Vice President Al Gore may have good reason to be hunting so hard for votes in Miami-Dade County.
Fifty-eight percent of Miami-Dade’s undervote ballots, which registered no presidential choice in machine counts, came from precincts Gore won on Election Day, according to a Sun-Sentinel analysis.
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The precincts Gore captured contain 6,269 of the undervotes, or 58.3 percent of the total ballots in which voters didn’t punch the ballot cleanly through or skipped the race. Precincts won by Texas Gov. George W. Bush contain 4,481 of the total undervotes, or 41.7 percent, the analysis shows.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in Tallahassee, the Gore campaign estimates it would net another 600 votes if all of Miami-Dade’s 10,750 undervotes are hand counted.
While statisticians believe that figure to be high, it seems likely that Gore would net more votes than Bush in such a count.
“It’s not going to be 600. That’s unlikely, extremely unlikely,” said Bruce Hansen, a statistical economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who did his own analysis of the Miami-Dade undervote Monday. “This is premised on the way the ballots were assessed [during] the first part of the hand recount.”
When Miami-Dade’s canvassing board abruptly called it quits Wednesday, saying that counters couldn’t meet the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline, Gore had a net gain of 157 new votes in Florida’s most populous county.
Twenty percent of the 2,000 undervotes examined in the aborted hand count yielded a vote for either Gore or Bush. Because more undercounted votes are in Gore-leaning precincts, he could be expected to pick up more votes than Bush if all the undervotes are scrutinized.
The critical question, of course, is how many.
Hansen’s preliminary analysis concluded that Gore would net 116 votes in the remaining Miami-Dade precincts. Add those to the 157 Gore had when the canvassing board gave up, and the vice president would have a net gain of 273 votes in Miami-Dade.
Where Hansen’s analysis gets tantalizing is in what he concluded is the likely range of votes Gore could pick up. If all the undervotes were hand counted, Hansen estimated, Gore is likely to pick up between 34 and 198 votes.
Assuming he picked up the high end, Gore would have a total of 355 new votes from Miami-Dade. Add that to the 180 votes yielded, but not accepted, in Palm Beach County’s hand count, and Gore would have 535 new votes–just 2 fewer than Bush’s official margin of victory.
Gore’s lawsuit also seeks to have the Palm Beach County votes counted.
“Add the 180 from Palm Beach, and we’re in a constitutional crisis,” Hansen said. “But that 355 number would be very unlikely, not impossible, but very unlikely. It all depends on how vote counters count and so many other assumptions.”
Republicans claim the abbreviated recount focused mostly on Gore precincts, thus producing skewed figures that failed to include those that backed Bush on Election Day. A review of the first 135 precincts covered by the manual recount bears them out, showing that only five went for Bush.
But the newspaper’s analysis of the undervote countywide also seems to bear out Democratic claims that much of the undervote is concentrated in Democratic precincts populated by the elderly and African-Americans. They attribute that to a massive get-out-the-vote effort that drew large numbers of first-time voters.
Of the 148 precincts where 2 percent or more of the ballots registered no presidential choice, slightly more than half, or 76, were at least 50 percent black. Sixty-five percent were predominantly Democratic.
In the four precincts with the highest undervote rate, more than 4 percent, voters on average were 74 percent Democratic and 68 percent black. All were in northwest Miami-Dade, with three in the Bunche Park community of Opa-locka.