USA [TODAY] describes its Florida vote findings as "a blow to Democratic
claims that Gore would have won the election if a hand recount had
occurred." But: 1) the paper waits until the very end of its Page 3
follow-up to report that its study also discovered that in Miami-Dade,
"Gore might have lost hundreds of votes" from misaligned ballots caused
by voters mistakenly punching ballot chads not assigned to any candidate;
2) Today's stories do not mention that by limiting its attention to
undervotes--ballots where there is, at best, evidence of an attempt to
perforate one chad--the study has chosen to ignore another type of
disputed ballot that might well have given Gore a big edge in a hand
recount: overvotes, ballots where there is evidence of an attempt to
perforate more than one chad. Specifically, there is no mention that a
post-election study conducted by the Orlando Sentinel of Florida's Lake
County ballots that included overvotes found net gains for Gore, because
the overvotes included ballots where cleanly punched regular votes for
Gore were accompanied by cleanly punched write-in votes for him.