WHO WON IN FLORIDA?
by Mark A.R. Kleiman

Nov. 26, 2000 -- LOS ANGELES (AmpolNS) -- Despite the best efforts of George Bush's friends to delay the vote count and intimidate the vote counters, we now know which candidate had more votes in Florida.

Al Gore did.

Now we get to find out whether the candidate with the most votes wins the election.

This has nothing to do with the tens of thousands of voided ballots, or the mistaken votes for Pat Buchanan and the Socialist Workers Party in Palm Beach, or the black voters illegally turned away from the polls. This is strictly about validly cast votes.

Here's the arithmetic:

With the absentees, but before the hand recounts, Gov. Bush led by 930. He picked up 96 in various maneuverings involving overseas absentee votes and a lost-and-found voting machine in Nassau County. So he started the hand recount process ahead by 1026.

The Vice-President gained a total of 569 votes in the Broward recount. That cuts Bush's margin to 457.

Palm Beach County has been using such strict standards in judging partially punched ballots that neither side was gaining many votes. Still, Gore was on track to gain somewhere between 100 and 300 votes, depending on how far the Palm Beach count gets before the deadline.

With Dade no longer counting, and not planning to report even its partial results, Gore will therefore wind up behind by somewhere between 150 and 350 votes at the time of certification.

But Gore had gained 157 more than Bush in the part of the Dade hand recount already completed. At that rate, if the Palm Beach canvassing board had been able to finish the job, his countywide gain would have been between 600 and 800 votes. So it's next door to certain that simply finishing the Dade count would bring him out ahead, probably by about 450 votes. (It's just barely conceivable that he will wind up so close as of Sunday that just including the Dade count already completed would do the trick.)

That's why Bush's forces mounted a near-riot to stop the counting. (As one of Bush's organizers told the same mob, after it had moved to Broward, complete with its mobile-home command center and walkie-talkie communications system, "No Miami here, unless we need to later.")

The Governor might pick up a few votes if the military votes disallowed for missing postmarks are counted, but not enough to put him back in the lead. Of the 1400 rejected, only about 200 simply lacked postmarks. The rest were missing essential elements: a signature, a date, or a witness. If all 200 are counted, as they should be, and Bush carries them 3-to-1, that's a gain for him of 100 votes, of which he's already gotten about 40.

Nor does Bush figure to gain much, if anything, if the rest of the state does hand recounts; that's why Bush's team didn't ask for them. Most of the state uses optical scanning, which, unlike the punch-cards, misses only tiny numbers of votes. It turns out that even in Duval County, which uses punch-cards and which Bush carried, most of the "undervotes" are in precincts that went for Gore. The mispunching problem seems to be concentrated among the very old and among first-time voters, both good groups for Gore.

Sunday's certification by the Florida Secretary of State isn't the end of the story. Florida law allows for any candidate to "contest" an election when the person certified as the winner didn't actually get the most votes. The Bush team argued to the Florida Supreme Court that the post-certification contest process provides the right forum for resolving ballot questions that local boards couldn't resolve by whatever deadline is established.

That is the process that will start Monday, unless Gore allows himself to be pressured into conceding an election he won. So far, it looks as if the Democrats in Washington, who were getting a little nervous, have had their spines stiffened a little bit by watching the mob action on TV.

So there are really only two questions: Will Gore tough it out through the "contest" process? And will the courts will figure out a way to get those Dade County ballots counted? The obvious way to do that is for the court handling the case to tell the Dade canvassing board to go back and finish its job, but the court could also have its own officers do the count. Thursday's Florida Supreme Court order refusing to order the board to go back to work right away doesn't preclude either of those steps.

Of course, Gore does give in, we'll know he wasn't fit to be president in the first place.

But that would still leave us with a president who lost the election.

Mark Kleiman is Professor of Policy Studies at UCLA.