As the 2000 Presidential election dragged on due to lawsuits filed over accusations of missed and uncounted votes, Thomas Hargrove, a reporter for Scripps Howard, wondered if the 2000 Florida fiasco was an isolated problem.
To test his theory, Hargrove went to Election Data Services, a Washington group that keeps election results, for data from the 1996 election.
Pulling the data into SPSS, a statistical software package, Hargrove ran queries to see if there were indeed undercounts in the contest between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton.
The results were startling.
"Our investigation showed that in the Dole-Clinton race, millions of votes were not counted," he said. "In one West Virginia County, the county clerk had just found 1,000 votes that Bob Dole should have gotten.
"It wasn't enough to change the election because Clinton had such a lead over Dole," Hargrove said.
The News Service also found other problems: official registration lists in the United States have become so faulty that scores of counties claim to have more voters than actual adult population.
Sloppy bookkeeping led 190 counties and the state of Maine to appear to be more than 100 percent registered in the 1996 presidential election, according to the Scripps Howard News Service study of election records in 3,189 counties and voting districts.
"Our studies did show that there were numerous problems in voting across the country and not just Florida," Hargrove said.
Computer-assisted reporting played an important role in coverage of the 2000 presidential election.
Hundreds of newspapers and other media across the country found problems in the election system that went beyond Florida, which had gathered most of the attention in the presidential race. Among the papers and news organizations were The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Tallahassee Democrat, among others.
Key findings
• The long-held belief that every vote counts is a myth. Media organizations found that in each election, thousands of votes are thrown out or not counted.
• The 3,067 individual counties in the United States have few national standards for determining how votes get counted. The job of counting the 100 million or more votes often falls on poorly trained and understaffed county clerk offices with few resources. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that county governments typically spend about 3 percent of their budgets on the clerk offices.
• Voting failures often fall on those who can least afford it: Minority and low-income communities. Investigations by The New York Times and several papers in Florida show that voting systems in these communities tend to be older and less reliable than those in high-income communities.
• Registration lists were often flawed. News organizations found that many people were turned away from polls because their names weren't on the list, and a Miami Herald investigation found that hundreds of felons voted in the presidential election.
• In Florida, poor ballot designs may have given thousands of votes to the wrong candidate. Another Miami Herald investigation found that a third party candidate's gain in votes in a heavy Democratic county was a statistical anomaly.
Faulty machines
Most of the problems with under-votes were attributed to faulty voting machines, an investigation by a media organization found.
One of the first newspapers to look at the voting machine issue was The New York Times. The Times and the Scripps Howard post-election analysis will be available soon at the IRE Resource Center.