106 CHAPTER 7 Correlation, Regression, and Logistic Regression
Gore votes. They contended that due to the closeness of the race
between Bush and Gore, the contested votes could swing the state
over from Bush to Gore, and hence the election would go to Gore,
since Florida had enough electoral votes to change the outcome of
the votes in the electoral college. One irregularity was the butterfl y -
shaped ballot in Palm Beach County. The democrats theorized that
the unusual butterfl y shape of the ballot could confuse voters, and
they could mark Buchanan ’ s box thinking that they had voted
for Gore.
In this case we could put the data on a scatter plot with counts by
county plotted for Gore versus Buchanan, Bush versus Buchanan, or
even Ralph Nader versus Buchanan, and in each case, Palm Beach
County will be a huge outlier. The data were made public on the
Internet, and many statisticians analyzed the data in a variety of ways.
Table 7.3 shows the vote by county for Gore, Bush, and Buchanan.
There are a total of 67 counties in Florida.
There are many things that can be observed from the data, and
the scatter plots will help greatly. First, Gore and Bush were the
main party candidates and received the lion ’ s share of the votes.
Buchanan and Nader were alternative party candidates, and Nader
received far more votes than Buchanan. The number of votes from
county to county varies quite a bit for all candidates simply because
the population size of the counties varies so much. Dade (where Miami
is located), Broward, and Palm Beach are the three largest counties in
Florida.
Palm Beach is a heavily populated by registered Democrats, and
so Gore won the county by a large margin 268,945 to 152,846. Not
including Palm Beach County, Buchanan ’ s votes ranged from 9 in
Glades to 1010 in Pinellas. Gore ’ s vote totals ranged from 788 in
Lafayette to 386,518 in Broward County. Bush ’ s vote totals ranged
from 1316 in Liberty to 289,456 in Dade County. In Palm Beach
County, Buchanan got 3407 votes. This is more than three times the
amount of votes he got in any other county! By comparison, in Broward
and Dade counties, Buchanan only got 789 and 561, respectively.
Figure 7.3 shows Gore ’ s votes versus Buchanan ’ s, and Figure 7.4
shows Bush ’ s votes versus Buchanan ’ s.
This seems to present a prima facie case that there is some irregu-
larity going on in Palm Beach County, and that it is likely that many
of the votes for Buchanan were not intended for him. But then