, Fla. Voting Error Study Shows

Florida voters who spoiled their ballots because they punched more than one presidential candidate were three times as likely to have included Vice President Al Gore as one of their choices as George W. Bush, a Washington Post analysis has found.

A review of computerized records for 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida’s largest counties offers new details of how voters erred. It reveals that, while Gore and Bush each may have lost votes that were intended for them, Democratic voters were significantly more likely to have invalidated their ballots than Republican voters.

According to the Post’s analysis, the biggest problem for Gore was in “overvotes,” ballots invalidated because voters indicated multiple choices for president. Although the number of ballots thrown out for that reason was known shortly after the Nov. 7 election, the Post analysis for the first time shows the voting patterns contained in those ballots. Gore was by far most likely to be selected on invalid overvoted ballots, with his name punched as one of the choices on 46,000 of them. Bush, by comparison, was punched on 17,000.

Democratic votes also appear to have been disproportionately affected because of Palm Beach County’s infamous “butterfly ballot.” The study found that the 8,000 voters whose ballots were thrown out because they chose Gore and one of the two other presidential candidates listed near him voted more than 10 to 1 Democratic in the U.S. Senate race.

The imperfections of Florida’s voting system have been clear since shortly after election day, when problems with a confusing ballot design in Palm Beach County and difficulties with the punch card voting system used in 26 of the state’s 67 counties raised questions about who had won a majority of the state’s 6 million votes.

The Post review indicates that problems with the voting machinery--or voters’ failure to use it properly--resulted in thousands of voters who went to the polls only to have none of their ballots in any races counted. Thousands more may have mistakenly voted for a presidential candidate other than the one they wanted because they failed to follow instructions to insert the punch cards into the voting machines.

President Bush and congressional leaders pledged this week to study election reform because of the Florida failures.

The Post findings suggest that the problems were not just hanging chads or outdated technology, however, but tens of thousands of voters who misunderstood how voting worked, were confused by the instructions and did not receive sufficient help in the process.