Clearing up the election that won't die

Clearing up the election that won't die By Lance deHaven-Smith CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST

Soon, Florida voters will have their first opportunity since the disputed 2000 presidential election to express their judgment about the performance of public officials who were responsible for administering the state's election laws before and during the election fiasco.

When the election controversy was unfolding, many rumors and accusations circulated about official wrongdoing, but time and information were insufficient, then, to assess their validity. Now, however, much more is known about what happened. Listed below are typical questions about the election, along with my best judgment on the answers.

Question: Who actually received the most votes in Florida's 2000 presidential election? Answer: Al Gore. State election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner by a margin of 537 votes, but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots of 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. Confusion and conflict, much of it generated by partisan intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001 every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which concluded that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast for Gore than for Bush.

Q: Why did some earlier post-election studies say just the opposite, that is, that Bush had actually won after all?

A: They did not really say this. They reported, instead, that Bush might have kept his lead if the manual recounts of machine-rejected ballots had been completed along the lines either requested by Gore or initially mandated by the Florida Supreme Court. In these recount scenarios, not all of the machine-rejected ballots would have been included. However, just before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the judge overseeing the final statewide recount was preparing to announce that the recount would cover all of the previously uncounted ballots.

A: No. In any election, many discarded ballots contain votes that are completely unambiguous. Of particular importance in the 2000 election were the ballots on which a selection had been made from the list of candidates and then a name had also been printed in the space for write-ins. Although these "write-in overvotes" were automatically excluded by tabulating machines, they contained unambiguous and legally valid votes whenever the write-in candidate matched the candidate chosen from the list preceding it. In its comprehensive study of all the uncounted ballots, the University of Chicago found that these write-in overvotes heavily favored Gore.

A: The social characteristics of Florida Democrats. The two groups making the most errors were African Americans and seniors, who are core constituencies of the Florida Democratic Party. Seniors probably made errors because of weak eyesight and other physical limitations caused by aging. African Americans may have made errors because of the anxiety they are likely to feel at the polls, where in the not-very-distant past they would have routinely faced threats, violence, police harassment, and worse.

A: The law required all discernible votes to be counted. Rejecting ballots only because they contain technical errors would have been a violation of Florida election law (Section 101.5614(5)).

A: No. The New York Times and The Washington Post discovered evidence that Florida's governor, secretary of state, and speaker of the House, all Republicans with close ties to George W. Bush, used their offices to manipulate the election controversy and secure Bush's victory. During the controversy, they collaborated either directly or through intermediaries with the legal and political advisers of George W. Bush to: (1) put pressure on the state's top law firms not to work for Gore; (2) bend the rules on absentee ballots to allow improperly marked absentee ballots to be counted; (3) block, stall or discredit manual recounts; and (4) create fears of a constitutional crisis so that the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene.

Q: Will changes to state election laws that were enacted in 2001 prevent the same problems from recurring?

A: No. In fact, the badly named Florida Election Reform Act is in many respects a step backward. It was enacted before the Times and the Post reported that Florida's public officials at the highest levels had collaborated with George W. Bush's advisers to block fair and proper execution of Florida's election laws. Consequently, the legislation focused on modernizing Florida's vote-casting and vote-tabulating equipment but failed to deal with the more serious problem of partisan corruption in the state's system of election administration.

Q: What can be done to assure that Florida's election system is administered properly to minimize voter confusion, count all valid votes, and reduce bias associated with race and age?

A: Amend the Florida Constitution. Florida elections are unlikely to be fair and accurate until their administration is constitutionally removed from the hands of partisan officials and prohibited from being biased against any groups of people who face special challenges when voting.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lance deHaven-Smith is a professor of public administration and policy at Florida State University. Contact him at ldsmith@garnet.fsu.edu.

Q: Why should ballots with mistakes on them have been counted at all?
A: The law required all discernible votes to be counted. Rejecting ballots only because they contain technical errors would have been a violation of Florida election law (Section 101.5614(5)).
Q: Did Florida officials faithfully execute the state's election laws?

A: No. ...all Republicans with close ties to George W. Bush, used their offices to manipulate the election controversy and secure Bush's victory. During the controversy, they collaborated either directly or through intermediaries with the legal and political advisers of George W. Bush to... bend the rules on absentee ballots to allow improperly marked absentee ballots to be counted;

Didn't he just say the law required this? So we only want to count improperly marked ballots when the favor Gore but it is election fraud to count them when they are from our Armed Services. I got it now!

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