Election still in air as courts deliberate

Chads. Butterfly ballots. Palm Beach County. Two weeks ago, these words were hardly commonplace in dinnertime discussion. But with the presidency hanging in the balance because of voting errors in the Southern Flordia County, many people cannot stop talking about them.\nPolitical scientists all over the country have been trying to break down the mystery behind the 19,000 votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. The phenomenon was so interesting to political science professor Burt Monroe that he decided to do an independant analysis of the numbers.\nAfter extensive analysis of the voting patterns in Florida Counties, Monroe concluded more than 2,800 votes for Buchanan were actually intended for Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore.\n"The Palm Beach outcome is a substantial outlier and tells us with near certainty that something in Palm Beach is very different from the rest of the counties," Monroe said in his study.\nMonroe said he downloaded the numbers from the CBS breakdown of the votes in Flordia counties and ran a regression. A data regression is a type of analysis that creates an equation for a set of numbers and sets up a graph to plot the data. Monroe's regression displays the Florida County data for the ratio of Buchanan to Bush votes compared with the total votes cast.\n"It is suprising that the ballot is as confusing as it appears to be," Monroe said, "but I am convinced that there were thousands of errors made."\nProfessors from Harvard, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities have all done similar studies. Harvard Professors Jasjeet Sakhon, Micheal Herron, Cornell Professors Johnathan Wand, Walter Melbane, and Northwestern professor Kenneth Shotts all participated in this analysis of the Palm Beach data. \n"Overall, we offer several different analyses of presidential voting in Palm Beach County, and each analysis leads to the same result," the authors of the study said, "the vote totals in Palm Beach County are irregular."\nThese Ivy league professors and Berkeley professor Henry Brady are all currently testifying in court cases in Flordia.\n"(The data) all looks convergent to me," said political science professor Robert Huckfeldt, "there is absolutely no doubt that the ballot produced a perverse outcome."\n But Monroe's study is unique in that his data shows there are irregularities in the number of votes for other candidates on the right side of the ballot. Presidential candidates printed on the right side of the ballot such as Socialist Party candidate David McReynolds and Constitution Party candidate Howard Phillips received a higher percentage of votes in Palm Beach county than in any other county.\nMonroe said he thinks they should recount other counties as well because the margin has changed so much after the recount.\nHuckfeldt said he thinks they should do away with this type of ballot.\n"You dont have to be a rocket scientist or a computer specialist to see it's a bad ballot," Huckfeldt said.