110 CHAPTER 7 Correlation, Regression, and Logistic Regression
why worry, Buchanan didn ’ t come close to winning the state or even
Palm Beach County, and 3407 votes is not a lot. Some were probably
intended to go to Buchanan. In fact, we can do a regression analysis
by excluding Palm Beach and fi tting a regression line to the Gore versus
Buchanan data, and predict the number of votes Buchanan would be
expected to have given that Gore had 268,945. This will be an estimate
of how many out of the 3407 might be legitimate, and the remainder
would belong to Gore, Bush, or Nader.
Since we do not know how to split it up, someone playing devil ’ s
advocate could say that Bush probably would have gotten something
like the proportion that he otherwise got, and the differential would not
be enough to swing the election to Gore. But Bush only won by
approximately 2000 votes, so if all those votes were for Gore, it could
swing the election to Gore ’ s favor.
If we just did a little data mining, we would have seen this anomaly
even if we didn ’ t know about the butterfl y ballot. But now the butterfl y
ballot becomes important because (1) Palm Beach is primarily
Democratic; and (2) the ballot makes it easy to mistake Buchanan for
Gore, but not Buchanan for Bush. Now adding up all the votes from
the counties we get:
Gore 2,907,342 Bush 2,828,127.So Gore would have actually won by close to 80,000 votes. But
this does not include the absentee ballots, many of which came from
the troops overseas. So the absentee ballots swung the vote to Bush.
Although we can estimate how many additional votes we think Gore
should have gotten from Palm Beach County there is uncertainty in our
estimates, and in the end, we would not be highly confi dent that Gore
won Florida. A better resolution, as I see it, would be to have Florida
do a reelection.
Some would argue that it would not be fair to allow registered
voters to vote if they hadn ’ t voted on election day. Now those voters
could be excluded because we have records of every registered
voter who cast a ballot. Of course even this would not replicate the
results because some voters could change their mind and some that
legitimately voted for Nader or Buchanan could switch to Gore or
Bush. There is also the issue of the absentee ballots. There really is no