Florida election recount

The Florida election recount of 2000 was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been proposed by the Florida Supreme Court. That in turn gave Bush a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.^[1]

Background

The controversy began on election night, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling, first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the eastern peninsula (which is in the Eastern time zone) but before they had closed in the heavily Republican counties of the western panhandle (which is in the Central time zone). Once the polls had closed in the panhandle, the networks reversed their call, giving it to Bush; then they retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call".^[2] Gore phoned Bush the night of the election to concede, then retracted his concession after learning how close the election was.^[3] Bush won the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. The small margin produced an automatic recount under Florida state law. Once it became clear that Florida would decide the presidential election, the nation's attention focused on the recount.

Recount

Palm Beach County recount attracted protestors and media.

"Butterfly ballot"

The Florida election was closely scrutinized after Election Day. Once the results were announced, charges were raised that some irregularities favored Bush. Among these was the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot," which some pundits claimed produced an "unexpectedly" large number of votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan. Conservative opinion commentators countered that the same ballot was successfully used in the 1996 election with no post-election protest,^[4] although in 1996 the butterfly ballot caused an estimated 14,000 votes for the second candidate on the left (Bob Dole) to be miscast. As this did not affect the election outcome, it went unnoticed at the time.^[5] Progressive commentators also claimed that there was a purge from the Florida voting rolls of over 54,000 citizens identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-American, and that the majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.^[6] (It was widely presumed that had they been able to express themselves at the polls, most would have chosen the Democratic candidate).^[7] Additionally, there were charges that there were many more "overvotes" than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval county (Jacksonville), where some 27,000 ballots showed two or more choices for President. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, the Duval County ballot spread choices for President over two pages with instructions to "vote on every page" on the bottom of each page.^[8] On the other side of the ledger, conservatives and Republicans charged that Democrats had registered non-citizens to vote, deliberately suppressed the overseas military vote, and arbitrarily changed vote-counting criteria after the election.^[4]

Controversial issues

Studies of the electoral process in Florida have been done by Democrats, Republicans, and other interested parties, that reveal various flaws and improprieties. Controversies included:

• All five major U.S. TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) made the incorrect assumption that all of Florida's polls closed at 7:00 p.m. EST. They reported this incorrect information at 7:00. In fact, the westernmost counties in Florida had polls open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they are in the Central Time Zone. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. Also, the Voter News Service called the state of Florida for Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to this confusion as high as 15,000, which could have reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes;^[9] a study by John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes.^[10] This survey assumes that the turnout in the Panhandle counties would have equaled the statewide average of 68% if the media had not incorrectly reported the polls' closing time and if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. So it is argued that Bush could have won by a larger margin and controversy been avoided if the networks had known and reported the correct poll closing times and waited to call the state until all polls closed. In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the premature calls for Gore's victory ranked #2 on a list of TV's ten biggest "blunders", and were blamed for ushering in a new era of public distrust of the media.^[11]

Supreme Court of Florida.

• Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up roadblocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election.^[12] This charge, however, has never been substantiated.
• Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo on how to invalidate overseas absentee ballots. The Herron Memo gave postmark and "point of origin" criteria Herron maintained could be used to invalidate overseas ballots. It was in line with a letter sent out by Secretary of State Katherine Harris stating that if a postmark was not present on a military ballot, it had to be thrown out. But on November 19, 2000, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Before that, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce postmark requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots and reducing votes from overseas, which were predominantly for Bush.^[13] Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore supporter, later told the counties to go back and reconsider those ballots without a postmark.^[14]

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris became a controversial figure during the Florida electoral recount.

• A suit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the United States Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment. Settlement agreements were reached in this suit.^[15] A systematic investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice found no evidence of racial discrimination.^[16]
• Democrats claimed that between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state, Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, contracted with DBT Online Inc., at a cost of $4.294 million, to have the "scrub lists" reworked. Nearly 1% of Florida's electorate and nearly 3% of its African-American voters — 57,746 citizens — were listed as felons and removed from the voting rolls. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, some listed "felonies" were dated years in the future, and some apparently were random.) It was contended that in a small minority of cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and some successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote, but most were not told that they weren't allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls, with the company directed not to use cross-checks or its sophisticated verification plan (used by the FBI).^[17]
• Some observers, such as Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen (1 p.25), have argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states) to request clemency and a restoration of their rights from Governor Jeb Bush, a process that could take two years and ultimately was left to the governor's discretion. (In 1998 Schlenther v. Florida Department of State held that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.)
• The Brooks Brothers riot: A raucous demonstration by several dozen paid activist Republicans flown in from out of state, some at Republican Party expense, to oppose the manual recount in Miami-Dade County. It was shut down a couple hours after the screaming protesters arrived at the county offices, where they began pounding on the doors, chanting and threatening to bring in a thousand vociferous Cuban-American Republicans. Some Republicans contend that their demonstration was peaceful, and was in response to the Miami-Dade election board's decision to move the ballot counting to a smaller room closer to the ballot-scanning machines to speed up the process. The election board consisted of three appointees, Myriam Lehr and David Leahy, who are Independents, and Lawrence King, a Democrat. The demonstration, which took place in view of multiple national network television cameras, resulted in the election board reversing their earlier decision to recount ballots, after determining that it couldn't be completed by the court-issued deadline. The Republican representatives involved in the recount effort credit this demonstration, dubbed the "Brooks Brothers Riot" because of the suits and Hermès ties worn by the Republican operatives, as a key factor in "preventing the stealing of the 2000 presidential election".^[18][19][20]
• The suppression of vote pairing. In brief, websites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas: the Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore and the Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This would have allowed Nader to get his fair share of the vote and perhaps get the Green Party into the debates in future elections while allowing Gore to carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the websites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them to reluctantly shut down. The ACLU got involved in a legal (not political) effort to protect the sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Jones two years later, but by then the election was over. The vote-pairing sites allegedly tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who voted for Gore.^[21][22]
• The actions of the Florida Supreme Court. It was argued, particularly by Republicans, that the court was exceeding its authority and issuing rulings biased in Gore's favor. The court acted "on its own motion" to stop the official certification of the election while specifically allowing the recount to continue. The Gore legal team never requested that court action, but the contention was that Florida law gives the court the right to take action without such a request.^[23] Similarly, the court's December 10, 2000 ruling ordered a statewide counting of undervotes, which the Gore team had also not requested.^[24] James Baker, among other Republicans, accused the court of violating longstanding Florida law, on which basis Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.^[25] Democrats argued that the Florida Supreme Court was simply trying to ensure a fair and accurate count.^[26]

Adding to these controversies was the fact that Florida's governor was the Republican presidential nominee's brother, although the governor recused himself from the recount process.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots

Simulation of the "butterfly ballot", seen at an angle

Allegations were raised that many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore or Bush actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots because of the ballot's confusing layout. Some commentators and observers have asserted that an unusually large number of ballots were spoiled because of two votes in the same race, with one of the two for Buchanan and the other for Bush or Gore. According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida."^[27]

On The Today Show of November 9, 2000, Buchanan said, "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore."^[28] He, unlike the voters, did not have the opportunity to see the ballot before Election Day.

Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9 that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there",^[29] Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, responded by calling that "nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded: "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said: "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."^[30]

The ballot had been redesigned earlier that year by Theresa LePore (Supervisor of Elections, and member of the Democratic Party). She said that she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger so the county's elderly residents could more easily see the names.^[31]

Timeline

Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount.^[32] In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts.^[33] The county canvassing board would then decide whether to recount as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts.^[34] If the board discovered an error, they were then authorized to recount the ballots.^[35]

Once the closeness of the election in Florida was clear, both the Bush and Gore campaigns organized themselves for the ensuing legal process. On November 9, the Bush campaign announced they had hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee their legal team,^[36] and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The canvassing board did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial mandated recount. The Bush campaign sued to prevent additional recounts on the basis that no errors were found in the tabulation method until subjective measures were applied in manual recounts.

The Gore campaign, as allowed by Florida statute, requested that disputed ballots in four counties be counted by hand. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and, when it became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline, both Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have their deadlines extended.

Florida Supreme Court appeals

Florida Supreme Court spokesman Craig Waters

The trial of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris was a response from the Bush campaign to state litigation against extending the statutory deadlines for the manual recounts. Besides deadlines, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily Democratic counties would be unfair.

Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered the recount to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore.

At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of disputed ballots in all Florida counties and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live worldwide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The Court further ordered that only undervotes be considered. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 14 tally.

U.S. Supreme Court proceedings

The recount was in progress on December 9 when the United States Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting), granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount.

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling to stop the recount. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. Five justices held there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped and Florida be allowed to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. The decision was extremely controversial due to its partisan split and the majority's unusual instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore said he disagreed with the Court's decision, but conceded the election.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's certification of the election results was thus upheld, allowing Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him president-elect.

Florida counties' recount decisions

Florida Attorney General Robert Butterworth in his advisory opinion to county canvassing boards:^[37]

The longstanding case law in Florida [ ] has held that the intent of the voters as shown by their ballots should be given effect. Where a ballot is so marked as to plainly indicate the voter's choice and intent, it should be counted as marked unless some positive provision of law would be violated. As the state has moved toward electronic voting, nothing in this evolution has diminished the standards first articulated in such [judicial] decisions ... that the intent of the voter is of paramount concern and should be given effect if the voter has complied with the statutory requirement and that intent may be determined. ... The Florida Statutes contemplate that where electronic or electromechanical voting systems are used, no vote is to be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the county canvassing board.

Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan in a contemporaneous article:^[38]

There is a real issue here about what voting actually means. To some, voting is a right that should be guaranteed regardless of any incompetence, error, failure, or irresponsibility on the part of the voter. ... Others have a different view. They argue that American democracy is ... a far stricter, Lockean, Anglo-American system based on the letter of the law and a successful vote cast by a rational, responsible voter. In this constitutional system, the "will of the people" is an irrelevant abstraction. ... From affirmative action and hate-crime laws it's a small step to ensuring that all voters, however negligent, have their intent, however vague, reflected in the final result of an election.

Pre-certification decisions that altered certified Florida 2000 presidential vote total
Decision-makers	Decisions	Impact on vote count[lower-alpha 1]
Gore	Bush
Canvassing boards around the state	Decisions by some canvassing boards to count illegal overseas absentee ballots.[lower-alpha 2] At Thanksgiving, decisions by 14 county boards to reverse prior decisions in order to include 288 ballots that had been rejected days earlier.[39][40][41][42]	194[lower-alpha 3]	486[lower-alpha 3]
Canvassing boards of Alachua, Bay, Bradford, Charlotte, Columbia, Escambia, Franklin, Gulf, Hendry, Hernando, Holmes, Lake, Manatee, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, St. Johns and Washington Counties	Election day decisions by 17 Optiscan counties not to "manually review overvotes that couldn't be properly read by machine"[lower-alpha 4][43][44][45]	-1278	-826
Canvassing boards of Alachua, Bay, Charlotte, Citrus, Columbia, Escambia, Franklin, Gadsden, Hamilton, Holmes, Jackson, Lake, Leon, Manatee, Monroe, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, Polk, Seminole, St. Johns, Suwanee, Taylor and Washington Counties	Election day decisions by 23 Optiscan counties not to "manually review undervotes that couldn't be read by counting machines"[lower-alpha 4][lower-alpha 5][43]	-789[lower-alpha 6]	-733[lower-alpha 6]
Canvassing boards of Collier, DeSoto, Dixie, Duval, Glades, Hardee, Highlands, Hillsborough, Indian River, Jefferson, Lee, Madison, Marion, Miami-Dade, Nassau, Osceola, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota, Sumter and Wakulla Counties	Election day decisions by 21 punch-card counties not to "attempt to determine voter intent on undervotes that couldn't be read by counting machines"[lower-alpha 4][lower-alpha 7][43]	-1310	-1858
The above 21 boards plus Palm Beach County Canvassing Board	Election day decisions by 22 punch-card counties not to "attempt to determine voter intent on overvotes that couldn't be properly read by machine"[lower-alpha 4][lower-alpha 8][43]	-396	-189
Palm Beach County Canvassing Board	Decision not to review dimpled ballots with clear indications of intent[lower-alpha 9][43]	-2735	-2107
Nassau County Canvassing Board	Decision to change county's certified vote from the mechanical recount total back to the election night vote total[47]	73	124
Secretary of State Katherine Harris	Decision not to include Palm Beach County's vote recount results (all but 53 precincts) submitted before certification deadline[lower-alpha 10][43][46][48][49][50][51]	-480	-265
Secretary of State Katherine Harris	Decision not to include Miami-Dade County's vote recount results (139 precincts) accomplished before certification deadline[42][48][52]	-302	-134
Impact of all decisions on candidates' potential statewide totals		-7023	-5502
Potential statewide vote count in absence of all decisions[lower-alpha 11]		2,919,174	2,918,227
		48.85%	48.84%
		984 margin[lower-alpha 12]

1. Positive sign indicates number of votes that decision caused to be included (or put back) in state certified total. Negative sign indicates number of votes that decision caused to be excluded from state certified total.
2. Ballots received after deadline, lacking required postmarks, unsigned, undated, cast after election day, from unregistered voters or voters not requesting ballots, lacking witness signature or address, or double-counted.
3. Dr. Gary King of Harvard University applied statistical modeling to determine that the best estimate for the impact of illegal votes would reduce the certified vote margin for Bush from 537 to 245.^[39][40]
4. According to standards being applied by each county at the time. Two-coder general agreement for punch-card counties.
5. Taylor County determined voter intent on some overvotes; however, it did not include them in its certified results.
6. Includes increase in Orange County's unofficially revised machine-tabulated vote total, due to machine later counting 512 ballots that were previously machine-rejected ("could not be distinguished from ballots that were accepted and counted – they appeared to be properly completed"): Gore 249, Bush 184 (total 433)^[42]
7. Amount excludes 139 Miami-Dade precincts that were recounted.
8. Unlike the other 20 counties, Palm Beach and Pasco Counties determined voter intent on 74 overvotes for Gore and Bush; however, they did not include them in their certified results.^[42]
9. Of these 4842 excluded ballots, 4513 had been set aside by the canvassing board for later inspection by a court (which never happened). All were among 10,310 undervotes in the county. The "set aside" ballots were dimpled ballots that were challenged by the two parties. A January 2001 review by the Palm Beach Post of those "set-aside" ballots determined that 4318 were "unambiguous" valid votes.^[46]
10. When Palm Beach County completed its recount two hours after the certification deadline, its final count was Gore 501 votes, Bush 327 votes excluded from the state certified total.
11. On December 9, 2000, five counties (Escambia, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Manatee) completed recounts of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, identifying a small number of new votes.
12. The NORC study did not address either of the concerns about overseas absentee ballots and Nassau County's certification change. The effect of removing these impacts above is to reduce this margin to 641 in favor of Gore.

Post-election studies

Florida Ballot Project recounts

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that were collected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.^[53] These ballots contained undervotes (votes with no choice made for president) and overvotes (votes made with more than one choice marked).

The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The total number of undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The review's findings were reported in the media during the week after November 12, 2001, by the organizations that funded the recount: Associated Press, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and Tribune Publishing, which included the Los Angeles Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune.^[54][55] The NORC concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots statewide in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 107–115 votes if only two of the three coders had to agree on the ballot. When counting ballots wherein all three coders agreed, Gore would have won the most restrictive scenario by 127 votes and Bush would have won the most inclusive scenario by 110 votes. The restrictive scenario accepts only so-called perfect ballots that machines somehow missed and did not count, or ballots with unambiguous expressions of voter intent. The inclusive scenario applies a uniform standard of "dimple or better" on punch marks and "all affirmative marks" on optical ballots to overvotes and undervotes statewide.^[46]

Subsequent analyses cast further doubt on conclusions that Bush would likely still have won had the U.S. Supreme Court not intervened. An analysis of the NORC data by University of Pennsylvania researcher Steven F. Freeman and journalist Joel Bleifuss concluded that after a recount of all uncounted votes using any standard (inclusive, strict, statewide or county by county), Gore would have been the victor.^[56] Such a statewide review including all uncounted votes was a real possibility, as Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, whom the Florida Supreme Court had assigned to oversee the statewide recount, had scheduled a hearing for December 13 (mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court's final ruling on the 12th) to consider the question of including overvotes. Subsequent statements by Lewis and internal court documents support the likelihood that overvotes would have been included in the recount.^[57] Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit".^[46] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supports these interpretations and criticizes the coverage of the study by media outlets such as the New York Times and the other media consortium members.^[55]

Candidate outcomes based on potential non-absentee recounts in Florida presidential election 2000 (outcome of one particular study)[54]
Review method		Winner
Review of all ballots statewide (never undertaken)
•	Standard as set by each county canvassing board during their survey	Gore by 171
•	Fully punched chad and limited marks on optical ballots	Gore by 115
•	Any dimples or optical mark	Gore by 107
•	One corner of chad detached or optical mark	Gore by 60
Review of limited sets of ballots (initiated but not completed)
•	Gore request for recounts of all ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties	Bush by 225
•	Florida Supreme Court of all undervotes statewide	Bush by 430
•	Florida Supreme Court as being implemented by the counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes as well as undervotes	Bush by 493
Unofficial recount totals
•	Incomplete result when the Supreme Court stayed the recount (December 9, 2000)	Bush by 154
Certified Result (official final count)
•	Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only	Bush by 537

Media recounts

After the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision) but that Gore might have won under other scenarios.^[58][59] Some reports counted undervotes (chad blocked hole), while others also counted overvotes (hole punched plus write-in names).

USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes: ballots that did not register any vote when counted by machine (many due to dimpled or hanging chads blocking a hole). BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today, show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes.^[60] Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:

• Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush won by 1,665 votes.
• Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush won by 884 votes.
• Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush won by 363 votes.
• Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore won by 3 votes.

The study remarks that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore was surely the winner under the strict standard. It also remarks that there are variations between examiners, and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots that registered more than one vote when counted by machine.

The study also found that undervotes break down into two distinct types, those coming from punch-card counties, and those coming from optical-scan counties. Undervotes from punch-card counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.

A larger consortium of news organizations, including USA Today, The Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, The Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, Bush won under stricter standards and Gore won under looser standards.^[61] A Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request; but one could argue that the recount of overvotes should have happened nonetheless, because faxes between Judge Terry Lewis and the canvassing boards throughout the state indicated that Lewis, who oversaw the recount effort, intended to have overvotes counted.^[62]

According to the study, only 3% of the 111,261 overvotes had markings that could be interpreted as a legal vote. According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential ballot was split across two pages and voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this alone cost Gore the election.

Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:

• Lenient standard. Gore by 332 votes.
• Palm Beach standard. Gore by 242 votes.
• Two-corner standard. Bush by 407 votes.
• Strict standard. Bush by 152 votes.

The overvotes with write-in names were also noted by Florida elections observer Lance deHaven Smith, in his interview with Research in Review at Florida State University:^[63]

...Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, [sic] while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000... –Lance deHaven-Smith^[63]

Opinion polling on recount

A nationwide December 14–21, 2000 Harris poll asked, "If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for — with no misleading ballots and infallible voting machines — who do you think would have won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?". The results were 49% for Gore and 40% for Bush, with 11% uncertain or not wishing to respond.^[64]

HBO film

The 2008 made-for-TV movie Recount, directed by Jay Roach and produced by and starring Kevin Spacey, explores the 2000 election and recount. It premiered on the HBO cable network on May 25, 2008.

See also

• United States House of Representatives elections in Florida, 2006#District 13
• 2016 United States presidential election recount and audit

References

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2. Ceaser & Busch 2001, pp. 252–253
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7. "Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout?". Ann.sagepub.com. 2014-01-01. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
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9. "Panhandle Poll Follow-up: Networks' Wrong Florida Call for Gore Depressed Voter Turnout in Florida's Central Time Zone". John McLaughlin & Associates. December 6, 2000. Archived from the original on December 25, 2007.
10. Lott, John R., Jr. (May 8, 2001). "Documenting Unusual Declines in Republican Voting Rates in Florida's Western Panhandle Counties in 2000". University of Maryland Foundation, University of Maryland.
11. Battaglio, Stephen. "The Blunder Years", TV Guide, November 1, 2010, Pages 20-21
12. Malcolm Brabant (January 5, 2001). "Bush's brother to face vote inquiry". BBC News.
13. Berke, Richard L. (July 15, 2001). "Lieberman Put Democrats In Retreat on Military Vote". New York Times. Retrieved October 6, 2008.
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15. "NAACP and Florida Voters Reach Agreement with ChoicePoint in Voting Rights Lawsuit: ChoicePoint to Make Donation to NAACP and Reprocess Voter Exception List" (Press release). ChoicePoint. July 2, 2002. Archived from the original on January 8, 2006.
16. Boyd, Ralph F., Jr., Assistant Attorney General (June 2, 2002). "Letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary".
17. Palast, Gregory (December 4, 2000). "Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program". Salon.com. Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, from casting ballots.
18. Lantigua, John (November 28, 2000). "Miami's rent-a-riot". Salon.com. Remember last week's ugly protest of the hand recount? Elián all over? Guess again — Washington GOP operatives were running this circus.
19. "Irish-American Republicans - Our Achievements". Irishgop.com. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
20. "Miami Mayor Denies Gore Urged Him to Publicly Support Recount". Articles.latimes.com. 2000-12-02. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
21. McCullagh, Declan (August 6, 2007). "Vote-swapping Web sites are legal, appeals court (finally) says". CNET.com. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
22. Worley, Brad (Spring 2001). "Nader's Traders vs. State Regulators: Examining the Controversy over Internet Vote Swapping in the 2000 Presidential Election" (PDF). North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina School of Law. II (I): 32–66. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
23. "Florida Supreme Court Stays Certification of Florida Presidential Ballots; Counties Counting Overseas Absentee Ballots". November 21, 2000. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
24. "Florida Recount: Official statements". December 10, 2000. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
25. "Text: Bush Campaign Adviser James A. Baker III". December 8, 2000. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
26. "Text: Gore Campaign Chairman William Daley". December 8, 2000. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
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28. "Pat Buchanan on NBC's Today Show". November 9, 2000.
29. Newsweek Staff (November 9, 2000). "The Two Campaigns Speak". Newsweek. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
30. Tapper, Jake (November 10, 2000). "Buchanan camp: Bush claims are "nonsense"". Salon. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
31. Van Natta Jr, Don; Canedy, Dana (November 9, 2000). "THE 2000 ELECTIONS: THE PALM BEACH BALLOT; Florida Democrats Say Ballot's Design Hurt Gore". The New York Times.
32. "Statutes & Constitution :View Statutes : Online Sunshine". Leg.state.fl.us. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
33. F.S. Ch. 102.166
34. F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 4
35. F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 5
36. "Text: Bush Campaign Press Conference". November 9, 2000. Retrieved February 12, 2015.
37. Dionne, E. J.; Kristol, William, eds. (Dec 1, 2010). "Florida Attorney General Advisory Legal Opinion AGO 2000-65, Date: November 14, 2000". Bush V. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary. Brookings Institution Press. p. 17. Retrieved 2016-12-03.
38. Sullivan, Andrew (December 4, 2000). "Bad Intent". The New Republic. p. 10.
39. Barstow, David; Van Natta, Don, Jr. (July 15, 2001). "Examining the Vote; How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote". New York Times. Retrieved 2016-11-16. The Times asked Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting patterns and statistical models, what would have happened had the flawed ballots been discarded. He concluded that there was no way to declare a winner with mathematical certainty under those circumstances. His best estimate, he said, was that Mr. Bush's margin would have been reduced to 245 votes.
40. Imai, Kosuke; King, Gary (September 2004). "Did Illegal Overseas Absentee Ballots Decide the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election?" (PDF). Perspectives on Politics. 2 (3): 537–549.
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44. Damron, David; Shaw, Gwyneth K. (January 28, 2001). "Lake Erred By Tossing Write-ins". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved 2016-11-28.
45. Maxwell, Scott; Damron, David (November 14, 2000). "Now Democrats Are Upset With The Way Lake Counted, Counters Threw Out 3,114 Ballots Because Voters Also Wrote In The Name Of Their Candidate". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved 2016-11-28.
46. deHaven-Smith, Lance, ed. (2005). The Battle for Florida: An Annotated Compendium of Materials from the 2000 Presidential Election. Gainesville, Florida, United States: University Press of Florida. pp. 38–39.
47. Martelle, Scott (November 28, 2000). "Add Nassau to List of Problems". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2016-11-30. Election night: Bush 16,404 votes to Gore 6,952. Mechanical Recount: Bush 16,280 votes to Gore 6,879
48. Florida Supreme Court (December 8, 2000). "No. SC00-2431, Albert Gore, Jr., and Joseph I. Lieberman, Appellants, vs. Katherine Harris, as Secretary, etc., et al., Appellees." (PDF). Retrieved 2016-11-30. For the reasons stated in this opinion, we find that the trial court erred as a matter of law in not including (1) the 215 net votes for Gore identified by the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board (at footnote: Bush claims in his brief that the audited total is 176 votes. We make no determination as to which of these two numbers are accurate but direct the trial court to make this determination on remand.) and (2) in not including the 168 net votes for Gore identified in a partial recount by the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board.
49. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. "2000 Presidential Election - Handcount (00genhc.xls)". 2000 General Election Results. Retrieved 2016-11-16.
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51. Engelhardt, Joel; McCabe, Scott; Stapleton, Christine (January 27, 2001). "Disputed Palm Beach ballots held potential gains for Gore". Palm Beach Post. West Palm Beach, Florida, United States. p. 1A.
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53. "Florida Ballots Project". National Opinion Research Center. Archived from the original on December 17, 2001. Retrieved May 28, 2010.
54. Keating, Dan (28 Aug 2002). "Democracy Counts: The Media Consortium Florida Ballot Review": 8. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Sheraton Boston & Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts
55. "Who Won the Election? Who Cares?". Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. Retrieved October 30, 2012.
56. Freeman, Steven & Bleifuss, Joel. Was the 2000 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count. Seven Stories Press, 2006, pp. 41-47.
57. "The Final Word? New Documents Raise Questions About News Media's Findings On The 2000 Presidential Election" (archived from the original on 2008-10-30)
58. "Statistical Practice : Reliability of the Uncertified Ballots in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida" (PDF). Amstat.org. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
59. "The Florida Recount of 2000". www.factcheck.org. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
60. "Newspapers' recount shows Bush prevailed". USA Today. May 15, 2001. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
61. "Florida voter errors cost Gore the election". USA Today. May 11, 2001. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
62. Isikoff, Michael (2000-12-09). "The Final Word?". Newsweek.com. Retrieved 2016-11-29.
63. Julian Pecquet (Winter 2005). "Battlefield Florida: A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith". rinr.fsu.edu. (Interview with author of The Battle for Florida, 2005). Retrieved August 18, 2016.
64. "The Long Count". Pollingreport.com. Retrieved 2016-11-29.

External links

• How we got here: A timeline of the Florida recount
• Election 2000 - NPR
• Bush V. Gore
• Video highlight of Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Wells opening Gore v. Harris argument on November 20, 2000
• Video highlights of November 20, 2000 and December 7, 2000 oral arguments in Gore v. Harris in front of Florida Supreme Court

Archives

• Jonathan Rosenblum Papers. 1993-2006. 1 cubic foot (1 box). At the Labor Archives of Washington. Contains records of Rosenblum's assistance in ballot recount efforts in November 2000.