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By Henry E. Brady I could not have imagined that the butterfly ballot would make me a believer in big effects. Students and collaborators have often been annoyed by my skepticism. They will enthusiastically tell me about their latest social science finding, and I’ll tell them ten reasons why it must be wrong. Political methodologists are bred to skepticism. Our experience is that, upon careful examination, big effects seldom happen. The day-after-the-election news story about the butterfly ballot first struck me as another “big effects” flim-flam. The story had all the hallmarks of media exaggeration and over-dramatization. According to news reports, some voters in Palm Beach County, Florida—many of them Jews or African Americans—believed that they had mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore because of the design of the ballot, which had candidate names on both pages and punch-holes down the middle. The story gained credibility because one look at the ballot suggested that it would be easy for Bush voters to cast their vote correctly: They only had to match the first name on the ballot with the first punch-hole. And it would be harder for Gore voters, who had to match the second name on the left-hand side of the ballot with the third punch-hole in the center. If Gore voters mistakenly punched the second hole, then they cast their vote for Pat Buchanan, whose name was listed on the right-hand side of the ballot, somewhat higher on the page than Al Gore, but somewhat lower than George Bush. In addition, some Gore voters claimed that they had mistakenly punched two names for President because the ballot said “vote for group” and there were punch-holes next to both Gore’s and Lieberman’s names. This mistake spoiled their ballots. The election results in Palm Beach County suggested that a sizable number of people might have made these mistakes. Pat Buchanan received almost 20 percent of his total statewide support in Palm Beach, a county with only about 7 percent of Florida voters. Furthermore, the number of multiply punched ballots, called “overvotes,” was more than 19,000. That was also high compared to other counties, leading to the possibility that thousands more Gore votes might have been lost because of the ballot format. This would indeed be a “big effect.” But, to my mind, there was nothing definitive about this evidence. My interest in the butterfly ballot grew through discussions with my graduate students. One of them, Laurel Elms, found Palm Beach County precinct-level data on the Internet and suggested that Buchanan votes seemed to be concentrated in heavily Democratic precincts. A convincing analysis, however, would require formulating and statistically estimating a model containing a behavioral parameter—the fraction of Gore voters who mistakenly voted for Buchanan. The model would be even more convincing if it also estimated the proportion of Bush supporters who had mistakenly voted for Buchanan. I went home Wednesday night and started to think about the problem, my intellectual curiosity aroused. I annoyed my wife and children by fiddling with equations at the dinner table. But this was just the kind of problem that my training had prepared me to solve. On Thursday morning I got up at 5 a.m. to go to work on some ideas. By shortly after noon, I had completed a paper that presented a statistical model showing whether Bush or Gore voters were responsible for the unusually high Buchanan vote. I concluded, to my own surprise, that “Using data from the 67 Florida counties along with data from precincts in Palm Beach County, there is a strong likelihood that over 2,000 of the Buchanan votes in Palm Beach County were cast by Gore supporters who mistakenly punched Buchanan’s name.” Moreover, there was no evidence that Bush supporters had made the same mistake. My analysis seemed innovative to me, and I thought it would add to the debate among academics that was starting up on the Internet about what had happened in Palm Beach County. I sent out this paper via e-mail and posted it to my Web site. Comments flowed immediately. Almost all of the other papers posted to the Web came to the same conclusion; for all of us, the data told a very clear story. The number of votes for Pat Buchanan was extraordinary, given the characteristics of the county and past support for Buchanan. Gore supporters, and not Bush supporters, had mistakenly voted for Buchanan in Palm Beach County. Spoiled ballots came disproportionately from liberal precincts. Unlike most social science data which tell equivocal stories, these data told a very clear and consistent tale. Every analysis proclaimed that something very odd had happened in Palm Beach County. On the Saturday after the election, I received an e-mail from a Palm Beach County lawyer, David Krathen: “Please give me a call at your earliest opportunity. I am an attorney involved in the injunction hearing before a West Palm Beach Circuit Judge regarding the national vote.” I immediately called Krathen, who said that he was representing the voters in Palm Beach County and that he had no connection with the Democratic Party. All the legal work was being done pro bono; there was no money to pay airfares or expenses, much less any fees, for expert witnesses. But Krathen needed help and would welcome my involvement. As the co-author of a book on political participation, Voice and Equality, I know some of the ways that democratic institutions fail to make sure that people’s voices are heard. Palm Beach County appeared to be a case where voters’ voices were silenced by preventable errors in the voting system. Perhaps the case would direct attention to America’s antiquated voting and vote-counting methods. After a moment’s thought, I said I would go. I would get very little sleep for the next five days. In Florida on Monday, November 13, I joined five other academics from Cornell, Harvard, and Northwestern University who had also answered Krathen’s call. We faced the difficult task of translating our data analysis into terms that made sense to journalists and to the legal system. Our paramount concern was to insure the integrity of our analysis. What was surprising and unexpected was the frenetic pace of activity and the extraordinary emotions on display in Palm Beach County. After meeting with Krathen on Monday morning at his Fort Lauderdale offices on fashionable Las Olas Boulevard, I got into a car with my colleagues and went north to a television studio at a Christian academy. As we prepared for an interview on CNN’s “Burden of Proof,” the make-up artist was clearly upset about what she perceived as unwarranted challenges to Governor Bush’s victory in Florida. After waiting in a studio for fifteen minutes, we were bumped by breaking news that a federal judge in Miami would not be stopping the manual recount. That afternoon, we went off to the Palm Beach County Courthouse, about forty miles north of Fort Lauderdale. After getting off the freeway, we encountered blocked roads, people holding protest signs about the butterfly ballot, and police everywhere near the courthouse. Later, we learned that the demonstrators were going to a march led by Jesse Jackson and that he had been ushered away by police as Bush supporters came at his entourage chanting “Jesse, go home!” Upon entering the courthouse, one of our team explained our purpose to an African-American security guard and asked for directions. The guard courteously complied and volunteered the opinion that the butterfly ballot had been intentionally designed to harm blacks. At the hearing, the assigned judge recused himself and set the next day for a preliminary hearing. We then walked out into a sea of cameras and a press conference. At this time, I began to realize that the press craved prec |
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