Clearing up the election that won't die

Soon, Florida voters will have their first opportunity since the disputed 2000 presidential election to express their judgment about the performance of public officials who were responsible for administering the state's election laws before and during the election fiasco.

When the election controversy was unfolding, many rumors and accusations circulated about official wrongdoing, but time and information were insufficient, then, to assess their validity. Now, however, much more is known about what happened. Listed below are typical questions about the election, along with my best judgment on the answers.

Question: Who actually received the most votes in Florida's 2000 presidential election?
Answer: Al Gore. State election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner by a margin of 537 votes, but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots of 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. Confusion and conflict, much of it generated by partisan intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001 every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which concluded that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast for Gore than for Bush.

Q: Why did some earlier post-election studies say just the opposite, that is, that Bush had actually won after all?

A: They did not really say this. They reported, instead, that Bush might have kept his lead if the manual recounts of machine-rejected ballots had been completed along the lines either requested by Gore or initially mandated by the Florida Supreme Court. In these recount scenarios, not all of the machine-rejected ballots would have been included. However, just before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the judge overseeing the final statewide recount was preparing to announce that the recount would cover all of the previously uncounted ballots.