Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202
more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida. George
W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit
with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after
election day. In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more
votes than Gore. These numbers are taken from the official results
released by the Florida Secretary of State's office and so do not
reflect overvotes, undervotes, unsuccessful litigation, butterfly
ballot problems, recounts that might have been allowed but were not,
or any other hypothetical divergence between voter preferences and
counted votes. After the election, the New York Times
conducted a six-month investigation and found that 680 of the
overseas absentee ballots were illegally counted, and almost no one
has publicly disagreed with their assessment. In this article, we
describe the statistical procedures we developed and implemented for
the Times to ascertain whether disqualifying these 680
ballots would have changed the outcome of the election. These
include adding formal Bayesian model averaging procedures to
models of ecological inference. We present
a variety of new empirical results that delineate the precise
conditions under which Al Gore would have been elected president
and offer new evidence of the striking effectiveness of the
Republican effort to prevent local election officials from applying
election law equally to all Florida citizens. |
Our analysis is
a part of The
New York Times article, ``How Bush Took Florida: Mining the
Overseas Absentee Vote'' By David Barstow and Don van Natta Jr.
July 15, 2001, Page 1, Column 1. Our method is briefly described in ``Examining The Vote;
How the Ballots Were Examined,'' By Josh Barbanel. July 15, 2001,
Page 16, Column 3
|