Election Results Are In-Again
MAYER, WILLIAM G.
Election Results Are In—Again Don't worry, there are still things to argue about. BY WILLIAM G. MAYER "THE ELECTION IS OVER. Let the historical recrimina--L. tions begin." The U.S. Supreme Court...
...They can tell us what they'd have done, of course, but there's no reason to regard their opinion as more correct than anything the Bush and Gore camps (or the courts) said back in November and December...
...One is the error of not counting a vote where the voter really did mean to express a preference for one candidate...
...What many are plainly hoping for is a more partisan outcome: a clear, firm declaraWilliam G. Mayer is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University and the author of several books on presidential elections...
...At least three highly contentious questions hover over the Florida recounts...
...And as any statistician will confirm, there is always a tradeoff between the two: Any attempt to decrease the number of wrongly uncounted votes will inevitably increase the number of wrongly counted votes...
...Indeed, given the nature of the question, it is impossible to provide a definitive, objective answer to it...
...What have we learned so far...
...Undoubtedly there are some cases where every unbiased observer will agree that the voter's preference is clear and that the vote was not counted because of computer or human error...
...Far from settling the matter, they're only going to set off a whole new series of arguments...
...Over the last 30 years, civic reformers in this country have spent a lot of time worrying about how to get more Americans to the polls—and remarkably little effort making sure that once there, their votes are counted accurately...
...What needs to be stressed here is that many forms of vote fraud are extraordinarily difficult to verify or document, and will almost certainly not be picked up in a recount, no matter how thorough and careful that recount is...
...1. How far should we go in determining the "intent of the voter...
...One asserts that the law is the law and must be followed, or those in power will always be free to act in an arbitrary manner...
...Thanks to a remarkable effort by the Miami Herald, we actually do have a pretty accurate count of the number of convicted felons who voted in Florida: 1,241 in 22 counties, which the Herald extrapolates (itself a risk-laden venture) to about 2,500 votes in the state as a whole...
...Most notoriously in the 2000 elections, the Gore campaign vehemently insisted that in the four heavily Democratic counties where hand recounts were being conducted, every effort be made to count every ballot cast by a well-intentioned voter, technicalities be damned...
...Supreme Court didn't say precisely that when it rendered its decision in Bush v. Gore—but it might as well have...
...Within days of Gore's concession, two different teams of media and academic researchers were already poring over the Florida ballots, trying to carry out a complete recount of every disputed vote cast in that state...
...The other position says that the law is not infallible and that when it conflicts with elementary principles of justice and fairness, officials should be able to bend or ignore the law...
...The Democrats are on even shakier ground...
...For those in both the Gore and Bush camps who expect these recounts to finally settle the issue, the assumption seems to be that what we face in the Sunshine State is a counting problem, like that old carnival game where people have to guess how many jelly beans there are in a glass jar...
...Bush won three of them...
...The conflict between these two standards runs through many of the greatest works in Western literature and philosophy...
...The hopes of the Gore supporters are illusory...
...So if partisan invective is your thing, you're gonna love these new recounts...
...This was, of course, the single most disputed issue during the official recount, and there is no way that academics or media rep-resentatives—or anyone else—can provide a final, "objective" answer to it...
...In an attempt to limit vote fraud and restrict the discretion of partisan election officials, every state has a lengthy section in its statute books that defines in extraordinary detail just what constitutes a validly cast vote...
...It's also clear that Dade County has a long history of vote fraud, though most of it seems to occur in local elections...
...But as we learned last November, a lot of "uncounted" votes are ambiguous cases, where reasonable people can disagree about what, if anything, the voter was trying to say...
...More to the immediate point, there is nothing new or "objective" that the recounters can contribute to this debate...
...Nor can mathematics help us identify some magic point where the tradeoff is perfectly balanced: Where to draw the line is less a matter of math than of values (in particular, which kind of error we most want to avoid...
...On the Democratic side, there are widely publicized charges that local authorities attempted to discourage or intimidate black voters from going to the polls and deleted many valid names from the voter registration rolls...
...To further complicate matters, while both sides can make out a plausible case that "something" untoward happened in the 2000 election, both will be hard pressed to come up with a precise number of votes they lost as a result...
...From a statistical perspective, the problem facing the Florida counters is a familiar one, involving two different types of possible error...
...The one undisputed conclusion that is emerging from the media recounts is that our current vote-counting systems are seriously deficient...
...tion that Gore "really" won Florida— a declaration that would both undermine the work of the current administration and give Democrats a potent rallying cry for the 2004 elections...
...If the recounts help remedy these deficiencies, they will be worth the time and money put into them...
...In this case, the contest judges would still need to do some count-ing—but they would first have to settle a considerably more difficult question: What exactly constitutes a "fruit candy...
...Besides all the counting problems, both the Bush and Gore camps also complained that the integrity of the Florida balloting was compromised by various kinds of "irregularities" or fraud...
...But it's no great secret that many of the people most interested in these recounts are motivated not by high moral concerns about improving the technology of election administration or even by simple curiosity...
...On the Republican side, there are (less widely publicized) charges that hundreds of convicted felons were allowed to vote, in clear violation of Florida law...
...Statisticians not being the wittiest people in the world, the two types are literally called Type I and Type II error...
...There are two quite defensible answers to this question...
...Because both of these are legitimate arguments, it's difficult to say what to do in any specific case—and all too easy for a candidate or political party to shift back and forth from one principle to the other, depending on what works to their immediate advantage...
...With the results from one of those recounts having just been made public, and with the other scheduled for release next month, it's worth taking stock...
...Given the basic rules of arithmetic, there is a clear, final, correct answer that everyone can agree on...
...What isn't clear, however, is how many of these patriotic felons voted for Gore...
...The Herald, for instance, elaborated four different scenarios for recounting undervotes, each with a different chad standard...
...And no recount could possibly tally up the number of votes that might have been cast if local authorities had been more solicitous of black voters...
...2. What should we do about votes that were not cast in a technically correct manner...
...And then, when it came to counting the absentee ballots cast by overseas military personnel, the Gore forces upheld exactly the opposite position: that the law had to be observed in all its magnificent rigidity...
...The problem in Florida, though, is more like a game where a jar is filled with all sorts of different kinds of candies, and participants are asked to guess how many "fruit candies" are in the jar...
...Though none of the contestants knows the number, it's a fairly simple matter to find out: You just count up the jelly beans...
...Even if we could figure out the truth in every incident complained of, and even if we could somehow determine the intentions of local authorities (and whether these matter), we still wouldn't have anything more than a wild guess as to how many votes this sort of thing cost the Gore-Lieberman ticket...
...What about a chocolate bar that has small bits of raspberry mixed into it...
...And what are we likely to learn in the future...
...What about grape-flavored bubble gum...
...Votes cast by convicted felons look the same, in a recount, as votes cast by law-abiding citizens...
...And would it make any difference if the raspberries or the grape flavoring were artificial...
...The Bush campaign has a slight advantage in this regard...
...Gore won one...
...And inevitably, some voters fail to dot every i and cross every t. What should be done in such cases...
...Nothing in the Miami Herald-USA Today results last week— and nothing we are likely to learn from the recount still being conducted by a consortium of eight other news organizations—will provide a conclusive answer to that much-debated question of who really deserved to win Florida...
...3. What do we do about vote fraud...
...The other is the error of wrongly attributing a vote to a candidate when the voter did not actually mean to do so...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 30
