Palm Beach Vote

November 9, 2000

I am now 100% convinced that in a fair election, Gore is the winner.

It is a simple matter of fact that some set of Florida voters went to the polls. Some subset went with the intention of voting for Gore. Another subset went with the intention of voting for Bush. It may be very hard to determine the exact membership of those sets now, but the fact is that those sets exist and are precisely defined. There are, therefore, some exact numbers which are the correct vote for Gore and the correct vote for Bush.

Now the process by which we determine those numbers has many flaws. Ballots can be lost, destroyed, misread, rejected, forged, or manipulated. None of that changes the correct number of intended votes by legitimate voters.

In a fair election, the process does not get in the way. In a fair election, the will of the voters is all that matters. The process has no standing in choosing our representatives.

This concept of fair has nothing to do with the fairness of the counting process. We can debate that process, but that does not change the the correct number of intended votes by legitimate voters. When I say "a fair election", I mean the result we would get if we knew those exact numbers.

Here are the Florida statewide and Palm Beach County results (pre recount):

	statewide		Palm Beach County
Gore	2907604	48.8%	268945	62.2%
Bush	2909385	48.9%	152846	35.4%
Nader	97391	1.6%	5564	1.3%
Buchanan	17464	0.3%	3407	0.8%
Other	22732	0.4%	1524	0.4%
Disqualified	?		19120	4.4%

(percentages are based on the number of qualified ballots, so the last column adds to 104.4%)

The first thing to note are the Gore and Bush numbers in Palm Beach. This is a very liberal county.

The 4.4% disqualified for double punches is really strange. By comparison, less than 0.9% of ballots were disqualified in Palm Beach County in the Senate race (which had 7 people running rather than 10).

It is debatable whether the Buchanan votes were meant for Buchanan or someone else, but the double punches are fairly clearly goofs. If those ballots are from a random sample of all voters, we would expect them to split between Gore/Bush as 62/35. That would give a differential of 5124 votes for Gore (19120 * (.622 - .354)). This easily swamps all other factors such as the current recount differential, the Buchanan question, the outstanding absentees, and probably the question of whether anybody was denied the vote due to race. Give Gore anything even vaguely approaching those 5000 votes, and Gore is President.

As for Buchanan, it is quite odd that such a liberal and largely Jewish county would go for Buchanan. As Palm Beach County Commissioner Bert Aaronson put it, "I don't think we have 3,000 Nazis in Palm Beach County." Buchanan even admits most of those votes are probably not his. If those ballots also should have gone 65/32, Gore gains another 900 votes in the differential.

If Gore voters were more likely to be confused than Bush voters because Gore was listed second on the first page and Buchanan had the second hole, then Gore gains a couple thousand more votes over Bush out of the Buchanan vote and another 10K from the disqualified vote.

I have only discussed what is fair, not what the law should do about it. Florida law says that the candidates must be listed in a particular order. In this case it was required that Bush be first and Gore be second. There is a decent argument that since Buchanan appeared higher than Gore and got the second hole, the law was broken. A judge will have to decide that. If the law was broken, then technically no vote has taken place at all in that county. They would have to vote again. That is the rule of law. The law explicitly mentions that the judge may set aside an election. It was last done 2 years ago in the Miami mayoral race, though an appeals court changed the order to instead invalidate all absentee ballots. The law also explicitly gives the judge the power to declare any candidate simply to be the winner. More generally, it allows:

The circuit judge to whom the contest is presented may fashion such orders as he or she deems necessary to ensure that each allegation in the complaint is investigated, examined, or checked, to prevent or correct any alleged wrong, and to provide any relief appropriate under such circumstances.

I see at least 4 violations of the Florida election law:

• The required words "vote for one" do not appear. It says "vote for group", but a group is more than one. This could be ruled important to the 19000 people who voted for more than one.
• The words "vote for one" are to appear "immediately under" the title of the office. Even if "vote for group" is considered to be equivalent, it is not "immediately" under. In between is a notice that "a vote for the candidate will actually be a vote for their electors." Although this is a violation, I don't see it having an affect.
• The law refers to each piece being "under" the previous piece. It thus implies everything is in one column. The words "vote for one" must appear "immediately under" the name of the office. Bush's name must appear "under" the heading (based on order of finish of the parties in the last gubernatorial election). Gore's name must appear "under" that. All other names must appear "under" that. More than one column results in the interleaving of names that apparently caused confusion, so this violation is significant.
• The place to mark the ballot is required to be "after" the name of the candidate. For 4 of the candidates, it is to the left of the name and thus "before". The illegal mixing of left/right also is important in apparently creating confusion.

Richard M. Mathews

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