Dom 13 nycklarna till vita huset

Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the original, limited recount of undervotes of several large counties would have resulted in a Bush victory

The players: A national media consortium – composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post – paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots – 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.

How it worked: NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots. Their goal was not to determine a winner, but to “examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida.” Carefully vetted coders reviewed the ballots, and NORC’s raw data is still available to the public online.

The study, released in November 2001, took place over 10 months and cost nearly $1 million. The Washington Post explained, “153 field workers spent 6,500 hours describing every dimple, chad, erasure and relevant marking. Typists entered 17.5 million pieces of information into Chicago computers.”

The different media organizations applied NORC’s raw data to several distinct recount scenarios.

The results: The two major conclusions here are that Gore likely would have won a hand recount of the statewide overvotes and undervotes – which he never requested – while Bush likely would have won the hand recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, although by a smaller margin than the certified 537 vote difference.


A sampling of headlines from the time include “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of all Uncounted Ballots,” from The Washington Post, and “Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” from The New York Times.


However, as the Post concluded, “While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.”

According to factcheck.org, "Nobody can say for sure who might have won. A full, official recount of all votes statewide could have gone either way, but one was never conducted."