ballot box: Politics and policy.

A Road Map to the Recount

Jacob Weisberg
Posted Thursday, April 5, 2001, at 5:51 PM ET

To sort out the data now coming in from the various media recounts of the presidential vote in Florida, you have to take care in framing your inquiry. The question "Who really won Florida" is much too vague. By manipulating the data and indulging various contrary-to-fact scenarios, it's possible to get to any answer you want. But there are some more specific questions that help to hone in on the big issue, namely George W. Bush's legitimacy as president. In ascending order of importance, my questions are:

1) Who did more people in Florida attempt to vote for?
2) Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the recount?
3) Who would have won if every legally valid vote had been counted?

We've known the answer to question No. 1 for some time. More people went to the polls intending to vote for Al Gore. Stephen Doig, a specialist in computer-assisted research, demonstrated this in a Miami Herald story published in early December (and unfortunately no longer archived on the paper's Web site). Based on a precinct-by-precinct analysis of 185,000 uncounted Florida votes, Al Gore would have won the state by 23,468 votes if every voter had succeeded in voting the way he or she intended to vote. Put another way, there is solid statistical evidence that more people in Florida left the voting booth thinking they had voted for Gore than left thinking they voted for Bush. But to my mind, that interesting conclusion has only a minor impact on Bush's legitimacy--no more than does the fact that Gore won the popular vote nationally. If a larger number of Floridians didn't cast legally valid votes for Gore, Bush still won the election under the rules of the game.

The Miami Herald's big recount story published yesterday answers question No. 2. If the Supreme Court hadn't ended the recount, George W. Bush probably would have won. To understand why the Herald story successfully answers this question, we must venture back briefly into voting-counting arcana. My colleague Mickey Kaus has faulted the Herald for examining only "undervotes"--those ballots registering no apparent choice for president--while ignoring the larger category of "overvotes"--those registering two or more apparent choices. As we'll see, the overvotes are highly relevant in answering question No. 3. But the undervotes were the only ballots being recounted when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened. At that point, the whole issue was clouded by a widespread, erroneous assumption that the overvotes didn't matter. They weren't going to be included in the final tally in any case. So the Herald tells us everything we need to know to answer question No. 2.

What it tells us is that under every plausible alternative recount scenario, Bush would have won the election anyhow. Say the U.S. Supreme Court held, on equal protection grounds, that there had to be a common statewide standard for the recount. Under almost any standard chosen, the result would have been the same. Under a "liberal" standard (dimples OK), Bush would have won by 1,665 votes. Under a "conservative" standard (penetration necessary), he would have won by 363 votes. Had the U.S. Supreme Court not insisted on a universal standard, Bush would probably have won by some figure between those two. Only under a super strict "clear punch" standard would Gore have won by a negligible factor of three votes. But the clear punch standard doesn't accord with the "voter intent" requirement of Florida law. In short, by attempting to stop the counting of valid votes, Bush was trying to steal what it turns out he would have won anyway. So shame, but no diminished legitimacy on him.

Forgive me if I digress for a short victory lap. I arrived at a similar conclusion--that any real-world recount was likely to make Bush the winner--four months sooner and $500,000 cheaper, using only highly amateurish statistical extrapolations. I pointed out at the time that the liberal, dimpled chad standard that Gore's lawyers were demanding would actually help Bush. That turns out to have been correct.

Back to business. It's question No. 3--who would have won if every valid vote had been counted--that I rate as the most important. It's a less realistic hypothetical than No. 2 since given the role of Katherine Harris, the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the fact that no one except Mickey Kaus understood the importance of the overvotes, there was never much chance of a fair and complete recount in Florida. Neither Gore nor Bush wanted one. Furthermore, according to the Herald, election judges in Palm Beach and Broward counties miscounted according to their own standards--mistakes unlikely to be corrected in any real-world recount.

Even so, question No. 3 seems to me to have the greatest impact on Bush's legitimacy as president. If we find out that Al Gore got more legally valid votes, it's going to be hard to look at the Republican in the White House the same way, even if we know that some of those votes stood no chance of getting counted.

So did Gore get more? The Herald's conclusion is that Gore would have won by either 393 or 299 votes if every county in Florida had recounted accurately using a common standard. But that conclusion is based only on an examination undervotes. It's going to be a few more weeks until the newspaper consortium that includes the New York Times and Washington Post finishes its work of examining the 110,000 overvotes as well. Any posthumous moral victories are going to have to wait until then.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.

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[Notes from the Fray Editor: It's like having the election back: thousands and thousands of people wanted to comment on this one. We brought in our home-made Fray Multiple Post Summarizer, and it came up with two results: "Bush won. Get over it" (easy winner) and "We were robbed, but we always knew that" (strong minority). There were a few posts that refused to be summarized quite so easily:]

Mr Weisberg contends that the fact that more people "intended" to vote for Mr. Gore than intended to vote for Bush has no important bearing on Bush's legitimacy, since it is the adherence to the rules that determines legitimacy. In fact, this matter lies at the heart of the issue of legitimacy. In a democracy the people rule. The process by which leaders are selected derives its legitimacy precisely through its conformity to this principle. To the extent that the process fails to produce an outcome consistent with the ideals of democratic government, it itself lacks legitimacy. Arguing that Bush's failure to secure a majority of those intending to vote is not relevant to the issue of legitimacy fetishizes rules over principles. In a democracy, an electoral process that fails to represent the will of the people is itself illegitimate, and its offspring an electoral bastard.

--Balzac

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1) Who did more people in Florida attempt to vote for?
It may be true that the exit polls showed most people voted for Gore, but in an election this close, the margin for error could easily skew the result. People do lie to exit pollsters, answers are garbled etc.

2) Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the recount?
Perhaps a better question is who would have won if the Florida Supreme Court actually followed the Florida law. A more sensible ruling would have allowed the recounts (according to the standards in effect prior to Nov 7) to continue which Gore could have used as a basis for a contest the certification. A statewide complete manual recount could have been completed in the time allowed by the statute. The Supreme Court got it right. A manual recount by widely varying standards even within a count does not represent the intent of the voter. It more accurately measures the bias of the counters and is little better than ballot box stuffing.

3) Who would have won if every legally valid vote had been counted?
That answer is easy, Bush...

--Alan Hawks

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Fairest, clearest, most straight-shooting analysis of the legitimacy question I've read yet.
You know, it's interesting, question #2--who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the recount?--would have been the most relevant question in determining who legitimately won the Florida election, but the U.S. Supreme Court made the question far less relevant, although not irrelevant. They said the results of the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount would be irrelevant to the question of Bush's legitimacy. That's only because they assumed Gore would get more votes. Now that that turns out not to be the case, the legend that Gore would have won had the U.S. SC not stopped the recount is so pervasive that the late-discovered truth will never completely obliterate it. The republicans are entirely responsible for this cloud of illegitimacy for resorting to extra-democratic means to install their president...

To suddenly admit that the truth is relevant (which republican pundits are now doing) to Bush's legitimacy claims is to admit that the republicans who stopped the recount were fools and worse, and that they undermined the legitimacy of the presidency. So it turns out that the U.S. Supreme Court did not do as much damage to democracy as we thought they did. But not for lack of trying

--Hallie Leighton

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Undervotes, overvotes, the reason Mr. Bush's legitimacy is and always will be questioned is not how they were tabulated, or even who got more of them. The killer was that the Supremes halted a process that might have given legitimacy to one or the other candidate before the process ended. It is impossible for a Democrat like me to accept Mr. Bush as my President because the process was subverted. I suspect many feel as I do. All I can do is vote. All I can expect is that the process will be reasonably fair. It wasn't.

--Steve Brooks

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Your article is interesting. I like the broad considerations of what is relevant and the more detailed focus in considering each alternative. The fact of the matter is while we still want more information on the matter--nothing will change, or likely should at this point. Each candidate made some mistakes which hurt their running. Each candidate had loyal followers. What federal or state inspectable voting systems are being discussed?--none to my knowledge. In the end we have the son of the President in office and are facing off with China less than 90 days later. Raise your hand if any of this surprises you.

--Jim

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