That’s what happened to the findings of the media study of the uncounted votes from last year’s Florida presidential vote. A consortium of news outlets—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tribune Co. (Newsday’s parent company), The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CNN—spent nearly a year and $900,000 reexamining every disputed ballot.
The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That’s because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court—as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore—only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.
Gore and the Florida Supreme Court ignored overvotes—votes where mechanical counting registered more than one vote—on the assumption that there would be no way to tell which of the multiple candidates the voter actually intended to pick.
But as the consortium found when it actually looked at the overvotes, one often could tell what the voter’s intent was. Many of the overvotes involved, for example, a voter punching the hole next to a candidate’s name, and then writing in the same candidate’s name.
Since the intent of the voter is clear, these are clearly valid votes under Florida law. And Gore picked up enough of such votes that it almost didn’t matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes—whether you counted every dimple or insisted on a fully punched chad, the consortium found that Gore ended up the winner of virtually any full reexamination of rejected ballots.
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