SPECIAL REPORT: Butterfly ballot cost Gore election A newspaper's study in Palm Beach County found rampant confusion cost Gore in Florida, gave Bush the win.

Joel Engelhardt and Scott McCabe - Cox News Service Sunday, March 11, 2001
West Palm Beach --- Confusion over Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W.

Bush's slim lead in Florida and win the presidency, a ballot-by-ballot review of discarded over-votes reveals.

The ballots show 5,330 Palm Beach County residents, many of them in Democratic strongholds, invalidated their ballot cards by punching chads for Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, whose hole on the punch card appeared just above Gore's.

The ballots also show another 2,908 voters punched Gore's name along with Socialist David McReynolds, the candidate whose hole on the card appeared just below Gore's. Both Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page of the two-page ballot, while Gore's was on the left.

The butterfly ballot confusion didn't hurt just Gore: 1,631 people punched both Bush and the candidate whose hole was below his on the ballot, Buchanan.

The two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, add up to 6,607 lost votes for Gore and an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political experts and partisan observers agree.

A Palm Beach Post review of more than 19,000 punch cards reveals for the first time how a confusing presidential ballot forced the nation into a contentious 37-day standoff in the courts. Those few thousand votes are but a tiny slice of the 6 million cast in Florida, but in such a tight race, they were the key to the state's 25 electoral votes and the Oval Office.

Even allowing that 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds --- which is more than their combined portion of Palm Beach County's total vote --- that would leave Gore with 6,541 votes, enough to overcome Bush's statewide victory margin of 537 votes.

"What it shows is what we've been saying all along --- there is no question that the majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore," said Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida.

Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, speaking for the Republicans, said: "You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people. You don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."

Aside from The Post, vote reviews in Palm Beach County were conducted by The Miami Herald, the Republican Party of Florida and Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

A media consortium that includes The Palm Beach Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune is examining under-votes and over-votes in all of Florida's 67 counties.

The over-votes can be divided into two types. Three-fourths of them were punches for two candidates, most of which experts say can be attributed to the ballot design. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem.

Voters complained they were confused by a ballot in which the names of the 10 presidential candidates alternated on two pages. They expected Bush and Gore to be the first two choices as required by Florida statute but instead found Buchanan, on a facing page, nestled between them.

The result was over-votes: Some people said they voted for Buchanan, then tried to correct their mistake by voting for Gore. Others said they voted for either Buchanan or McReynolds, thinking the ballot allowed them to vote for both president and vice president.

Many were Jewish retirees in southern Palm Beach County thrilled by the chance to vote for Gore's Jewish running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman. Instead, they voted for the right-leaning Buchanan, whom many Jewish voters consider anti-Semitic, or the left-leaning McReynolds, an obscure candidate who received 308 votes in Palm Beach County, almost half his statewide total of 622.

Forty-six percent of the Gore-Buchanan over-votes came from precincts where the majority of voters were Democrats and 65 or older. Included in those numbers:

In nine of the 10 precincts with the most Gore-Buchanan over-votes, the majority of voters were both Democratic and 65 or older. Eight of the 10 precincts were in south Palm Beach County.

In comparison, about 38 percent of the people who voted in the Nov. 7 election in Palm Beach County were 65 or older, according to state records.

"These are people who knew how to vote. Typically they do it right. But the butterfly ballot discombobulated them," University of California-Berkeley Professor Henry Brady said. "Are these stupid voters? Or is it a stupid voting system? There's certainly evidence here that these were not stupid voters."

Brady calculated months ago that at least 2,000 of Buchanan's 3,424 Palm Beach County votes were meant for Gore. If that were true, Gore's total gain --- with the over-votes --- might have been as much as 8,600 votes.

Such conclusions are harder to come by for the 5,062 voters who punched three or more choices for president. Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates.

These type of errors, which were disproportionately high in black-majority precincts, appear to have been made by people who didn't know how to vote, said Anthony Salvanto, a University of California-Irvine researcher who has studied a computer database that recorded every clear punch on the ballots cast in Palm Beach County on Nov. 7.

Gore appeared on 80 percent of the over-vote ballots, 15,371 times on those cards clearly punched for two or more candidates. Buchanan drew the second-most punches on over-votes: 8,689. McReynolds appeared 4,567 times, the third most.

Bush received the fifth-most punches, 3,751, fewer than Libertarian Harry Browne, who amassed just 769 votes in the county but appeared on 4,218 over-vote ballots. The numbers total more than the 19,125 because more than one name appears on every over-vote ballot.

Can the voting difficulty really be ascribed to the butterfly ballot? Without a doubt, Brady and Salvanto say. Consider:

Ninety-two percent of the voters who cast two votes for president did not cast an over-vote in the seven-candidate Senate race, where the candidates were all on one page, Salvanto found. That indicates they knew better than to punch two candidates elsewhere on the ballot but were confused by the presidential design, he said.

Voters at polling places were eight times more likely to over-vote than absentee voters, who filled out their punch card at home and did not use the butterfly ballot, another indicator that the ballot was at fault, not the voter, Brady said.

The county recorded just 3,073 over-votes in 1996, less than 1 percent of all ballots, when just four candidates' names were listed. It recorded 19,235 over-votes last year, or 4.2 percent of the ballots.

While it is common for more people to vote for president than for senator, that didn't happen in Palm Beach County. The county recorded 2,229 more votes in the Senate race.

Eighty-three percent of Gore-Buchanan voters picked Democrat Bill Nelson for U.S. senator, showing a likelihood they supported Democrats, Salvanto found.

Nelson got 62 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County.

One-fourth of the 19,125 over-votes were ballots with three or more punches, the Post found. These can't all be blamed on the ballot design, researchers said.

Many voters ignored the right side of the ballot, mixing their votes among candidates on the left side. For instance, the most common three-punch wasn't Buchanan-Gore-McReynolds, which received 115 votes. It was Gore-Nader-Hagelin, with 138, a combination that pointed to voters picking among the six candidates on the left side.

Ballots with three or more punches came from a disproportionately high number of black neighborhoods, where a strong get-out-the-vote campaign produced a historic turnout, the Post study showed. Of those 5,062 multipunches, 1,290, or 25 percent, came from precincts with a black majority, which make up just 7 percent of all the county's polling places. Black voters overwhelmingly supported Gore.

The ballot's designer, Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, a Democrat, has said she split the 10 presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county's many elderly voters. It backfired, she admits, and she said she would never make the mistake again.

Monte Friedkin, the county's Democratic Party chairman who criticized LePore's handling of the election, said while he understood the confusion, the voter must take some of the blame.

"Frankly, the system is bad, the machines are not user-friendly, but at the end of the day it's as much the fault of the voter as the process," Friedkin said.

"We can make all the excuses we want, but the facts are the facts and George Bush is president."

Election challenges based on the butterfly ballot confusion were rejected by a local judge and the Florida Supreme Court.

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