Precinct-Level Analysis of Palm Beach County Returns

The results of the previous sections strongly suggest that Buchanan's vote total in Palm Beach County was not a true reflection of voter intentions. A crucial question remains: Who made the mistakes? Was it voters who wanted to vote for Bush or those who wanted to vote for Gore?

At an intuitive level, mistakes seem less likely for Bush voters, who had to match the first candidate with the first punch hole, than for Gore voters, who had to match the second candidate with the third punch hole. Of course, a large number of Democratic voters complained that the butterfly ballot caused them to vote for Buchanan by mistake. Nonetheless, it is important to examine the possibility that Buchanan received votes intended for both candidates.²¹ To do that, we estimate an overdispersed binomial model for precinct-level election returns across Palm Beach County. The linear predictor of (6) now has for regressors the vote share in each election-day precinct for U.S. Senate candidates Democrat Bill Nelson ($x_{1i}$) and Reform Party candidate Joel Deckard ($x_{2i}$). We use the robust $\tanh$ estimator. If the butterfly ballot did not cause any systematic voting errors, we would expect that support for Nelson (D) in a precinct would be negatively associated with support for Buchanan and that support for Deckard (Ref.) would be positively associated with support for Buchanan. If the butterfly ballot did cause asymmetric voting errors, we would expect support for Nelson (D) to be positively--instead of negatively--associated with support for Buchanan.

The first line in Table 5 presents the results for election-day precincts across the whole of Palm Beach County. Support for Nelson (D) is positively associated with support for Buchanan. Such a pattern is what we would expect to observe if the butterfly ballot caused many Democrats to vote for Buchanan. The pattern supports the claim that Buchanan's votes tended to come from mistaken Gore supporters.

The pattern does not occur for votes for other offices that included a Reform candidate but did not use the butterfly ballot. In 2000 in Palm Beach County, Reform Party candidates contested the legislative races in both Florida State Senate District 35 and Florida U.S. Congressional District 16. Only the presidential portion of the 2000 Palm Beach County ballot used the butterfly format, so it is probably safe to assume that the outcomes of the non-presidential races in Palm Beach County were not contaminated by the butterfly ballot. Using this assumption, we are able to examine the relationship between Reform Party support and Democratic Party support both in the presence and in the absence of the butterfly ballot.

Restricting attention to Palm Beach County election-day precincts in State Senate District 35, we robustly estimate two separate models. In the first model $y_{i}$ is the count of votes received by Buchanan, and in the second $y_{i}$ is defined as the count of votes received by Reform Party State Senate candidate Sherree Lowe. We also estimate two parallel models restricting attention to Palm Beach County election-day precincts in Congressional District 16. In the first model $y_{i}$ is the count of votes received by Buchanan, and in the second model $y_{i}$ is the count of votes received by Reform Party candidate John McGuire. Because the butterfly ballot was relevant only for the presidential vote, we expect support for Nelson (D) to be negatively associated with support both for Lowe and for McGuire.

Turning first to the results in Table 5 for District 35, we see that support for Nelson (D) remains positively associated with support for Buchanan across precincts in the district. But support for Nelson (D) is negatively associated with support for Lowe (Ref.). As expected, the coefficient associated with the Nelson (D) vote share switches sign. The results for Congressional District 16 parallel those of State Senate District 35. Across the precincts of Congressional District 16, support for Nelson (D) is positively associated with support for Buchanan, but support for Nelson (D) is negatively associated with support for McGuire (Ref.). We also find that in both districts support for Deckard (Ref.) is not significantly associated with support for Buchanan, but it is positively associated with support for McGuire (Ref.).

In the absence of claims about the butterfly ballot, the precinct-level findings would be quite counter-intuitive. One would expect precincts that are more Democratically-inclined with respect to the U.S. Senate race to be less Reform Party-inclined when it comes to other races. The results presented in Table 5 support the claim that the butterfly ballot caused systematic, biased voter errors that cost Gore more lost votes than Bush. Democratic-inclined precincts (as measured by the Nelson (D) vote share) are less likely to vote for Reform party candidates in general (e.g., Lowe and McGuire) but are more likely to vote for Buchanan. The difference is the butterfly ballot.

The key features of Table 5 are the contrasts between Buchanan and Lowe and between Buchanan and McGuire. It is possible to explain the positive association between the Nelson (D) vote share and the Buchanan vote share by asserting that Reform Party members in Palm Beach County chose to live among Democrats. The unintuitive nature of such an assertion notwithstanding, the assertion contradicts the finding that the Nelson (D) vote is negatively associated with both the Lowe (Ref.) and Mcguire (Ref.) vote shares. We have the additional oddity that there is no significant relationship between votes for Deckard, the Reform candidate for the U.S.. Senate, and votes for Buchanan. But there is, as one would expect, a strong positive relationship between votes for Deckard and votes for at least one of the other two Reform party candidates.

The results in this section also enable us to examine, and refute, one final alternative explanation for Buchanan's anomalous vote total in Palm Beach County. It is conceivable that Buchanan's Palm Beach County vote total was caused by a group of anomalous precincts within the county. Anomalous results concentrated within a few precincts would suggest that excess votes were the result of localized phenomena, rather than the butterfly ballot, which was used uniformly throughout the county. For example malfunctioning vote machines such as the one in Tillman precinct in Jasper County, South Carolina, could have recorded extra votes for Buchanan in a few precincts. Alternatively, intentional fraud in a few precincts could be the source of Buchanan's success. Finally, pockets of intense election-day Reform Party mobilization could have delivered the extra votes. Such explanations are, however, quite difficult to reconcile with the precinct-level patterns documented in this section. Given our use of a robust estimator, the coefficients would not be affected by a few precinct-level anomalies produced by irregular voting processes. Moreover, a localized mobilization effort should affect outcomes in multiple races whereas the peculiar relationship between Nelson (D) vote share and Reform vote share is present only in the presidential race, which used the butterfly ballot.