(29) Florida DOS, Division of Elections, Analysis and Report of Overvotes and
Undervotes for the 2004 General Election Pursuant to section 101.595, Florida Statutes (Tallahassee, FL: Division of Elections, 31 January 2005).
The bill prohibits a manual recount from being ordered if the number of overvotes,
undervotes, and provisional ballots is fewer than the number of votes needed to change the outcome of the election.
2) with a statistical analysis of the Florida ballots, considering the relative virtues and vices of different voting methods, of ballot designs, and of manual versus machine counting, as well as the matter of
undervotes and overvotes, concluding withal that no recount method could have "broken the tie" (p.
Not at all: there is no discernable class of "overvoters," and there is nothing in Reynolds or any other case preceding or following it to suggest that a state cannot be selective in deciding which types of ballot errors it deems worth recounting, subject only to a requirement of rationality; What's more, the entire objection to the Florida Supreme Court s failure to mandate a statewide recount of overvotes while it mandated a statewide recount of
undervotes overlooks the crucial fact that thirty-four of Florida's sixty-seven counties examined overvotes for mistakes in the original machine recount and thus submitted, to the final tally on which the Harris certification of November 26 was based, counts that included "classes of voters" that were not similarly counted in other counties.
Each of these was based on reviews of untallied ballots statewide, including
undervotes (ballots not registering a presidential preference when tabulated) and overvotes (those on which counting machines detected more than one vote, as when someone selected a candidate and also wrote in the same candidate).
(283) In an opinion concurring in the judgment to halt the Florida recount, Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by the formalist Justices Scalia and Thomas, decided that the Florida Supreme Court had changed Florida's election law when that court purported to interpret the meaning of a legal vote (284) and when that court, on December 8, ordered a recount of all
undervotes throughout the state.
The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to review overvotes (ballots indicating two or more candidates chosen) and
undervotes (ballots that were not clearly marked).
For instance, a relative gain would likely arise from any decision to conduct a manual recount to remedy a possible undervote--and an unknowable net gain would arguably be just, given that there probably were more Gore
undervotes in Broward County--and these relative gains would be allowed under the lower level of scrutiny applied to nondiscriminatory election restrictions.
It may be true that counting the "
undervotes" would have on balance helped Gore, but so what?
After the disputed vote count in Florida turned last fall's presidential election into a hanging chad, there was much talk of election reform to ensure that America would never again be so bedeviled by
undervotes, overvotes, and unintended votes.
For example, the Herald's report on the presidential ballot reviews, which counted 64,000
undervotes throughout Florida's 67 counties, was front-page news in the Herald but relegated to a short article on page two of El Nuevo Herald.
It also turns out that the margin Gore needed was not in "
undervotes" in Miami-Dade, Broward, and.