Eventually, Gore did ask for a statewide recount, but his lawyers never pressed for overvotes to be included.
When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount in December, based on Gore's petition, it too focused only on undervotes--drawing a dissent from Chief Justice Charles T. Wells. "How about the overvotes?" he asked.
When the U.S. Supreme Court took Bush's appeal of the case, Justice John Paul Stevens asked the same question of Gore's lawyer, David Boies.
"Nobody asked for a contest of the overvotes," Boies explained. "Once you get two votes, that ballot doesn't get counted for the presidency."
Ironically, Bush's lawyers, in their brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, said one of their objections to the Florida recount was that it didn't consider potentially valid overvotes.
The Supreme Court majority agreed that the absence of the overvotes was a flaw in the Florida court's ruling. If the high court had, instead, ordered Florida authorities to design a comprehensive recount--one that included the overvotes--the outcome might well have been a victory for Gore.
Close Race Triggered Automatic Recount
The study found another wrinkle that might have aided Gore.
Florida's vote was so close on election night that state law required an automatic retabulation. But officials in 16 counties using optical scanning systems never recounted their ballots; instead, they merely rechecked the electronic records of their election night machine count.
Over five weeks of recounts and court battles, Bush's unofficial lead rose and fell almost by the day, at one point dropping to just 286 votes. If the 16 counties had recounted their ballots and included overvotes in their tallies, Gore would have taken the lead, at least briefly, by 48 votes, the study shows.
The study answers another question that has lingered since December: Could Gore have won if he had asked for recounts of the undervotes in counties other than the four he picked?
Some of Gore's advisors worried that they should have sought a manual recount in Duval County, for example, which registered 5,090 undervote ballots (in addition to its 21,855 overvote ballots). But Gore would have lost ground had they done so. The study found that Bush would have gained as many as 834 additional votes in a Duval County recount, mostly from undervotes.
