Content area
Full Text
We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2, 000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. We use
multiple methods and several kinds of data to rule out alternative explanations for the votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach County. Among 3,053 U.S. counties where Buchanan was on the ballot, Palm Beach County has the most anomalous excess of votes for him. In Palm Beach County, Buchanan's proportion of the vote on election-day ballots is four times larger than his proportion on absentee (nonbutterfly) ballots, but Buchanan's proportion does not differ significantly between election-day and absentee ballots in any other Florida county. Unlike other Reform candidates in Palm Beach County, Buchanan tended to receive election-day votes in Democratic precincts and from individuals who voted for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate. Robust estimation of overdispersed binomial regression models underpins much of the analysis.
Betaeginning on election day November 7, 2000, Palm Beach County (PBC), Florida, attracted national and eventually international attention because thousands of voters in the county complained that they had difficulty understanding the now infamous butterfly ballot. As a result, they claimed that they had cast invalid or erroneous presidential votes. Lawyers working for the Democratic Party reportedly collected 10,000 affidavits sworn by voters with complaints about some aspect of their election-day experiences in the county (Associated Press 2000b; Firestone 2000a, 2000b; Van Natta 2000; Van Natta and Moss 2000). Shortly after election day, eleven groups of PBC voters filed independent lawsuits seeking relief, claiming they and others had made mistakes in their votes for president because of the confusing format of the ballot.1 Many of them stated that they had intended to vote for Democratic candidate Al Gore but by mistake chose Reform candidate Pat Buchanan. The number of votes involved was more than enough to have tipped the presidential vote in Florida from Republican candidate George W. Bush to Gore, thus giving him Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency.2
PBC is a heavily Democratic, politically liberal county that conventional wisdom says should provide few Buchanan votes. Two days after the...