Reliability of the Uncertified Ballots in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida

Following one of the most closely contested elections in American history, a group of the nationʹs largest media organizations retained the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to conduct an in-depth inventory of all uncounted ballots from the 2000 presidential race in Florida. This article describes the planning and implementation of the project and its resulting databases. The State of Florida employed three major voting systems for the election: two systems based on punch cards, and various optical scanning systems. We analyze and present statistics regarding the reliability of the various voting systems. Although none are perfect, we generally found optical scanning to be superior to the punch card systems. We summarize analyses of project databases conducted by the Media Group with respect to new vote totals that hypothetically might have been achieved had the U.S. Supreme Court not stopped the vote counting. We offer recommendations to policy makers for future elections.