Florida 2000 and Washington 2004

• 61,190 of these were undervotes that were unreadable by counting machines. Many of them gave unambiguous indications of voter intent and could have been used in a supervised manual recount.
• At least 24,653 were clear enough to have met the most lax of Florida county standards.
• Of the remaining overvotes, 3,690 also gave unambiguous indications of voter intent, and could have been used as well.
• Of the 25 Florida precincts with the most rejected ballots, 21 were predominately black and all were over 50 percent Democratic.
• Though any vote counting standard based on undervotes only would have favored Bush, any that included overvotes also would have favored Gore.
  
  (NORC, 2001; Nickens, 2001)

After all the legal battling by both sides, the Florida Supreme Court had allowed for manual recounts of undervotes only. In the end, the NORC found that any recount under these conditions would have ended in a Bush victory of at least the final 195 vote margin, but any recount that had included the 3,690 unambiguous overvotes would have gone to Gore, and by a much larger margin. At least one other study independently reached similar conclusions using a separate examination of ballots and regression methods (Wolter et al., 2003).

Many other problems also plagued vote counts. Hundreds of overseas ballots with late postmarks, lacking witness signatures, and in many cases even double-votes were counted in heavily Republican counties despite the fact that all were in violation of Florida law. Similar ballots were effectively blocked by Bush campaign legal challenges in Democratic counties creating yet another partisan skew in the state tabulation. A study by the New York Times later showed that after the legal battles were over 80 percent of those were Bush votes (Mintz, 2001). Illegal absentee ballots were counted in Bay, Escambia, Pinellas, and several other counties (Freedburg & LaPeter, 2000). During a Bay County legal challenge to elections irregularities witnesses testified to having observed Republican voters turning in "handfuls", and in one case a suitcase-full of absentee ballots in defiance of Florida law which states that no one person may submit more than two absentee ballots other than their own or that of a family member (Grimaldi & Slevin, 2000). Statewide a total of 680 such ballots were counted despite having been verified as being illegal. The large majority of these were for Bush (Imai & King, 2002; Barstow and Van Natta, 2001; Mintz, 2001). When lawyers for Al Gore attempted to challenge these ballots the Bush campaign accused them of trying to defraud "our fighting men and women overseas", precipitating ugly exchanges by both sides. Montana governor Marc Racicot was typical of most Bush campaign representatives in saying that,

"The vice president's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment against the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces.... The man who would be their commander in chief is fighting to take away the votes from the people that he would command."

(Tapper, 2000)

Of course, even if this were true it evades the main issue--the legality of the votes in an unprecedented close race. But in a time of high patriotic sentiment, public emotions were on Bush's side and the argument proved to be an effective PR move that diverted attention away from the legality issue giving Bush a significant edge.

Dead people, voters who hadn't lived in Florida for years, people not registered to vote and more--all voted statewide while both Democrat and Republican lawyers sought to block each other's votes, sometimes on valid legal grounds, often on highly questionable ones. One elections supervisor described the whole process as "your average Panama City wet T-shirt contest" (Tapper, 2000).

Many ballots across the state were not only mishandled, they were deliberately altered. In Seminole and Martin counties for instance thousands of Republican ballots that would otherwise have been illegal were corrected to remove the violations. Similar corrections were not granted to Democrat ballots. Republican election supervisors admitted that the ballots had been altered, but claimed that this hadn't been done with "fraudulent intent" (Gold, 2000; Tapper, 2000; Moss, 2000; Shapiro, 2000; Bailey, 2000; Earlandson, 2000). Another 2,400 absentee ballots were duplicated in Escambia County--over 11 percent of that county's total. Complicating all of this was the fact that Florida law was vague as to what constitutes "alteration". State law allows duplicate ballots for some purposes such as replacing legitimate ballots that have been inadvertently damaged to the point of being unreadable by counting machines (Damon & Roy, 2001). Washington State also allows for duplication of damaged ballots and many such ballots were in fact recovered in this manner during the Gregoire/Rossi machine recount. Similar irregularities occurred across the state on both sides of the election, but were far more prevalent in Republican districts than Democrat ones. Most proved to be beyond prosecution due to the difficulties in proving deliberate intent, the vagueness of Florida laws regarding ballot duplication, and the fact that in most cases there was no way to separate altered ballots from clean ones. This left rejection of all ballots in these precincts as the only viable option for removing altered ones, which would have disenfranchised an even larger number of voters. In the end cases in Seminole and Martin County were set aside on these grounds, though no one disputed that illegal activity had taken place.

Bush campaign efforts to block recounts reached a disturbing low two weeks after Election Day. On November 22, 2000 a mob of Republican demonstrators descended on the Miami-Dade County elections office and stormed the building screaming epithets and waving their fists. Sheriff's deputies managed to seal off the area where recounts were being conducted while the throng pounded on the door and a window into the counting area screaming threats. When local Democratic Party chairman Joe Geller tried to escape via the back door he was followed onto the street, surrounded and beaten for several minutes before Miami police were able to break things up and rescue him. Several other Democrat elections officials in the building were also cornered and beaten (Gigot, 2000; Filkins & Canedy, 2000). Actual footage of Geller's assault was aired on nationwide news broadcasts (Osunami & Redecker, 2000; Filkens & Canedy, 2000). Other riots followed in Broward County and Fort Lauderdale. The Miami riot had been covered by CNN giving these offices some forewarning of the coming threat. Security was tightened accordingly and no violence ensued, though a brick was thrown through the window of the Broward County elections office.

Within one week an investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that with the help of House Whip Tom Delay (R-TX), the Bush campaign had organized these riots and sent over 200 Congressional staff members to Florida all expenses paid to support them (Kulish & Vendehei, 2000; Gigot, 2000; Kamen, 2000). Afterwards, a party was given to thank the participants Highlights included Wayne Newton singing "danke schoen" and a live conference call from Bush and Cheney themselves who congratulated everyone for their success and took the opportunity to crack a few jokes about those who had been assaulted (Kulish & Vandehei, 2000). All of this took place before the U.S. Supreme Court ordered recounts to be stopped. The Florida Supreme Court ruling that recounts were to continue was still in effect.

Nothing comparable to any of this happened in Washington's fall 2004 gubernatorial race. While at least one death threat was made against Gregoire (Ammons, 2005), no actual violence is known to have occurred. Numerous allegations of conflict of interest were made over the months following the election, but none were ever demonstrated. In sharp contrast to Katherine Harris, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed maintained strict neutrality throughout the election and post-election legal battles, despite being a Republican and on the receiving end of the final outcome. Under his supervision, all aspects of the election were conducted in accordance with state law, every reported irregularity was investigated in a non-partisan manner, and every reasonable effort was made to insure that no one's rightful vote was lost. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest was strictly avoided. In fact Reed even drew harsh, and utterly undeserved criticism from his own party for refusing to side with them in what he rightly considered a weak challenge to the election (Postman, 2005c).

Were the Victories Meaningful?

Both elections were decided on victory margins of a few hundredths of a percent. The first order of business is to determine whether a margin this small can even be measured accurately. This can be evaluated with a standard statistical tool called the t-test. The total pool of ballots cast can be thought of as a “pool” of data recording the choices of individual voters and each vote counting cycle an "experiment" where we reach into this pool and select a sample of data points from for our measurements. In this case the sample size is the total number of ballots counted. The choices of each voter will be independent of the others so each experiment will result in ballot counts that will have a "scatter pattern", the width of which will be determined by the dispersion (i.e. noise) in our sampling process. This in turn will be measured by the standard deviation of the mean values observed across successive recounts. The t-test method compares the difference between the means of any two counts (in this case the total counts for either candidate) to the standard deviation of the differences in mean that would be measured in a statistically significant number of recounts, denoted σ_diff. The resulting ratio, denoted T, is a measure of the probability that the difference between any two samples (i.e. recounts) is the result of random chance. For two different sample of size N₁ and N₂ taken from any pool of some variable of interest, with means M₁ and M₂ and standard deviations S₁ and S₂, T is given by,

Where,

In practice how T is calculated depends on the size of the sample being taken, the number of known "degrees of freedom" DF involved (i.e. the number of ways each data point can vary apart from the others), and whether or not there is any relationship between the effects we want to measure. For any given sample size N the degrees of freedom will be equal to N - 2. Where N is very large, both N and DF can be treated as infinite. Under these circumstances σdiff will be equal to the “pooled” standard errors of each sample which is given by,

For a statistically significant number of samples from a large pool the results of multiple experiments will follow a "bell curve" with the peak of the curve centered on the most probable result and the "tails" to either side possible values that are less likely to be measured. Mathematically, this is represented by a gaussian function, or gaussian distribution (for small sample sizes the corresponding distributions would be represented best with a binomial distribution). In the case of our two elections the vote tallies of third party candidates are small enough in relation to total ballot count to be neglected and the contests are essentially between two candidates. This is particularly true for Washington 2004 where the only other gubernatorial candidate, Libertarian Ruth Bennett, not only garnered less than 2.3 percent of the vote but ran her campaign almost entirely on the single issue of gay rights and likely did not capture a representative sample of all Washington voters. Thus, for both elections the vote counts we are differencing will be related to each other with the requirement that by fraction they must add up to 1.0. The appropriate test for this situation is a proportional T-Test in which we test the differences between two sampled proportions P and (1 - P) against the standard error of their differences in multiple trials. In general multiple measurements of P will follow a gaussian distribution if,

For the Washington and Florida elections the size of the pool we’re sampling from with our vote counts runs well into the millions and this requirement will be met so the standard errors of the proportional vote tallies and the corresponding value of T will both be derived from gaussian distributions. For Washington 2004, we can define the votes counted for Gregoire and Rossi as V_G and V_R, and the corresponding proportional fractions of the total as P_G and P_R. From these the standard errors S_G, and S_R associated with a statistically significant number of recounts will be given by,