Proofiness - Charles Seife [60]
The 2000 Florida election was a nastier, dirtier, more error-ridden, and higher-stakes version of Minnesota’s Senate race. As Clinton left office, the nation was deeply divided; as a result, the race to determine his successor was exceptionally close. The margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was a bit less than half a percent of the votes cast. In some states, it was even closer. In Wisconsin, Gore’s margin was less than a quarter of a percent; the same was true of Oregon. In New Mexico, Gore won by less than 0.1 percent. But those were blowouts compared to Florida.
Nobody predicted just how close the election would be in Florida. The two candidates would be separated by a mere 1,784 votes out of nearly six million, a margin of 0.03 percent, thirty-thousandths of a percent. Within a few days, an automatic recount triggered by Florida law brought the number down to 327: 0.006 percent, six-thousandths of a percent of the votes cast. On this tiny, tiny handful of votes hung the fate of the 2000 presidential election, as the two candidates had divvied up the other states of the Union more or less evenly. Florida’s twenty-five electors would be decisive; whoever won Florida would take the White House.59
The 2000 presidential election was a complex drama with a rich supporting cast and ironies aplenty. But the true complexity of the drama came from the nature of Florida elections. Unlike Minnesota, the electoral laws in Florida were neither clean nor modern; they were messy, vague, and full of holes. While Minnesota had a uniform system of voting—every single precinct used relatively reliable Scantron machines to tally ballots of similar designs in a standardized manner—Florida’s voting system was a patchwork. Each county had different machines, different systems, and different electoral rules. Some used punch cards while others used Scantrons. There was no standardized ballot, and the punch-card-reading machines were notoriously unreliable. As mentioned earlier, a provision in state law triggered a recount in close elections; as in Minnesota, an election with a margin less than 0.5 percent of the votes cast automatically forced counties to count the ballots again. However, the recount wasn’t to be done by hand except under certain circumstances—unless there was a proven “error in the vote tabulation,” ballots would simply be passed through the readers a second time.
Adding to the drama, the patchwork nature of the Florida election made it incredibly error-prone—much more so than Minnesota’s. Minnesota’s ballots were relatively uniform and well-designed, making it difficult for citizens to cast their vote for the wrong person (though some certainly managed). In Florida there was no uniform design, and some of the ballots were incredibly confusing. In Palm Beach County, a wealthy, Democratic-leaning region of Florida, an infamously badly designed punch-card ballot, the so-called butterfly ballot, invalidated thousands of votes for Gore. Confused by the ballot’s layout, the (mostly elderly) citizens accidentally punched out the hole belonging to Pat Buchanan, a far-right candidate, instead of (or in addition to) their vote for Al Gore. It was crystal clear that this was a systematic error that cost Gore thousands of votes.60
Another source of errors was punch cards. Even in 2000, punch-card ballots were antiquated and unreliable and had large error rates. One major problem was that it was surprisingly difficult for voters to punch the cards properly. Most of the ballots were made out of a small piece of stiff paper with little rectangles scored into the sheet. The voters put the ballot into a voting machine—essentially a box with a metal grate on the top—and with a little stylus punched out