Here's proof that you don't have to be a big newspaper with a lot of expensive database software and unlimited staff time to come up with a compelling story. From inspiration to publication, this CAR project took just four days - during which the reporter also churned out front-page dailies from Ground Zero of the 2000 post-election imbroglio.
As a newly promoted bureau chief at a small (just over 50,000 daily circulation) Knight Ridder newspaper in Tallahassee, Fla., I was up to my eyeballs in Florida's hanging chads and other controversies when a call came out of the blue. A civic activist I had known at a previous job five years ago and 400 miles away had driven to the state capital to get some information from the state Division of Elections. She saw my byline and called to tell me she'd picked up an interesting report.
Because the information wasn't available on the state Division of Elections' Web site, I had a copy of the report faxed over. It was a compilation of the presidential votes cast and counted in each of the state's 67 counties.
Like the rest of the world, we'd been hearing that voters in counties with antiquated punch-card voting systems had fewer of their votes counted, compared to those using optical scanners. We'd also been hearing complaints from minority groups that poorer counties had the fewest votes counted because they had the bulk of the old equipment.
I used Microsoft Excel 97 (for PCs) and compiled a spreadsheet listing the state's 67 counties in one column and the percent of votes not counted in another. Generally, I prefer using raw numbers, not computed ones, in spreadsheets, but in this case, the percentages were all I needed and I was in a hurry to make a Sunday story out of information I'd just discovered on Thursday.
Because I was in a hurry and on the cheap, I went to the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research site (http://www.bebr.ufl.edu/) and printed out a free report on population and income. Since it was a PDF, I had to key the per-capita income data back in instead of just downloading it.
I had to do the same with the information about which counties used what voter system. That's available on the Division of Election's Web site (http://election.dos.state.fl.us/votemeth/cvs.shtml), but not in any downloadable form.
Once the data were input and double-checked, there were several ways I could have approached the analysis. I could have done more intensive number-crunching on it such as Chi-square, but in the time frame allotted, I thought just ranking the counties by income and slicing them in half - high income vs low income - would offer a new perspective and serve the purposes of the article.
The resulting story "Incomes, discarded votes may be linked" (http://web.tallahasseedemocrat.com/content/tallahassee/2000/12/03/local/1203.loc.votes.htm) showed that voters in Florida's poorer counties were more than twice as likely as those in more affluent ones to have their votes for president disregarded. That held true regardless of whether they voted on optically scanned ballots or punch card ones.
The story inspired debate about the get-out-the-vote campaigns that had been launched by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, unions and Democrats, all of whom tend to draw lower-income voters. Advocates used the article to talk about the need for voter education and the equitability of having the state subsidize new voting machines. Even Gov. Jeb Bush found the article of use and had a copy faxed to him.