Florida Election Recount - Results

Results

The media reported the results of the study during the week after November 12, 2001. The results of the study showed that had the limited county by county recounts requested by the Gore team been completed, Bush would still have been the winner of the election. However, the study also showed that the result of a statewide recount of all disputed ballots could have been different. The study was unable to review the ballots in Broward and Volusia that were counted as legal votes during the manual recounts thus analysis included those figures that were obtained using very loose standards in its calculations. Since these recounts resulted in a sizable net gain for Gore (665 net Gore votes) they have no bearing on the assessment that Bush would likely have won the recounts requested by Gore and ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. They do, however, play a major role in the assessment that Gore could have won a recount of the entire state if overvotes were taken into account. Without these votes Gore would have lost a recount of the entire state even with all overvotes added in. Unless 495 or more of those votes were actual votes then Gore still would have lost. Note these figures also do not take into account a dispute over 500 absentee ballots that Bush requested to be added to the certified totals. If found to be legal votes that would put Gore totally out of reach regardless of any manual recount standard.

The Florida Supreme Court had ordered "counting of the legal votes contained within the undervotes in all counties where the undervote has not been subjected to a manual tabulation." The U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court and stopped their recount via an unsigned "per curiam" opinion in Bush v. Gore, with three Justices (Rehnquist joined by Scalia and Thomas) concurring in a separate opinion. Four Justices (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) each wrote their own opinion with various combinations of the other three joining.

The media recount study found that under the system of limited recounts in selected counties as was requested by the Gore campaign, the only way that Gore would have won was by using counting methods that were never requested by any party, including "overvotes" — ballots containing more than one vote for an office. While some of these ballots recorded votes for two separate candidates, a significant number (20 percent in Lake County, for example) were cases of a voter voting for a candidate and then also writing in that same candidate's name on the write-in line.

The New York Times did its own analysis of how mistaken overvotes might have been caused by confusing ballot designs. It found that the butterfly ballot in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County may have cost Gore a net 6286 votes, and the two page ballot in similarly Democratic Duval County may have cost him a net 1999 votes, each of which would have made the difference by itself. The rest of the media consortium did not consider these because there could be no clear determination of a voter's intent. Separate analyses suggest that confusion over the butterfly ballots may have cost a Gore victory by perhaps a few thousand votes.