This study was commissioned by Tribune Co., owner of The Times; Associated Press; Cable News Network; the New York Times; the Palm Beach Post; the St. Petersburg Times; the Wall Street Journal; and the Washington Post.
The review was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago. Researchers trained and directed by NORC inspected 175,010 ballots and recorded their characteristics in a series of computer databases.
Each media organization independently analyzed the data collected by NORC. The full NORC database will be released to the public today on the NORC Web site, http://www.norc.org, to enable readers to examine and analyze the data themselves.
NORC prepared separate computer studies to assess the reliability of the data. Those studies indicated that the researchers agreed more than 97% of the time when inspecting the ballots, "a high degree of accuracy," according to Kirk Wolter, a senior vice president of NORC and director of the project.
However, Wolter warned that the outcomes are so close that they cannot conclusively show who got the most votes. "It's too close to call," he said. "One could never know from this study alone who won the election."
Unlike a public opinion poll, the media-commissioned study has no "margin of error" because researchers inspected every available uncounted ballot, not a representative sample. But the study still is not entirely precise because Florida's counties could not locate every uncounted ballot.
Hard to Gauge Exact Number of Bad Ballots
Florida's state government doesn't record how many ballots were invalidated on election day, and county records are incomplete in some cases. The best estimate is that about 176,400 ballots were rejected as undervotes or overvotes. The NORC study thus included more than 99% of the total.
In some cases, county officials could not be certain which ballots had been counted because every time a punch card ballot is run through a tabulating machine, one or more of its paper "chads" can be dislodged.
One county, Volusia, posed a particularly complex problem. Volusia completed a hand recount after election night, and the results are part of the state's certified tally. County officials subsequently could not determine which ballots had been included in their manual recount and which had not. Accordingly, Volusia's certified totals were used in the study rather than any new data from those ballots.
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Times staff writer Lisa Getter contributed to this report.
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On the Web
More on the Florida ballot analysis is available on the Web at: http://www.latimes.com/recount
* A database of all Florida vote totals, based on the scenarios developed for the project.
* Archived audio, video, photos, graphics and special reports from last year's election dispute.
* Photos of ballots and typical errors.
* Links to a Web site where you can download the data and software to do your own analysis.
