<a target=new href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/recount/"><b>NY TIMES: Exploring the Florida Recount</b></a>
<a target=new href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html">LINK - Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote</a>
George W. Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount that the Florida court had ordered to go forward.
<a target=new href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/recount/12ASSE.html">LINK - Who Won Florida? The Answer Emerges, but Surely Not the Final Word</a>
The comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots solidifies George W. Bush's legal claim on the White House
<a target=new href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/recount/12NUMB.html">LINK -Ballots Cast by Blacks and Older Voters Were Tossed in Far Greater Numbers</a>
Black precincts had more than three times as many rejected ballots as white precincts in last fall's presidential race in Florida.
<a target=new href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/politics/15BALL.html">LINK - How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote</a>
The winning margin included hundreds of flawed ballots.
<a target=new href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html">
LINK - CNN: Florida recount study: Bush still wins </a>
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.
NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.
As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.
In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.