Newspaper Recount Didn't Count All Votes: Washington Post Misreported Its Own Study

The lead story in the November 12 Washington Post concluded that "if [Vice President Al] Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result [of last year’s presidential election] likely would have been different."

The Post made this conclusion, it said, because: "An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins."

Nowhere in this lead story, however, did the Post reveal that the recount it conducted with a consortium of news organizations did not, in fact, recount "all disputed ballots," or even all of the same ballots that were disputed as of last November.

In another story in the same edition, the paper conceded that it counted "virtually all" of the ballots that were "uncounted" on Nov. 11, 2000. In yet another story in the same edition, the paper said: "The 175,010 ballots examined in the study represent more than 99% of the total number of undervotes and overvotes believed to have existed on Election Day."

So what did the Post’s recount actually count? All disputed ballots? Virtually all uncounted ballots? Ninety-nine per cent of the total number of undervotes and overvotes?

Well, there is still another option: Elsewhere in the same edition—not in an actual story, but in a caption above a graphic—the paper said: "A review of all uncounted ballots in Florida shows that Al Gore got more votes overall."

So, again, what is it? All disputed ballots? All uncounted ballots? Virtually all uncounted ballots? Or 99% of the undervoted and overvoted ballots? Does a precise and accurate answer to this question make any difference?

It does, if—like the Post—you are trying to earn credibility for the claim that the state of Florida made a mistake involving several dozen votes that switched the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

The group of researchers at the University of Chicago that conducted the "recount" for the Post, the New York Times and other major papers concluded that a total of 176,466 Florida ballots in last November’s election had either no vote (an "undervote") or more than one vote (an "overvote") on the presidential section of the ballot. The researchers "recounted" only 175,010 of these ballots. By their own calculation, they missed 1,456 of them. That would explain the Post’s claim in one of its stories that it had recounted "99%" of the ballots.

Do these 1,456 missing ballots reflect on the credibility of the Post’s editorial conclusions? Absolutely, the Post’s declaration—in the second paragraph of its lead front-page story—that a "recount of all disputed ballots" would likely have changed the outcome of the election cannot be supported because the paper did not recount "all disputed ballots." No one did—ever.

But would the missing 1,456 ballots, if found tomorrow and added to the Post’s recount, bolster the Post’s speculation that Gore could have won if "all" disputed ballots were recounted? Maybe, maybe not. No one can know for sure. But here are some facts to consider:

According to the Post’s recount, if Gore had gotten what he demanded in court—a recount of all votes in Palm Beach, Broward, Volusia and Miami-Dade counties—Bush still would have won the election by 225 votes.

According to the Post’s recount, if the Florida Supreme Court had gotten what it wanted—a recount of all undervotes in every Florida county—Bush still would have won the election by 493.

In its desperate search to find a way that Gore could theoretically be awarded the election, the Post came up with yet another recount scenario that neither Gore nor the Florida Supreme Court had demanded. They recounted "all" (or "virtually all," or "more than 99%") of undervotes and overvotes statewide. Then, rather than apply one vote-counting standard statewide (as the U.S. Supreme Court said would be necessary to keep the recount consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection requirement), the paper applied a different vote-counting standard in each county (adopting in each locality the unique standard that local officials say they would have used had not the 14th Amendment required a uniform standard).

Using these multiple standards—a recount of "all" (or "virtually all," or "99%") of the undervotes and overvotes, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago—Gore would have eked out a 171-vote victory.

But that still ignores the 1,456 missing ballots. Might there not be enough Bush votes among those to change the winner back to Bush even under the Post’s own never-requested, multiple standard, unconstitutional vote recounting method?

David Keating, one of the reporters who wrote the story for the Post, says that statewide only about 13% of the undervoted and overvoted ballots revealed what the paper determined to be an intelligible vote for either Bush or Gore when recounted. That would mean by extrapolation that one could expect to find 189 intelligible votes among the 1,456 missing ballots. That, Keating argues, would not be enough to overcome Gore’s 171-vote margin in the Post’s recount.

Keating said that in some counties there is no record of how many undervoted and overvoted ballots were cast last November, so nobody knows for sure how many such ballots may be missing now. "In some counties," said Keating, "it’s a mythical number."

This raises questions about how the researchers at the University of Chicago arrived at the conclusion that there were 176,466 undervoted and overvoted ballots cast statewide in Florida, and that they recounted 175,010 of these, leaving only 1,456 uncounted.

These researchers, for example, indicate on their website that they believe they were missing 198 undervoted and overvoted ballots from Miami-Dade County. But Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy has a different estimate. "I’d say we probably had about a 98% reliability in pulling out all the overvotes and undervotes" for the newspaper recount, Leahy told Human Events. He attributed this margin of error to the understandable difficulty workers face trying to sort these ballots out as they run through counting machines.

The University of Chicago says Miami-Dade provided them with a total of 28,403 undervoted and overvotes. If this is off by 2%, as Leahy believes, that means the newspaper recount may have been missing 570 undervoted and overvoted ballots from Miami-Dade alone.

That would mean the newspaper recount was missing almost three times as many Miami-Dade ballots as it thought it was missing.

But these inconsistencies are not the only reasons that the newspaper recount is bogus. The re-re-recount also failed to deal with missing chads.

The liberal press did not want to report on the issue of missing chads the first time around either. But last November, when the original hand recounts were done in the four counties requested by Gore, many chads fell out of ballots as the recount was conducted—permanently altering the status of some ballots (click here for related story).

The Post’s Keating conceded that chads must have fallen out of ballots during the paper’s recount and that no effort was made to account for them. When asked if chads fell out while the newspapers were doing their recount, he said: "Some may have. I wouldn’t be able to quantify it. The fact of the matter is every time you paw over them more fall out. It’s been described—the counting room, when they’re feeding these things through the computers on election night—it’s described as looking like a snow storm of chads flying through the air."

Asked directly if the newspapers kept track of how many chads flew off the ballots during their recount, Keating said, "No. That was not something that there was any effort to try to—because if there’s a chad falling, lying on the floor, you don’t know if it came out of the presidential race, or another race, I mean you can’t, you don’t know. You don’t know if it came out today or last week. You don’t know if it came out of a ballot we’re looking at, or a ballot we’re not looking at."

So the Post’s recounters may or may not have cast some inadvertent "chad-flying" overvotes for Howard Phillips and John Hagelin. We will never know. But we do know this: This latest, and hopefully last, recount was not scientific, was not conducted according to constitutional standards, and was not reported to the public with strict accuracy.

Okay, let's see if I've got this straight. The only way that Gore supporters can claim a win for Gore is:

If 1,456 missing (!) ballots are ignored;
Military ballots are never counted;
A different standard is used for each county;
Illegal overvotes are counted;
Seers are used to devine the intent of voters;
If they extrapolate a guess as to what the ignored 1,456 missing ballots might have shown;
Falling chads are not taken into consideration.
The articles states, "Asked directly if the newspapers kept track of how many chads flew off the ballots during their recount, Keating said, "No. That was not something that there was any effort to try to—because if there’s a chad falling, lying on the floor, you don’t know if it came out of the presidential race, or another race, I mean you can’t, you don’t know.
Precisely, you can't know.

Someone please explain to me how come no one in the press talks about the fact that the only way Gore wins is if all undervotes and overvotes (i.e. all ILLEGAL votes) are tallied as votes for Gore.

Incredibly, CNN did just that. They said, "In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes. ...However, the double votes on both butterfly and caterpillar ballots were clearly invalid under any interpretation of the law."

I'm shocked I tell you, shocked.

Please, don't faint...I don't have any smelling salts, but I have CHEESE! OMG, Did I say cheese?

The tossed military ballots simply would not support the media's foregone conclusion, so this issue was ignored.

About 40% of the military ballots were disqualified on technicalities. The 60% which were counted produced an additional 630 vote margin for Bush. Assuming the same ratio on the additional 40%, there were a net 420 additional Bush votes-- more than enough to overcome any hypothetical exercises in mental flatulence which never were.

You got it, this is voter fraud, classic case! The media does not want to say this, or we might find out how Hillary became Senator of New York!
I am convinced this is how most democrats get into office, through fraud in democratic controlled districts.

Good point:

"The media does not want to say this, or we might find out how Hillary became Senator of New York! I am convinced this is how most democrats get into office, through fraud in democratic controlled districts."

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